One of the items which came up in my YouTube feed this afternoon was an advert by the Indian news agency, the Quint, for its investigation into an outbreak of witch-hunting in Jarkhand. This has so far resulted in 1,000 women being murdered. The Quint wonders if it’s really about witchcraft or simply a landgrab.
In Britain and the west, the witch hunts are viewed very much as a horrendous atrocity of the Middle Ages and 16th and 17th centuries, when hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mainly, but not exclusive women, were tortured and killed due to the superstitious ideas of the time. The belief in witches is still strong in other parts of the world, where people are still being accused and killed as witches. I’ve heard of this being done in Africa, but I haven’t so far heard of it in India. The question whether it’s all a cynical ploy to grab land is a good one. In medieval Europe, the law stated that if convicted, the accused witch’s property went to their accuser. This has raised the question among historians of whether there was a cynical, material economic motive for the crime: people were being accused simply as a way of nabbing their property. It now seems that there’s a similar motive hanging over these horrendous attacks in India.
‘The prestigious science journal, Nature, reported on 31st May 2023, that the Indian education authority is dropping several key scientific and political subjects from the education curriculum for pupils under 16. the magazine reported:
In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy.
The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.
Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.
Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.
Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.’
Some material was cut from the curriculum last year in order to lighten it during the Covid pandemic. It was expected that it would be reinstated once the pandemic and the lockdown was over, but this hasn’t happened. Academics and educationalists appear perplexed by the decision, but it looks like it comes from the RSSS, the militant Hindu nationalist organisation linked to Modi’s BJP.
[Amitabh] Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.
Aditya Mukherjee, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, says that changes to the curriculum are being driven by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a mass-membership volunteer organization that has close ties to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.
“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.’
One of the other subjects cut from science teaching is a section ‘Why We Fall Ill’, which seems to me to be particularly wicked and dangerous. Everyone really needs to know about the causes of disease, regardless of their level of education or the country in which they live. This removal threatens to increase the incidence of disease in a country where many people lack access to medicine.
In an article from the previous day, 30 May, Nature reported the Indian education authority’s, NCERT’s, reasons for the changes
‘NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.
NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Some people interpret this as a motivation to remove the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, and instead use the time to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.’
But it comments
‘India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.’
It all reminds me of the furore back in the 1990s when Christian Creationists in Kansas banned evolution from being taught in their schools. The great comedian, the late Bill Hicks joked about it, saying ‘In many parts of our troubled world, people are crying ‘Revolution! Revolution’. In Kansas they’re shouting ‘Evolution! Evolution! We want our opposable thumbs’. There have been periodic concerns ever since about the teaching of evolution and Creationism in schools. Western scientists have been particularly worried about Creationism, or Creation Science, being taught as scientific fact. There was particularly controversy nearly two decades ago with the emergence of Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute. Intelligent Design accepts evolution, but considers that it has carried out by a God or other intelligent force that has actively intervened at specific points. One form of Intelligent Design, proposed by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle in his 1980s book, Evolution from Space, is that the creator may have been an extradimensional computer civilisation. For years discussions of Creationism and its supposed threat to science was chiefly confined to Christianity. There was some discussion of the rise of Islamic Creationism in Turkey, but from what I recall this was mostly confined to the internet. India at that time seemed not to be experiencing any similar concerns about evolution or other doctrines which may have challenged traditional religious teaching.
This looks very much like it’s going to damage India as an emerging global economic and technological force. Yes, the country has a millennia-old tradition of scientific and medical innovation, but the country has become a scientific powerhouse as well through embracing modern, western science, just as its neighbour China has done. I’ve been particularly struck by the country’s ambitious space programme, which has made some remarkable advances and has made India a space power. If these changes to its schools curriculum continue, I can see the tradition of scientific excellence that the country has done so much to build being severely handicapped.
I also note the similarity of its stance on the environment to various right-wing political lobby groups and think tanks to ban the teaching of environmentalism and climate change, and to make us all believe that the massive pollution of the environment by business isn’t happening and won’t cause permanent damage. Trump when he was in the White House passed legislation preventing the American environmental watchdog from publishing anything about climate change of the environment. This partly came from oil industry, whose own, astroturf climate organisations has a policy of buying up independent climate analysis laboratories and using them to turn out its own, anti-climate change propaganda.
Regarding the excision of material on politics, I’ve got the impression that India is trying to establish itself as the true home of democracy, looking back to its traditional village councils or panchayats. But there seems to be a more sinister purpose to the removal of chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy, as well as a chapter on the industrial revolution for older students. It looks here like the BJP and its storm troopers are trying to stop India’s young people from acquiring the historical and political knowledge to understand how their country could be – or actually is – being taken towards authoritarianism and Fascism.
Vicious totalitarian governments of both left and right, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, have all attacked and refashioned science, history and education as part of their programmes. Now it seems India, under the BJP, is also going down this path.
Hat tip to Gillyflower, one of the many great commenters on this blog, for the link to this story about internet broadcaster, right-wing mouthpiece, stalker and jailbird Alex Belfield. Belfield was put away for cyberstalking the various people who’d crossed him during his broadcasting career. Even though he’s now a convict, he still casts a long shadow, and so the cops have hit him with a Stalking Prevention Order to stop him doing it again. Here’s the story from the West Bridgeford Wire, which also includes official links and phone number to the police and other organisations to provide help against stalking:
‘Nottinghamshire Police says that it has shown its commitment to protecting victims of online harassment after securing stalking protection orders against a persistent offender.
Stalking protection orders are civil orders which can run alongside criminal prosecutions and can forbid a person from contacting others or from taking certain actions.
Every breach of an order is an offence in its own right and could result in a jail sentence.
Alex Belfield, of HMP Stocken, in Rutland, was previously jailed for five-and-a-half years in September 2022 following a four-week trial at Nottingham Crown Court.
The 43-year-old former BBC radio presenter was locked up after running a relentless campaign of harassment against multiple victims.
Following much hard work, Belfield has now been made subject to indefinite stalking protection orders relating to two victims who were not part of the criminal trial.
The orders which were imposed on Thursday (1 June 2023) at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court, prevent Bellfield, or any of his supporters, from contacting these victims by any means, including on social media.
Lifetime restraining orders were previously granted to all eight complainants in the criminal case.
Detective Constable Janet Percival, of Nottinghamshire Police, said: “It’s been a long hard slog, but we’ve now managed to secure these significant orders which will provide peace of mind for these two victims who were caused genuine alarm and distress by Belfield.
“It’s important for people to know that they don’t have to put up with this sort of online harassment and cyber stalking.
“I understand that people can be reluctant to contact us – sometimes because they aren’t sure that what’s happening is serious enough to warrant police action, and sometimes because they feel we won’t be able to help – but I can assure them that we will take their reports seriously and we will do whatever we can to help and protect them.”
Stalking offences are defined by a pattern of fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repeated behaviours – in person or through remote means such as social media.
If you are a victim of stalking or believe that you might be, please contact Nottinghamshire Police:
If you feel in immediate danger at any time, always call 999.
According to new polling, 63% of British adults now say that Brexit has caused more problems than it solved. While some of you may be shocked that the number isn’t even higher, given the shambolic economic state of affairs in Britain over the past several years, that figure is proof that the public attitude towards Brexit has changed. The big question is: why are neither of the major parties saying it?
It should be clear to everyone by now that the Conservatives have permanently pinned their colours to the Brexit mast and that there is no going back for them. The cult of Brexit has subsumed the entire party’s identity. With an evangelical glint in their eyes, ministers pontificate endlessly about the sunlit uplands, plucking imaginary “Brexit benefits” out of thin air and holding them up as victories.
For the Brexiters in the Conservative and Reform parties, anything that goes wrong – as so much has lately – is attributed to a lack of dedication to the cause. As Labour backbencher Hilary Benn put it so eloquently during the recent e-petition debate on a public inquiry into Brexit:
“It is like all revolutionaries, if I may use the analogy. When the revolution does not quite work out, they say, “But comrade, it was not applied with sufficient vigour and purity”—an argument that some Members in the Chamber might be more familiar with than others.”
But what about Labour? While lacking the religious fervour of the Conservatives, Keir Starmer has also insisted that Britain’s future lies “outside the EU.” Beyond that comment, we have no idea what Labour’s specific position is.
A recent YouGov poll made it clear that the general public is completely uncertain about Keir Starmer’s stance on Brexit. He seems to be trying to assuage the right-wing press who want to attack him as a remainer, while also trying not to alienate his remain-heavy base. It’s a tough balancing act.
We have to ask why no major party in the UK is willing to come out as unapologetically anti-Brexit. At the next general election, we’ll almost certainly have just two options to form the next government – Labour or Conservative. Westminster’s bubble is now so insular that it’s barely possible to see daylight between their stances on this, the biggest issue of our time.
63% of British adults are not having their voice heard. These are people who want their freedom of movement back, who want an economy bolstered by the single market, who want the worker and environmental protections previously attached to our EU membership. They are a silent majority that our broken political system has systematically sidelined.
A political system that excludes a majority can’t really be called a democracy. This is yet another glaring indicator of the UK’s democratic deficit, and the abyss that awaits us if we fail to get a grip on our failing institutions and policies.
I got this petition yesterday, and have very definitely signed it.
‘David, it’s just been revealed that the Government has slipped out plans to introduce TOUGHER Voter ID rules around elections, requiring certain ID to vote by post and by proxy. [1] Only last month voter ID blocked THOUSANDS of us from voting in local elections. [2] And now they want to go further, just in time for a General Election.
Conservative MP Jacob Rees Mogg recently admitted – on TV – that the Conservatives introduced Voter ID to try to sway the elections. [3]
It’s a stitch up but it’s not a done deal.
Today, together, we can show that we, the British public, have noticed this power grab – and we won’t accept it. We can create a huge people powered backlash with one simple message: DITCH VOTER ID BEFORE THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTION.
David, it’s going to take a huge outcry to stop them in their tracks, so will you add your name to the petition right now? The moment 100,000 of us add our names, we will take it to Downing Street with a camera crew so they can’t help but notice us.
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)
The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.
Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.
The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.
The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.
They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.
The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.
They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.
As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.
Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.
Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.
The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.
I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.
Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.
As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.
And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.
On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.
There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.
I got this message from the internet campaigning organisation Avaaz yesterday. I haven’t donated, but I’m putting this up because it describes the horrific persecution of gay and trans people in Uganda and in case anybody else may wish to donate. I’m very much aware that gay people in the west haven’t had it easy, but this is Nazi-level persecution.
‘Dear Avaaz members,
I write from Uganda, where a vicious ‘anti-gay’ law is about to be signed — and we’re being hunted like animals.
Days ago, neighbours castrated a transgender person with a kitchen knife. We couldn’t go to the police as we’d be arrested — and had to search for a friendly doctor, as most wouldn’t help us.
We’re being fired from work, rejected by family, evicted, beaten, raped… and worse.
I’m appealing for your support. Please.
This could be our last call for help. When this law is signed, everything we do, including sending this email and raising funds, will become illegal. But right now, there’s still a narrow window when LGBTQ+ groups can receive support — and your donation could help save lives.
You’d fund safe houses where people can hide, along with emergency medical care, legal support, and trauma counselling. We urgently need more safe houses, as we constantly have to run when angry mobs arrive.
We’re being flooded with frantic calls for help, but without more funds we can only help a tiny fraction of people. I’m heartbroken, and don’t know where else to turn.
And it’s all because of who and how we love. In the face of unimaginable cruelty and violence, please stand up for our right to Love. Donate what you can now:
The new law will effectively make it impossible to exist as a LGBTQ+ person in Uganda.
I could get a life sentence for kissing my partner, and be executed for repeated homosexual ‘offences’. Renting to gay people will become illegal — and I could serve 20 years in jail just for sending this email.
They call us “ungodly” filth, but we aren’t the ones inflicting unimaginable cruelty on already vulnerable people. I know girls who’ve been raped by family members to ‘cure’ their ‘lesbian disease’.
That’s why safe houses are so critically important— providing a place of sanctuary in a country burning with hatred. With your help, we could:
Fund dozens of new safe houses and emergency shelters across the country;
Provide emergency health care and legal support for those who’ve been arrested — and meals for people in jail;
Help fund the development of a new legal case to challenge the law in court; and
Power emergency response campaigns, like this one, to defend communities facing discrimination, assault, and war around the world.
Every penny raised will support LGBTQ+ people in Uganda, and power Avaaz’s emergency response work around the world. By donating, you won’t just be helping in Uganda — you’ll be ensuring this crucial capacity is maintained for others like me, facing unimaginable terror.
Gay, straight, lesbian, transgender — we all just want to live and love in peace. I don’t know when that day will come, but it is not today, and our fight for love must go on. Wherever you are in the world, please stand with us. Donate what you can now:
I’ve been part of the Avaaz community for years. I’ve seen the difference it makes when we come together fast for those in need. Now it’s my community being attacked — me and my people need this movement’s help.
With hope and the deepest of gratitude,
Frank and the whole team at Avaaz
Note: If and when the ‘anti-gay’ law passes, the consequences for an email like this could be deadly — in many ways, they already are. For that reason, we aren’t using Frank’s photo, or their name.
PS. This might be your first donation to our movement ever. But what a first donation! Did you know that Avaaz relies entirely on small donations from members like you? That’s why we’re fully independent, nimble and effective. Join the over 1 million people who’ve donated to make Avaaz a real force for good in the world.
Just got this from the pro-democracy organisation, who explain how it is that the various official watchdogs designed to protect democracy aren’t doing their job. They’re allowing Reet Snob (so appropriately named here by Brian Burden, I believe) and the rest of them to get away with an open admission that the Voter ID laws were gerrymandering.
‘Dear David,
We were all stunned by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s admission at NatCon last week: he confessed that voter ID was an attempt to “gerrymander” elections. At the very least, we expected an investigation from the relevant authorities.
However, Byline Times reporting this week shows that none of the watchdogs are going to investigate Mogg’s comments. The institutions tasked with holding MPs and political parties to account for their actions – the Electoral Commission, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, the Cabinet Office – are not going to do anything about it.
This is shocking news given the serious implications of Mogg’s comments. Mandatory voter ID was introduced when Mogg was still serving in Boris Johnson’s cabinet, putting him close to the policy’s conception and implementation. During May elections, at least 16,000 voters across 53 council areas were turned away at the polls – and more than 6,000 didn’t come back. It will only be more extreme during a General Election. Mogg’s “gerrymandering” scheme had real-world consequences, potentially even swinging certain close races.
So why is no one investigating? Apparently, arcane rules in Parliament mean that because Dawn Butler MP raised this issue in the House, the Standards Commissioner is reluctant to open an investigation. The Electoral Commission views the issue as outside of its remit, and the Cabinet Office has simply said, without giving a reason, that it does not plan to launch an inquiry.
In recent years, the enforcement powers, remit, and operational capacity of crucial watch dogs has been undermined by the government. Boris Johnson’s revisions to the ministerial code made it harder to enforce accountability on government officials. In the same bill that included Voter ID policies, the government reigned in the Electoral Commission’s powers, in addition to jeopardising its very independence. That’s not a coincidence.
What we’re seeing is the systematic removal of political guardrails. As this government looks to consolidate power and crush dissent, these “pesky” watch dogs become obstacles for them to overcome instead of critical safeguards to democracy.
Part of our call to fix democracy is giving watchdogs their teeth back. In a fair political system, admitting to an entire nation-wide strategy of gerrymandering would be, at the bare minimum, cause for investigation. Moreover, gerrymandering in itself is not even an illegal act – which goes to show how much work needs to be done to make a democracy that works for all of us.
We’re glad you’re with us on this important mission.
‘David, energy prices are falling but we’re still paying DOUBLE what we were in 2020.
This means the average household will fork out over £2,074 each year for gas and electricity. [1] At the same time, thousands of families are buckling under £3.6 BILLION energy debt from simply trying to stay warm last winter. [2] It’s clear: the system is broken.
BUT, we have a rare chance to fix this: right now MPs are debating laws to overhaul our energy system. [3] It’s an unmissable opportunity to force the Government to commit to long-term solutions that will prevent families being punished by sky-high costs. But it’ll take us fighting together to make them listen.
We need to move fast. Some MPs are pushing the Government to use this moment to end forced prepayment meter installations and make sure more of us can insulate our leaky, cold homes. But they’ll only win if there’s a tidal wave of public support. [4]
So, David, will you sign our petition and call for the Government to commit to long term solutions to the energy crisis?It only takes 30 seconds to sign.
Time is ticking as the Government’s Energy Bill goes through Parliament, so we need to urgently get all MPs to support two things:
Making sure no-one gets their energy supply cut off if they can’t top up their meter, by ending forced transfers to prepayment meters.
Helping households stay warm by raising minimum energy efficiency standards of private rented sector homes so they are better insulated.
We don’t have long, David, but we know no one else can quickly ramp up the pressure like we can. Thousands of us recently piled pressure on the Government and forced them to make vital reforms to the private rental market – after FOUR YEARS of delays! [5] We made our voices impossible to ignore, and we can do it again.
So, David, will you help raise the pressure on MPs to back vital reforms to our broken energy system?It only takes 30 seconds to sign.
I got this message from the Trades Union Congress via the Megaphone about an hour ago. It thanks everyone who attended their protest outside parliament yesterday, and pledges that they will carry on fighting the government’s attempts to stifle the right to strike. It also states that they have succeeded in getting the Labour party to repeal the offensive legislation. This is good news, but as it comes from Starmer’s Labour party, I’m afraid I do wonder how far it can be trusted, official platitudes about standing by the unions notwithstanding.
‘Hi David,
It was fantastic to be joined by so many of you in Parliament Square last night to send a clear message to the government: We will not stand by while you attack our right to strike.
As you may have heard, Conservative MPs again decided to support this undemocratic Bill. The Bill will now return to the House of Lords, where Peers will again decide where they stand.
While the government may get this legislation on the statute book, we will not stand by and let them sack a single nurse, paramedic, teacher, railway worker or civil servant.
We will defend the right to strike. And we will defend every worker who exercises that right to strike.
And I am pleased to say won confirmation that the Labour Party will repeal this legislation if they win the next election.
Thank you for everything you have done to build our campaign so far. Your energy and solidarity are the trade union movement’s greatest strength.
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