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.
There’s an interesting opinion piece in today’s Evening Standard by the author Tomiwa Owolade. He was talking about the British book awards, which he attended on Monday, and the appearance there via video link by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, remember, had suffered a near-fatal attack by an Islamist fanatic at a literary gathering in America back in August last year. Rushdie’s voice was hoarse, and the video accompanying the article shows him wearing spectacles with one lens blacked out, which were a result of his injuries sustained in the attack. But what impressed Owolade was that he didn’t talk about his own 30-year period hiding from murderous fanatics like his attempted assassin. He was receiving the Freedom to Publish Award, sponsored by the Index on Censorship. Rushdie didn’t talk about others who were suffering imprisonment and death for their writing, and didn’t mention authoritarian states like Russia, China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. He spoke about the rising level of censorship in the supposedly liberal west, among nations that pride themselves on their tradition of freedom of speech.
“The freedom to publish,” Rushdie said, “is also the freedom to read. And the ability to write what you want.” But this conviction is now being weakened: “We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression and freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”
This is not a problem that’s confined to the political Right or Left. Rushdie mentioned the “extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools” in the US. A recent report by PEN America has found that book bans are rapidly rising in the US.
Across the country, novels by distinguished authors such as Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have been banned in schools and libraries. Rushdie argued that this constitutes an “attack on the ideas of libraries themselves.”
But he also described as “alarming” the trend where “publishers bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.” This is where editors are trying to ‘update’ novels by dead authors by removing or replacing offensive words or phrases. Rushdie argued that “the idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical.”’
Owolade concludes:
‘Rushdie viscerally understands the severe end of censorship; he has been nearly murdered for writing a book. But he is also rightly cognisant of, and opposed to, the milder threats. Because he recognises that the two ends are interlinked: once we accept that some books should not be allowed to be published, or read, or should have their content suppressed or bowdlerised in any other way, we accept the logic of those who think freely producing such books is a crime worthy of prison or death.’
I entirely agree with the article and Rushdie, which rather surprises me. I’m not a fan of his, and I honestly don’t think the Satanic Verses should have been published. There were three internal messages in Viking Penguin at the time advising against publishing it because it would upset Muslim opinion. I haven’t read the book, but people I know who have, including a lecturer in Islam, have assured me that it isn’t blasphemous. However, there’s something to about it in National Lampoon’s Book of Sequels that while it’s made clear that the book isn’t blaspheming Mohammed or the other principal figures of Islam on page 50, the book is so grindingly dull that no one ever makes it that far. The fatwa placed on Rushdie was a noxious piece of opportunism by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted an issue he could exploit that would allow him to wrest leadership of the Islamic world away from the Saudis. The publication of the Satanic Verses came at exactly the right time, and so you had the rancid spectacle of mass book burnings in Bradford, Kalim Saddiqui telling his flock that ‘Britain is a monstrous killing machine and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’, and a demented Pakistani film in which Rushdie is a CIA agent, whose career undermining Islam is ended when God whacks him with the lightning bolt.
But we do have creeping, intolerant censorship in the west and it isn’t confined to either the left and right. I’m very much aware of the purging of radical authors, and particularly LGBTQ+ material from American libraries. I’m also not a fan of the Bowdlerisation of writers like Dahl and Fleming because they’re deemed to be offensive to modern sensibilities. The term ‘Bowdlerise’ is particularly interesting. It comes from the name of a puritanical Victorian publisher, who produced a suitable censored children’s edition of Shakespeare with all the Bard’s smut and innuendo cut out. I’m also concerned at the way publishers, students and lobby groups are trying to stifle the publication of works on such controversial topics as the trans issue and ban their writers from speaking in public or holding academic posts.
A recent example of this has been Oxford University Student Union’s reaction to gender critical feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock speaking at the Oxford Union. There were protests by the Student Union against her appearance as well as attempts to sabotage it by block-booking seats so that they wouldn’t be available to those who really wanted to hear her. She’s been denounced as hateful, people have declared they feel unsafe after her appearance, and the SU has cut its connection with the debating society. They therefore won’t be allowed to appear at fresher’s fairs and other Student Union sponsored events. The SU is also offering support to people traumatised by her appearance.
This is in response to a feminist intellectual who simply does not share the opinion that transwomen are women. Controversial, yes, but not hateful. What makes this affair ridiculous is that there have been real, noxious figures from the Fascist right who have spoken at the Oxford Union and suffered no such attack by the Student Union. People like Nick Griffin, the former head of the BNP, and the Holocaust Denier David Irving. If anybody deserves mass protests against them, and who really would make people feel understandably unsafe, it’s those two. I can’t imagine how Jews and non-Whites would feel in their presence, especially given the BNP’s history of violence against them. But they were allowed to speak at the Oxford Union, albeit to the surprise and disgust of many.
Rushdie’s right about free speech coming under attack in the liberal west. And the Tories, and particularly the Nat Cons are part of this. They’ve passed legislation severely restricting the right to protest and to strike, as well as the legislation providing for secret courts. And I don’t see Starmer changing this legislation, not when he said that laws like the Crime and Policing Act need time to bed in.
We really do need to wake up this threat, and that this isn’t a partisan issue if we’re going to defend freedom of speech and debate.
This is another message I got from the organisers of the Arise Festival of left-wing ideas. They’re organising an online meeting on the 31st May 2023 about defending our right to resist from the highly authoritarian and illiberal legislation that was used to arrest the anti-monarchy protesters at the coronation.
The shameful rushing through of anti-protest legislation in the run-up to the Coronation – & how police treated protesters during it – starkly illustrate how a deeply unpopular Government has had a major authoritarian shift on top of years of attacks on our democratic rights. As John McDonnell noted yesterday, “There’s a comprehensive assault on basic civil liberties – the right to strike, right to protest peacefully & right of journalists to report without arrest.. Time has come for a new movement to defend our civil liberties.”
Yours in solidarity, Matt Willgress , Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas (via Labour Assembly.)
Our Right to Resist
Major online rally. Wednesday May 31, 6.30pm. Register here // Retweet here & spread the word.
John McDonnell MP // Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP // Kate Osborne MP // Lord John Hendy KC // Zita Holbourne, BARAC // Myriam Kane, Black Liberation Alliance // Mish Rahman, Labour NEC (pc) & Momentum NCG // Rob Poole, Strikemap // Chris Peace, Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign // Hasan Patel, Young Labour/ / Fran Heathcote, PCS President // Alex Gordon, RMT President // Video message from Shami Chakrabarti.// Chair: Christine Blower // & many more tba.
The deeply unpopular Tory Government has had a major authoritarian shift, with a new assault – on top of years of attacks – on our basic civil liberties and democratic rights. As part of the growing opposition to this, we are bringing together a wide range of voices to stand up for our right to resist and say no more.
Opening Arise – An Online Festival of Left Ideas 2023. ‘
I got this email early this morning from the pro-democracy group Open Britain. They see the mass arrests of the anti-monarchy protesters at the coronation as showing that the right to protest in Britain is dead. They are also unimpressed with Wes Streeting’s pronouncements on the matter, as he failed to say whether Labour would repeal the legislation or change the approach to policing such protests. Starmer’s own comments on the matter are highly ambiguous. He states that he won’t repeal the legislation as it needs to ‘bed in’, and just because the cops have the power to do something, it doesn’t mean that they will on every occasion. There are other views and vloggers, which claim that Streeting has supported the anti-monarchy protesters’ right to demonstrate and that the legislation needs to be amended rather than repealed. But nevertheless, it strongly gives the impression that Starmer and the Labour right are deeply authoritarian who don’t support this key democratic right.
‘Dear David,
Whether this coronation weekend was one of celebration, quiet acceptance, or frustration for you, we can all agree on one thing – the right to protest is dead.
On Saturday, the met police hauled away peaceful republican protestors. They wrapped up their placards and signs and loaded them into the back of trucks. All told, 62 arrests were made, with charges including “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” and possession of a bike lock (which could, in the Met’s eyes, be used to “lock on” to objects in protest).
In a free society, the state tolerates dissent. Even if the monarchy is a symbol of pride for many of those in Westminster, they can’t just have anyone who disagrees thrown in a police van.
This is the logical outcome of this government’s slide into authoritarianism, with policies like the Policing Act and Public Order Act granting officers sweeping powers over anyone creating a bit of noise or voicing a difference of opinion. So much for the “freedom of expression” that they’ve been ranting about – that only applies to discrimination or racist dolls, apparently.
The scary part of this story is that the entire power centre of British politics is already accepting this state of affairs as normal. Labour’s Wes Streeting declined to confirm that his party would repeal either of those illiberal bills or change the approach to protests in any significant way if in government. Keir Starmer’s comments today echoed Labour’s refusal to stand up for basic human rights.
In a 2021 poll, 63% of Britons said that “people should have the right to attend a protest to stand up for what they believe in” – and only 9% disagreed. How is it, then, that BOTH of the two major parties are now firmly against peaceful protest? In an odd twist, the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP – the UK’s smallest parties – are the only ones committing to reinstate the right to protest.
This proves beyond a doubt that what we need is a united movement to reclaim our rights and make Britain a real democracy again. We’re building that movement as we speak, bringing together everyone who will speak out against Westminster’s broken system. It’s deeper than partisan politics – it’s about pulling us out of the mess the country as a whole has fallen into.
As a small team, we need all the help we can get to make it happen. We’re working tirelessly with our allies in civil society, Parliament and the general public to shake this country out of its authoritarian stupor. We greatly appreciate whatever you can do to help us revive the right to protest.
I haven’t donated to the organisation, but am posting this message here as I believe it is an important comment on the current lack of proper democracy under this highly illiberal Tory legislation.
Mea culpa! Yesterday I put up a piece reporting that David Lammy had declared that Labour would not repeal Tory legislation, as otherwise the party would spend its time doing nothing else. This raised questions about whether it was worth voting for Starmer’s party in the first place if they weren’t going to repeal deeply unjust and illiberal Tory legislation. Now it seems I may have jumped the gun somewhat. The left-wing vlogger, A Different Bias, has put up a video stating that Lammy may have been somewhat clumsy in the way he answered the question, and that the Labour party certainly does not support the Tories’ anti-protest legislation. He states that Wes Streeting condemned the legislation and supported the anti-monarchy protesters’ right to demonstrate, and denounced their arrests by the Met police. As for repealing legislation, he states that this would indeed take up too much time as the bills were passed from one committee to another. He also argues that while the legislation against demonstrations does contain deeply illiberal curbs on freedom, some of it is still worth keeping. This includes the prohibitions on demonstrations outside abortion clinics. This legislation needs, therefore, to be amended rather than repealed. Furthermore, repealing it would take up too much that could be better spent on measures to grow the economy, stop the health service being run down and improving conditions for ordinary Brits.
I was influenced in my views about Lammy’s comments by Robespierre, who has since declared he made a mistake and issue this video retracting his views.
I hope I have been wrong about this, though many of the commenters on yesterday’s blog post pointed out how authoritarian Labour was, with their plans to introduce national ID cards. The pro-democracy group Open Britain don’t seem to be entirely convinced that Streeting genuinely objects to the Tory legislation. And there is the general problem of credibility. Starmer has broken every promise and pledge he made as leader of the Labour party, and I doubt he’ll change once in government. He may still end up supporting the anti-demonstration laws if he decides it suits his purpose.
David Lammy was on LBC Radio yesterday, and gave an answer to an interview question that left many listeners stunned. Kernow Damo has put up a piece about it on his vlog, as has Maximilien Robespierre, the smooth-voiced Irish vlogger. The Met’s heavy-handed policing of the Coronation and its arrest of 62 anti-monarchy protesters, simply for protesting, has raised questions about both the Met’s conduct and the Tory legislation allowing them to clamp down so hard on peaceful protesters. People are concerned about the draconian laws curbing protests and strikes. Lammy was asked if Labour intended to repeal this legislation. ‘No,’ he said, ‘because otherwise we’d spend all our time just repealing Tory legislation.’ This left Robespierre thoroughly gobsmacked. Because people are voting Labour in the hope that they’ll revrerse the Tory legislation allowing the water companies to dump raw sewage into our waterways and seas, stop the running down of the NHS, the impoverishment our great, hard–pressed and underappreciated working people. Now Lammy says that Labour doesn’t intend to do any of that. Robespierre raises the obvious point that this is a strange attitude for a party whose electoral line is that people should vote for them because they aren’t the Conservatives.
But I think this attitude is part and parcel of Starmer’s return to Blairism. Blair was a Thatcherite, who went further in the privatisation of the NHS and reforming – read: cutting back even further – the welfare state than the Tories themselves. One of the criticisms of Blair’s and Brown’s governments was that New Labour really didn’t differ at all from the Conservatives. They just promoted themselves on being able to implement the same wretched policies better and more efficiently. And in the case of the ‘welfare to work’ legislation, in which benefit claimants only got their welfare cheque if they did mandatory voluntary work for grasping, exploitative charities like Tomorrow’s People or the big supermarkets, Blair spun a profoundly reactionary policy introduced by Reagan’s Republicans in America and mooted by Thatcher over here as somehow left-wing and radical. It was all part of Blair’s New Deal, a modern version of Roosevelt’s make-work schemes during the Depression. The result of New Labour’s shameless emulation of the Tories was that an increasingly large part of the electorate stopped voting. They felt that it didn’t matter who you voted for, because they were all the same. Corbyn offered some escape from this electoral trap by promoting socialist policies. Hence the screams from the establishment both inside and outside the party that he was a Commie, Trotskyite anti-Semite. Because you can’t have someone offering the proles something that will actually benefit them.
And now it seems it’s back to business as usual under Starmer.
And the return to Blairism is already having the effect it previously had on the electorate. The Tories took a hammering at the local elections, and has naturally been held as an historic win by Stalin. Except that it was more a comment on how the electorate was fed up with the Tories than an overwhelming victory for Labour. According to some experts, by this measure Labour will be 28 seats short of a majority at the next general election. I seem also to recall polls that indicated that while people liked Labour, they didn’t like Starmer and didn’t think he was anywhere near as good a leader as whoever was the Tory prime minister at the time. And it’s obvious to see why. Starmer is deeply treacherous and untrustworthy, ditching nearly every pledge and promise he declared he believed in. He has done everything he could to purge the left with the usual smears of anti-Semitism. But his personal performance against the Tories has been dismal. For a long time he offered no alternative policies. His tactics seemed to be to wait for the Tories’ own failures and duplicity to catch up with them and then hope that the proles would vote Labour as the only alternative. This seems to have worked to a certain extent, but it also shows that the same tactics is failing to energise any enthusiasm for a Labour government. In fact, it’s put many people off.
Not that this necessarily bothers Starmer. As we’ve seen from the various coups and plots against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour right would prefer to destroy Labour than accept any return to socialism.
I’ve said before that I’m a monarchist, but I am also aware that some the protesters against the monarchy have very good reasons for doing so. One of these is the immense cost of the Coronation when three million Brits have to use food banks to stave off hunger. The mellifluous voiced Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, put up a very pointed video about this the other day, commenting on a clip from the news in which Joanna Lumley commented on the monarchy’s generosity. The guest’s going to the event had the cars valeted and refuelled free. Robespierre commented that the monarchy wasn’t paying for this, but the British taxpayer. It wasn’t done free of charge, but the cost was being placed on the British taxpayer at a time when very many ordinary Brits are finding it extremely hard to make ends meet.
Rather more troubling is the allegation, which I’ve heard has been made by the Labour MP Clive Lewis, that our sovereign lord Charles III exempted himself from something like 120 different laws in order to rake in a cool £2 billion. If that’s true, then it’s just greed as well as using his personal position as head of state to unfairly enrich himself. When ordinary people do this, like politicians and government officials, it’s called corruption and ends up with an investigation from the rozzers. And it’s also an affront given the three million or so ordinary Brits, who are now forced to use food banks and the rising levels of real poverty in general in the United Kingdom.
People have been criticising Charles for years. Some of this has been general attacks on the monarchy, but some of has been about his personal profiteering. One documentary – I think it might have been ‘Charles: The Man Who Shouldn’t Be King’ – pointed out that normal jars of honey are below a pound in price. Unlike the honey Charles is producing from his estates in Cornwall, which is over £4. Other issues are that he doesn’t observe the same distance the Queen did between the monarchy and politics. There was an article in the Independent or the Groan years ago about the numerous letters he wrote to various authorities calling for the return of grammar schools. Some of Charles’ causes have made him genuinely popular. One of these was his attack on modern architecture, which he derided as ‘monstrous carbuncles’. This enraged various elite architects, but captured the mood of many ordinary people sick of grey, concrete monstrosities. After he made his stinging remarks, some wag wrote on the hoardings surrounding a building site in Bristol ‘another monstrous carbuncle – way hey, right on Charlie!’ But this attitude is dangerous, as not everyone shares his opinions. There have been a number of posts from various right-wing types who believe in the various conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and the Green Movement expressing their paranoid fears about Charles’ sympathies and connections to them. Charles is almost certainly correct in his support for Green issues, but it does mean that there is a section of right-wing opinion now alienated and distrustful of the monarchy.
I don’t think there are very many of them at the moment. A far more serious issue is the king’s profiteering. If he continues to do this as poverty in Britain grows, then more people will justifiably become anti-monarchists.
I hope you’re all enjoying this Bank Holiday Monday, despite the drizzle. The Met police has been widely criticised for its heavy-handed conduct during the Coronation. They arrested 50 or so anti-monarchy protesters simply for standing there and protesting. According to this Channel 4 news report, the arrests were made under legislation that permits this to be done during large events. From what I’ve seen, some of the arrests were ‘pre-crime’, where someone was arrested carrying a banner or placard before they could demonstrate. This is, as I believe Mike over at Vox Political, has pointed out, another infringement of democracy. People have a right to demonstrate and protest, even at events like coronations. He fears, rightly, that this is going to have a chilling effect on young people’s engagement with politics. They will feel that they cannot express their views and so there is no point in becoming politically active. And so democracy withers away, rather than be felled in a swoop through a Fascist or Communist coup.
One of issues is the Met police’s arrest of three volunteers from the 5-Star movement – not the right-wing Italian party or the 1980s British pop band – who were handing out rape alarms the night before. The police claim that they had intelligence that the alarms were going to be used at the coronation to spook the horses. They alleged that some of the protesters were even planning to through them at the horses, causing them to bolt into the crowd. The volunteers, who I’ve heard were giving them away at 2 O’clock in the morning, have explained on the other hand that they do it to protect vulnerable women on girls on a night out. This seems to me far more plausible than the Met’s story. I’ll be interested to see what evidence the Met has for this intelligence, assuming we’re allowed to see it and it’s not another fairy tale to allow the cops to clamp down on peaceful protesters and perfectly innocent volunteers in a fit of judicial paranoia.
The Palestinian people need our solidarity now more than ever. We will be joining fellow Labour members & affiliated trade unionists who will be joining this protest march and rally for Palestine taking place on Saturday 13th May 2023 in central London.
The march is supported by numerous trade unions including Artists’ Union England, BFAWU, CWU, The MU, NEU, PCS, RMT, TSSA, UCU, UNISON, Unite the Union.
FREE PALESTINE – END APARTHEID – END THE OCCUPATION
GENERAL DEMO INFO:
Date: Saturday 13 May 2023
Time: 12pm
Location: The BBC, Portland Place W1A, London
Organised by: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Muslim Association of Britain, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Supported by Artists’ Union England, BFAWU, CWU, The MU, NEU, PCS, RMT, TSSA, UCU, UNISON, Unite the Union.
The March is also commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Nakba when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes and villages in 1948.
More demo info can be found on the PSC Website here.‘
I had this piece come though earlier this evening by the pro-democracy group Open Britain. Faced with very many people being turned away from polling stations because they don’t have ID, the Torygraph has decided to dream up a conspiracy theory so that it’s their fault, not the fault of an anti-democratic and unnecessary law. Yes, they’ve declared that protesters are going to disrupt the voting tomorrow, including by deliberately leaving behind their ID. This is desperate. It’s a fantastic excuse, and it shows the powerful imaginations the Tories have when spinning lies and excuses. Here’s the piece:
‘Dear David,
Local elections are tomorrow, and a significant number of people still risk being turned away from the polls – despite councils’ and the Electoral Commission’s best efforts. Compounding that, we won’t even know the actual number of people turned away because of how the scheme has been organised.
Funnily enough, some in the Conservative press and on the Tory backbenches are taking this as yet another opportunity to demonsie “activists” and protestors. A recent piece in the Telegraph claims that left-wing troublemakers will intentionally leave IDs at home in protest. There’s no evidence that’s true – take it from the activists themselves.
Tory MP Craig Mackinlay argues that such groups will disrupt our local elections not because of their disagreement with voter ID as a policy but simply because they have a nefarious agenda – because they’re just out to cause chaos. It shows an implicit inability even to consider the fact that the policy might be flawed. There are many good reasons to oppose the policy, and people like us are busy making those cases fairly and reasonably, not going out of their way to disrupt elections.
Mackinlay’s spasm is really an attempt to distract from the glaring negative impacts of the government’s poorly-planned policy. As always, its easier to blame the “wokerati” protestors than it is actually to take responsibility for policy choices that don’t work. We can’t be sure, but it looks like the results tomorrow aren’t going to reflect well on the Voter ID scheme – with potentially thousands turned away. They could be hedging their bets.
Regardless, Mackinlay is embodying the same attitude that Suella Braverman has brought to the Home Office, one that favours a brutal crackdown on opposition instead of dialogue or debate. Just this week, the Public Order Bill was enshrined into law, meaning that the police’s powers to crush any coronation protests will be vastly extended. Braverman even wrote a letter to various republican groups designed to intimidate them into submission.
A government that forcibly silences dissent is a government that lacks democratic legitimacy. We’re much further along this road already than many realise.
We won’t stop fighting for a government that favours compromise over crackdowns and dialogue over censorship. We’re glad to have you with us for the fight.
The Open Britain team‘
This deep authoritarianism and refusal to concede that protesters have a good reason for demonstrating, as well as Braverman’s letters to the various republican organisations to stop them spoiling King Charles’ special day are just a few more instances of the Tory party’s determination to stifle dissent and protest. It’s why they’re a danger to democracy.
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