Published by Hodder & Stoughton at Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1974, Cannibal Adventure was one of a series of children’s adventure books by Willard Price. It’s heroes were a pair of boys, who sailed around the world on a Yacht visiting exotic places like Africa, Polynesia and South America. The blurb for the book runs
‘A Willard Price Adventure story, about Hal and Roger and their amazing adventures in search of wild animals for the world’s zoos.
Hal and Roger themselves in a village of cannibals in New Guinea, but the native tribes and the animals the brothers want to catch are less dangerous than an old enemy who arrives secretly and is bent on revenge.’
I read it when I was at junior school, way back in the 1970s when one of the children’s shows on TV during the summer holidays was Daktari, about a vet treating animals in Africa. One of these poor afflicted creatures was Clarence, the cross-eyed lion. It was based on, or inspired by, an earlier film about a White doctor or anthropologist working with an African people and learning to respect their ways and he and his son make friends with the locals. I read a number of the Willard Price books, as did some of my friends at school. We liked the exotic locations, the animals and the different peoples the heroes encountered on their journeys.
But Cannibal Adventure was one of the many books that earned the ire of Bernie Grant in his crusade against anything he thought was even vaguely racist. And so it was put on their Index Librorum Prohibitorum, declared to be racist, and removed from the local libraries.
The 70s were a much more racist, or openly racist time than today, and I can understand why Grant and his minions would be sensitive about it. One of the nasty stereotypes about Blacks is that they are all cannibals living in mud huts, wearing grass skirts and with bones through their noses. Another children’s book from the same period on making costumes for parties includes a page or two on how to make just such a costume, along with others for less controversial figures like Frankenstein, Dracula and the man with another face on the back of his head and entirely different outfit pointing the same way on the rear half of his body. Some of the racist abuse Blacks have suffered has been based very much on the Cannibal stereotype.
But I read the book and didn’t think it was at all racist. Some indigenous Papuan tribes were cannibals, eating the flesh of their enemies. One tribe suffered from a degenerative neurological disease, Koro, related to Creuzfeld-Jacob and Mad Cow Disease because of their traditional custom of eating human brains. There were also at the time tribes that had still not been contacted by the outside world, while many Papuans still wore their traditional tribal costume. When the Papuan parliament was opened in the early 1980s by Prince Charles, the chiefs attending the ceremony flew in wearing pretty much the outfit sported by the Black gent on the cover.
The book was also careful to present the indigenous friends of the two lads as intelligent, dignified people despite their Stone Age lifestyle. They had a skull hut, where they kept the revered skulls of their ancestors. Again, this is based on fact, and I’m not going to sneer at it because the ancient Celts were also head-hunters. French archaeologists in Lyon, the ancient Lugdonensis, found a skull temple. It’s the carving of a monster, between whose front paws are a couple of circular indentations to hold human heads. On Anglesey in the 1980s British archaeologists also found the remains of a human skull in what was also probably a ritual site or temple. Cuts on the bone showed that the face had been cut off, probably for the priest or shaman to wear. Despite this, Price stated that the local people weren’t superstitious savages. They didn’t know what glass was, but they knew it wasn’t spirits, and so called it something like ‘transparent stone’. If I remember correctly, they were presented in a positive light, at least relatively for the time.
Lambeth and Brent’s zeal for banning books enraged some on the left as well as the right. Martin Barker, the author of Comics: Ideology and Power, which defends comics from attacks from both the left and right, rails in his final chapter against the new censorship, all the more so because it’s being done by the left and he was a man of the left. It was this bigotry and intolerance by those London councils that partly influenced my decision not to vote for Dawn Butler as deputy leader of the Labour party when a hustings was held here in Bristol. She made it clear she was going to come down hard on racism. I thought of some of the stupid things Lambeth and Brent got up to, and wondered if she was going to follow the same pattern of hurling specious accusations of racism against anyone who didn’t follow her definition of it.
Now, nearly fifty years after the book’s publication, there are the same kind of people demanding the censorship and cancellation of others for what they see as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and so on. Sometimes they’re right, but sometimes it’s the accusers themselves who are narrow and bigoted. And I firmly believe that children should have their imaginations stimulated through literature, escapism and the exotic as well as the real and the socially conscious. On a related topic, I notice that American Evangelical Christians are also screaming about the Harry Potter books’ promoting the occult again, despite the fact that they are very definitely well within the tradition of children’s fantasy.
Thomas – or was it Heinrich? – Mann said about the Nazi book burnings ‘When you burn books, you also burn people’. Well, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to burn some books, like those advocating paedophilia. And some books are definitely evil works of genuine racist propaganda, like The Protocols of the Eldersof Zion. Others are just innocent, but express the attitudes of their time. Or don’t find the very narrow ideological parameters of the censors. Of these, I strongly urge you to use your own judgement.
And don’t let anti-racist fanatics ban ordinary, decent books like those of the fanatics on the extreme right.
It seems to me that there’s a real war going on in ostensibly democratic countries against freedom of speech and conscience. I don’t think this is confined to either the left or right either. In Britain we have had a successions of governments that have been determined to limit the right to public protest from David Cameron to Johnson with his wretched Criminal Justice Bill. And before then there was Tony Blair and his attempts to control what was being said about him and his coterie on state broadcasting, just as Berlusconi was doing to the Italian state media. John Kampfner wrote a rather good book about it, Freedom for Sale, a few years ago, arguing that governments from Blair to Putin were trying to bargain with their peoples. They got material prosperity in return for severe infringements on their ability to protest against their governments. Well, Blair was wretched, but he did at least tackle poverty with no little success. Cameron, Tweezer and Johnson are simply increasing it.
On the other side of the political aisle, the right are complaining about the imposition of curbs on free speech as part of the campaign against hate crime and the ‘cancel culture’. Some of this is exaggerated. Zelo Street demolished some of the claims Toby Young, Douglas Murray and the rest were making about right-wingers being prevented from speaking at universities by giving the precise statistics. These showed that, while it had happened, the percentage of speakers cancelled was minute. But I do think they have a point. For example, it should be accepted that trans people should not despised, persecuted or suffer discrimination. But I think there are legitimate issues and questions voiced by gender critical feminists about trans activism and that there are spaces that should only be reserved for ‘cis’ women. But to some people, simply voicing what to many people are reasonable questions and criticisms constitute hate speech. There are similar problems regarding the reporting and discussion of racial issues. Nobody should want to empower real bigots and Fascists, but it does seem that legislation put in place to protect minorities from real hate has now expanded into Orwellian thoughtcrime.
And these attempts to limit freedom of speech have got into what is permissible in comics. One of the astonishing snippets I found while flicking through Paul Gravett’s Comics Art yesterday, was that in 2011 Tokyo municipality expanded its ban on the sale of certain comics (manga) and animated movies (anime) to children under 18 by including materials ‘excessively disruptive of the social order’. (Page 72). I realise that Japan is a very conservative society. The right-wing Liberal Democratic party were in power for fifty years or so after the end of World War II. The country is very Confucian in that one respects one’s elders and superiors. Gender roles are very traditional, as are conceptions of nationality. I don’t know if it’s still the case now, but under Japanese law at one time a person could only be a Japanese citizen if both their parents were ethnic Japanese. I gather that there are ways you can become a naturalised citizen, but it’s extremely difficult. It’s also supposed to be a very conformist society, in which children are taught at school that ‘the nail that stands up must be hammered down’. But this attack on comics is extreme.
Such attacks on the four-colour funnies and related media haven’t been restricted by Japan by any means. In the 1950s there was a moral panic in America and the United States against comics, one of the major figures in which was the Austrian psychiatrist, Dr Frederic Wertham. Wertham was one of a number of left-wing, emigre intellectuals who believed that popular culture had assisted the Nazis into power. He believed that American youth was being corrupted into crime and sexual deviancy by comics. He accused Superman of being a Nazi, despite the fact that the character’s only similarity to Nietzsche’s superman is the name, and that the Man of Steel’s creators were American Jews. Batman and Robin were an idealised homosexual couple, an accusation that has continued to plague attempts to reintroduce Robin in the strips. Oh yes, and Wonder Woman was a sado-masochist feminist lesbian. I doubt any of these accusations would have been recognised by the kids who actually bought and read the strips. But Wertham’s denunciations were taken up by a variety of groups, from the religious right to the Communist party and led to the passing of laws across America banning or restricting the sale of comics to children. The ban led to the collapse of particular comic genres, specifically the horror and true crime comics, which were particular targets of the legislators’ ire. It also affected the SF comics, because some of them strayed into politically dubious areas. The superhero comics survived, not because they were the most popular, but because they were the type of comics least affected by the new regulations.
One of the SF comics singled out for censorship was a story in which an astronaut from Earth travels to a world populated entirely by robots. His face hidden in his spacesuit, he tells the robots that they’re being considered as candidates for joining a galactic federation. Shades of Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets by a slightly different name here. However, the robots are divided into two types, blue and orange, and there is hatred and conflict between them. At the end of the story, the astronaut informs them that they have been rejected because of these divisions. It was only when the people of Earth rejected their differences and united, that real progress was made, he states at the end of the story. In the last panel he removes his helmet, and reveals that he’s Black.
Shock horror! An anti-racist message! This was too much for one New York judge, who wanted the strip banned on religious grounds. He believed that God had only given speech to humanity, and hated the idea of talking robots. But the underlying issue is obviously its attack on racism at a time when Jim Crow was still very much in force. Eventually the judge had to back down, and the issue degenerated into a fight between the publisher, EC, and the authorities over how many beads of sweat they could show on the Earthman.
Well, at least there were comics creators in America prepared to deal with the issue. Pat Mills, the creator of zarjaz British comic 2000 AD, says in his book about British comics and his career in them, Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! that even in the late 1960s, the policeman heroes in British comics were making quite racist comments about Blacks. Part of what made 2000 AD’s predecessor, Action, so controversial was that Mills and the other creators there had been determined to make it as relevant as possible to contemporary British youth culture and deal with the issues and stories affecting and demanded by the young readership of the time. It was originally going to be called ‘Boots’, after Dr Martens’ distinctively rebellious footwear, followed by the years. So ‘Boots 1977′, Boots 1978’ and so on. But this was too much for the publishers, and the name Action settled on instead. In the end, the comic only lasted a couple of years because it was so controversial, with the major criticism that it was far too violent. 2000 AD was its successor, but here, unlike Action, the violence would be done in support of the law. This led to Judge Dredd, who was deliberately designed as a Fascist cop. The strip’s founding artist, Carlos Ezquerra, was Spanish, and so incorporated into Dredd’s uniform the style of the Fascists then making life a misery in Franco’s Spain, the helmet, the shoulder pads and the eagle badge. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the light reflected in Dredd’s visor looks like ‘SS’. Dredd was thus partly a comment by Mills and Wagner on some of the authoritarian trends in contemporary policing. Other strips tackled issues of racism and religious bigotry – Strontium Dog and Nemesis the Warlock, for example, and sexism, like The Ballad of Halo Jones. There was also a strong anti-war message in the ABC Warriors. Mainstream American comics had been tackling some of these issues for a decade or so previously. There were issues of Spiderman, for example, that tackled racism, and the Blaxploitation craze of the 1970s led to the appearance of Black superheroes like Powerman, Brother Voodoo and the Black Panther. Since then, and particularly since the collapse of the Comics Code Authority in the 1990s, comics have become an accepted and critically respected medium for the discussion of political and social issues. This has reached the point where Conservative and more traditional fans and comics creators believe that the medium and related forms of popular culture, such as SF and Fantasy film and television has become too politicised. In their opinion, contemporary comics writers and artists are too concerned with pushing overt messages about racism, sexism and gay rights at the expense of creating good, likeable characters and engaging plots and stories.
Martin Barker describes how comics have always been the subject of suspicion by the left and the right, going back to the Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian Britain, and the cheap, popular novels being read by ‘the democracy’ in his Comics, Ideology and Power. Girls’ comics seem to me to have come in for a particular bashing. They were attacked by conservatives for being too radical and challenging traditional female roles. The left attacked them for being too conservative and not teaching girls their proper, traditional place. Barker shows how these attacks were way off, tearing to pieces specific criticisms of various strips. He argues that children actually subtly negotiate the content of the comics they read. They accept only those elements of the strips which appeal to them and ignore the rest. They do not simply accept everything they read. Barker’s final chapter is a passionate attack on those, who were trying to censor comics at the time he was writing. This included Thatcher and the Tories, but he was also angry at his own camp, the left. Brent and Lambeth councils were also leading an attack on popular literature through their zeal to purge their municipal libraries of anything they considered racist.
And they attack on popular literature has carried on. I remember the furore at the beginning of this century against the Harry Potter books. American Evangelical Christians accused J.K. Rowling of leading children into Satanism and the occult. Well, I admit I’ve only seen the films, not read the books, but I must have missed that one. It’s always seemed to me that the Harry Potter books actually were part of a long tradition of supernatural fantasy in children’s literature going right back to E. Nesbitt and beyond, and including The Worst Witch and Gobbelino the Witch’s Cat. Their attacks on Potter contrast with the Pope’s, who praised them and J.K. Rowling for encouraging children’s imaginations. There was also a rabbi, who wrote a piece praising Potter as a kind of model for Jews.
I’m not a free speech absolutist. I believe the promotion of certain opinions should be outlawed. Obvious examples include anything that encourages the sexual abuse of children or real hatred and violence towards minorities. I have no problem with the law banning the incitement to racial hatred. This was introduced in the 1920s or ’30s with the aim of combating the rise of real Fascism in the form of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Arnold Leese’s The Britons and other violent, deeply racist and anti-Semitic outfits. I also believe that parents have every right to exercise concern and control about what their children read or listen to, or are taught at school regarding certain highly controversial issues.
But I am afraid that the rules against certain types of hate are being used to silence perfectly reasonable criticism. One of the quotes that my accusers have cited to show that I am an evil anti-Semite is a statement where I say that every state and ideology should be open to discussion and criticism, even Israel and Zionism. There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic in that. Even the wretched I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism states that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic only if it is applied solely to Israel. But that sentence makes it very clear that I don’t single out Israel and Zionism for especial criticism. I simply state that they should not be above it. But to the anti-Semitism hunters, this is obviously too much.
I am very much afraid that freedom of speech, discussion and conscience and true liberty of the press is under attack. The Conservatives want to close down any view that isn’t their own, all while arguing they’re simply standing up for free speech against the censorious ‘woke’ left. And there are forces on the left trying to close down reasonable debate and criticism under the guise of protecting people from hate.
We have to be careful, and defending freedom of speech and publication from attacks, whether by left-wing councils like Brent and Lambeth in the 1980s, or right-wing local authorities like Tokyo and its law of 2011.
This should not be a partisan issue, but should stretch across the political spectrum. But my fear is that it won’t. And as both sides struggle to establish the kind of censorship they want, real freedom of expression will die.
Here’s another video from another Conservative youtuber, Simon Webb. Webb’s channel, History Debunked, specialises in attacking various myths and pseudo-history being pushed as authentic Black history. In this video he attacks the call from supporters of Critical Race Theory that there should be separate schools for Black pupils, and particularly for boys. He has seen for himself how such schools actually lead to worse academic performance and behaviour in such a school in Tottenham in Haringey. But some of the reasons for its failure – management by parents, instead of qualified teaching staff – are also a major problem for the Thatcherite free school project, which was intended to allow parents to break out of the state education system.
Webb begins by quoting a passage describing how one Black activist, Derek Ball, urged Blacks to abandon their demands for integrated schooling during the Civil Rights struggle, and instead concentrate on building good, all-Black schools to boost Black educational achievement. The argument for these is that, despite attending the same schools as Whites and Asians, Blacks, and particularly Black boys, still fall behind because of the lack of suitable role-models.
Webb describes how the Seventh Day Adventists in Haringey in 1980 set up their own, all-Black school as part of this ideology. Staff at the school, John Loughborough, were good, moral, upstanding people. Unfortunately, they had a problem recruiting proper teaching staff, so they were being taught by the friends and relatives of the people who founded it, who wanted a job. Webb states he noticed how the academic achievement and basic behaviour of the children of friends, who sent their kids there, progressively decline. Their interest in and performance in vital subjects like maths and physics declined. At the same time, their interests narrowed to Black music, culture and politics. The teaching staff were unable to keep discipline, and so their behaviour became worse, instead of better. By the 1990s, when Haringey closed it down, it was the worse school in the borough.
Webb states that he has heard similar stories from across the Pond, and there are also similar stories about Muslim and Orthodox Jewish schools in this country. In the case of the Orthodox Jewish school, the educational curriculum was extremely narrow, so that its former pupils were left unprepared for life in wider British society. The same is true of the Muslim schools, while many of the pupils at the former John Loughborough school have a chip on their shoulder about how poor their schooling was, and its inability to prepare them for mainstream British society. He states that the problem with schools is that their management requires a very specific set of skills, which most parents don’t have. He states that in all the similar schools of which he knows, Black, Muslim, Orthodox Jewish, there are similar problems – a narrow curriculum, safeguarding issues and poor discipline.
The demand for racially segregated schools to benefit Blacks goes back several decades. I can remember the idea being debated in the 1990s. Round about the time Bristol City Museum was setting up its ‘A Respectable Trade’ exhibition about the city’s role in the slave trade, a women wrote into the local paper, then the Bristol Evening Post, calling for such schools. There were similar moves before then. After the riots in the St. Paul’s area in 1981/2, the council sent into schools various teams and advisors to teach the children not to be racist. This included the school at which my mother taught. This was accepted by staff and parents, though I do remember that the headmaster at the time refusing to allow the same anti-racist educators to take Black children out of the school to have special lessons on their Black identity, or something like that, as he was firmly against any kind of segregation.
I also recall Thatcher’s attempt to break up the state education system. As well as the City Academies, which were so terrible she and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, were actually winding up before Blair later relaunched them as academies when he came into power, she also announced she was passing legislation for free schools outside Local Education Authority Control. No longer would parents have to tolerate sub-standard education as the hands of evil lefty teachers and local councils. No! Parents would now have the power to break free and found their own schools, run how they wished. Which would undoubtedly do well due to market forces. All absolutely tripe, of course. Teaching really is a skilled profession, which not everyone can do. But right-wing governments like those of the Tories and Blair have been able to use it as a political football and partially privatise it by playing on the general belief that ordinary people know how to teach and manage a class better than the professionals. I remember back in the 1980s how the right-wing press, including the Bristol Evening Post, was constantly attacking teachers with scare stories about Communist teachers indoctrinating children. Thatcher herself, in one of her wretched speeches, was scathing about ‘anti-racist mathematics’, while her lapdog paper, the Scum, ran the story about children in Brent or Lambeth being taught to sing ‘Ba Ba Green Sheep’ because the original nursery rhyme, ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’, was supposedly racist.
And the concerns about the narrowness of the curriculum in some of the free schools and academies run by religious organisations are perfectly justified. A few years ago there were concerns about the Muslim schools up north, with allegations that they were being run very strictly in accordance with traditional Islamic practice. The sexes were segregated, discipline harsh, and the curriculum narrowly religious. There have been allegations since that this wasn’t the case, and such concerns were the result of Islamophobia. The Christian schools set up by a the evangelical Christian head of a haulage company have also been criticised for their severe and humiliating discipline, as well as teaching Creationism as science. As for Orthodox Jewish schools, the French academic, Alfred Kepel, in his book about the rise of religious fundamentalism, The Revenge of God, describes one such school in Paris where the only secular subject was maths.
I am certainly not against faith-based schools. Both Mike and I went to an Anglican church school and got a Christian education. But the school also strongly condemned sectarian and racial prejudice, and did take children to other, non-Christian places of worship, like the local mosque, as a way of teaching them about those faiths.
Nevertheless, the very narrow focus of some religious or racial organisations in the education they wish to provide should be of concern. Whatever their faith or none, children need and deserve a broad education which promotes their personal achievement and growth and prepares them for wider British society rather than isolating them in self-imposed ghettoes. And they also need to be taught by properly qualified, experienced and skilled staff, rather than ordinary people, who wrongly think they can teach thanks to decades of being told so by the right-wing press.
The free schools and academies may not provide this, and in many cases they certainly don’t. But they make profits for the academy chains and support the Tory ideology of attacking the state provision of education.
I’ve no doubt that racially segregated education is a failure, regardless of whether it is intended to benefit Blacks or other ethnic minorities. So are the free schools and academies generally.
All of them should be wound up, and schooling returned to the state and control of local authorities.
I’m sorry for posting it, but this video by the mad right-wing YouTuber and internet radio host Alex Belfield is interesting for what it says about the murky state of certain sections of Black politics and activism in the UK. The video dates from February last year, 2020, and shows Belfield celebrating the rejection by the Electoral Commission of an application by a group of anonymous individuals wishing to found a Black Lives Matter political party. This was made five months prior to the Electoral Commission’s final decision, following the death of George Floyd. The Commission turned the application down because it was likely to mislead voters. The official BLM organisation, now the Black Liberation Movement, denied that it was associated with the applicants. The manifesto did not describe the party’s structure or organisation and the party’s application left its structure and financial organisation incomplete. The application was also made by anonymous individuals, which also raises justifiable suspicions.
The application to establish a BLM party allowed Tory backbenchers to accuse Black Lives Matter of being a party political organisation with left-wing objectives. One was the destruction of the traditional family, the other was to have the police defunded.
Belfield also notes that this comes after various individuals in America have been sent down for embezzling donations to BLM across the Pond. The UK branch have also been denounced by smirking abomination Priti Patel and Sajid Javid. They also caused riots that have left hundreds of police officers injured. Belfield states, in my view absolutely correctly, that if they were White they’d be compared to the BNP, EDL or other Fascist organisation. But they are considered acceptable to the media because they are Black. Belfield says of all this that ‘there are shenanigans afoot’ that make him very afraid.
Belfield is an arch-Tory with a very toxic political bias. He wants the NHS privatised, or at least handed over wholesale to private management despite all the evidence showing that the health service’s problems are the result of privatisation and underfunding by the Tories. He believes that Colston’s statue shouldn’t have been torn down, and condemns other moves to removes or rename other monuments and institutions with connections to the slave trade or the British Empire. He hates Sadiq Khan and has instead promoted Laurence Fox and other right-wing rivals. His videos are full of sneers and invective against ‘left-wing oyster-eating, Guardian-reading, ambivalecious Naga Manchushy types’. Because he’s in some kind of very nasty dispute with the Beeb, which he’d like to defund, and obviously hates those presenters he views as left-wing, like Naga Manchetty.
But unfortunately here has a point. I think there are some very nasty shenanigans and corruption within certain parts of Black politics. And that this is not confined to the left.
The book Back from the Brink, published a decade ago, describes how the Tory party was brought back from the edge of political extinction by David ‘Dodgy Dave’ Cameron and the mass murderer of the disabled and unemployed, Iain Duncan Smith. Apparently, it describes how the Tories tried to build up a constituency within the Black community by recruiting certain ‘community leaders. Many of these turned out to be criminals, who ended up being sent to the slammer rather than parliament.
On the other side of the political spectrum, I’ve heard of members of anarchist groups leaving the movement after they noticed members of various drug gangs appearing at meetings. I also remember how there was so much corruption in Brent and Lambeth councils in the 1980s that they were hardly out of the pages of Private Eye’s ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column. The magazine even gave Brent the nickname ‘Bent’, just as it called Merseyside ‘Murkyside’ for the same reasons. And some of the organisations involved in the corruption were Black.
Now I am certainly not claiming that corruption and embezzlement is confined to the Black community, or that it is even prevalent within it.
You can see simply by opening the papers that isn’t the case. But where there is poverty, despair and marginalisation, whatever the colour or ethnicity of the community, you will also find crime. And criminals will seek an entrance into politics for legitimation and also to allow their activities to expand and continue without interference by the law. Hence the scandals way back in the ’70s or ’80 about corruption in the Met, and allegations since then that certain coppers have been taking bribes from criminal gangs to look the other way. And an organisation like Black Lives Matter, which has received considerable amounts of money from donations and has a radical antipathy towards the police, will be an attractive target for criminals.
It must, however, be noted that the group that wanted to found the Black Lives Matter political party weren’t connected to the proper, official Black Lives Matter movement. They are also not connected to Sasha Johnson’s wretched Taking the Initiative Party.
The Groan has published a piece about Sasha Johnson’s shooting. Apparently it was when she was coming back from a party at 3 AM Sunday morning. At the moment they’re working on the assumption that she may have been shot in mistake for someone else and that her political activism was not a motive. They also urge people not to speculate about the motives for her murder.
I dare say they’re right, though hanging over their request for people to refrain from speculating is the spectre of terrible race riots if someone comes to the unfounded conclusion that the attacker was racially motivated.
But it does seem to me that if her political organisations and activism is investigated, it might turn up some very unsavoury dealings or connections.
This is another great video from Labour Against the Witchhunt, a group formed to defend decent Labour party members, who have been suspended, expelled and smeared as anti-Semites, amongst other lies. It was filmed on 15th May 2018. Marc Wadsworth is the Black Labour party anti-racist activist, who was smeared as a Jew-hater by the vile Ruth Smeeth, because he embarrassed her by commenting on her passing information to a journo from the Torygraph at a press event. He was prevented from getting a fair hearing partly because a group of White Labour MPs and Zionist smear merchants descended on the tribunal to pressure them into giving a ‘guilty verdict’.
Hew begins by thanking the audience for turning up, and the people who organised the event, Tina Workman, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Moshe Machover, and others. He states that they have been ratcheting up the party passing reinstatement motions. This is going really well. Ealing North and Luton South have passed resolutions, as well as places he hasn’t even heard of, like Stroud in Gloucestershire. All around the country there is a great upsurge of anger, of rage, at an injustice. And it isn’t about him, as Alexei [Sayle] has said. It’s about an attack and turning back the tide of having a socialist for the first time as leader of the Labour party, and all his allies, like myself, Tony [Greenstein] and Jackie [Walker] are collateral damage because they’ve dared to defend him and, in a sense, take a bullet for him. That’s what he was doing when he spoke out at the Shami Chakrabarti report on the 30th June 2016. He says that they will remember the fraught political atmosphere that surrounded that meeting with people, who the organisation he then belonged to, Momentum Black Connections, described as ‘traitors’, the 172 who signed a motion of ‘No confidence’ in Corbyn. They included an individual he personally got into trouble for. He’s not going to big them up any more, and give them fame from his name, but his audience knows who they are. This is a battle that has been lost. But they are fighting a war, and they will win, but they will throw everything at them.
He then say what a spectacle it was when the 18,19,20 – they say 40 or 50, but he can count, and it wasn’t that many – of white MPs, led by Wes Streeting – and they have to think of a nickname for him – marching on his hearing, against one Black man, to influence the outcome of that NCC kangaroo court. He’s free to call it that now, as that’s what it was. He faced a panel of that famous left-wing from the GMB, Maggie Cousin, and the wingman, Douglas Fairbairn, from the steelworkers’ union – never says a word, just nods every time Maggie says something. And he’s says he’ll leave the name of the Unite member out of it for now, as he’s a member of Unite and a very loyal person, but he can’t help what others may find out as a result of doing due diligence. He quotes Chris Williamson, who said it was a perverse decision. The hearing took two days. People like Graham Batch put in a witness statement, Mike Kushman, David Rosenberg, Naomi Winborne-Idrissi. Fantastic Jewish support. This is not Black people versus Jewish people. This is Jewish people and Black people fighting side by side for justice on a cause. And let them never divide us, for that is what they seek to do! He says that he’s not an anti-Semite, his audience knows he’s not an anti-Semite, and the MP who accused him knows he’s not an anti-Semite. In fact when she went out of the room and put that statement out attacking Corbyn, he was just collateral damage. She didn’t have a clue who he was. He was just some Black awkward bugger, who’d called her out doing something she didn’t ought to with the Daily Telegraph, another Labour supporting paper.
It’s interesting, he says. You can judge people from the company they keep. On the one side you have Kevin Schofield, the former Sun journalist, who’s now running PoliticsHome. You’ve got Richard Angel, director of Progress, I can’t remember whether he was on the left or the right, but it doesn’t matter as he’s very much on the right, Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel. That was the little crew that was out that day to get Corbyn. And don’t forget that the Chakrabarti report was against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism. So he had every right, didn’t he? – to talk about the underrepresentation of African, Caribbean and Asian people in that room, and among the staff and the journalists? All of that was lost as the journalists, who turned on him as one of their number, had no interest in the report and its issues. They were out to get Corbyn that day. They were like a pack of wolves, and he has never seen anything like it in forty years of journalism. They were rabid. He then mentions that Tina Godshaw, from the press office of the National Union of Journalists was present, and that they’ve worked very closely together at Lambeth Momentum. And so they were on a mission.
But he’s slowly rowing back. He’s got a rebuttal strategy. He’s taken on the Jewish Chronicle. It’s been settled by IPSO and 14 stories have been corrected. They had to take the word ‘abuse’ out of those stories, as he did not abuse that MP. He says he was heckled in the meeting ‘How dare you! How dare you! How absolutely dare you!’ A Black man daring to speak up at a nearly all White meeting about Black representation. ‘How dare I!’ Perhaps, he muses, that’s the slogan for a future T-shirt.
But they’ve made progress. A poll of nearly 3,000 people, ordinary members of the public, came out more than 94 per cent against his expulsion. Expulsion revulsion! There’s been an outcry. The Black community is stirring. He was on a radio station. He was supposed to be on for half an hour, they wouldn’t let him go after an hour. He identifies the station as Genesis Radio, and points out Jennifer Lee, who was the programme’s presenter that night, and who would be speaking later. Nana Asante of the Black Labour Movement has run a fantastic petition campaign, which is on Change.org. Sometimes as Black people, they’re slow to stir – a sleeping giant – but when they get on the move, you saw the Civil Rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Panthers and the Black Power movement. They are mighty. Small but tallowa, as they say in Jamaica. Small but mighty. And they’re beginning to stir. The Voice newspaper carried a story supporting the campaign. Last week it was the story that had the most views. It’s beating stories about Black American celebrities, like Megan Markle in terms of hits.
How do they go forward? London is just the beginning. This is just a springboard to a national tour, where he will be able to talk directly to the public, as some people have raised questions. Like after watching a fifty-five second video clip that’s online of him talking at the Chakrabarti meeting, they ask ‘Surely he can’t have been chucked out of the party at that meeting because of what he said? There must be more.’ Well, there is no more. In the hearing over two days they played that clip about 15 times and dissected it, every bit of it. And there is no more. There were two charges of which he was found guilty. One is the incident in the video, and the second charge was that he dared defend himself in an article in The Voice and on his own website, The Latest.com, and retweeted a few of Tony Greenstein’s sage offerings online and some others. And so he is guilty in some way of exacerbating the original charge. So it’s just nonsense. He has a brilliant team of lawyers, about four of them at the last count, and they’re putting together a case, on Monday the Labour party will get a very heavy-duty letter from his lawyers, who have said that he has substantial grounds for the Labour Party having breached its own rules on contract, on human rights, and there’s a small issue of defamation. There are a few individuals he may have to go after.
‘Let me,’ he says, ‘leave you with this insight into the hearing’. When his fantastic barrister Althea Brown of Doughty Street, a great Black woman, challenged the Party to give a definitive definition of what it had adopted as its version on anti-Semitism, they couldn’t answer. They had to call an adjournment. And they accused Walker of daring to say in that private JLM meeting, which she thought was a safe space to have a debate about all matters Jewish and anti-Semitism, when she asked for a good working definition of anti-Semitism. The party themselves couldn’t come up with that definition. They couldn’t. Was it the I.H.R.A.? Was it the I.H.R.A. couple of sentences? Was it the I.H.R.A. couple of sentences plus examples, seven of which are about Israel? They didn’t know. They had to call an adjournment, and they came back into the room with four lawyers, all disagreeing with each other and saying well, maybe they can take into account the examples. But that’s not party policy, is it? That’s making it up as you go along.
So we’ve got a problem. And the problem isn’t pockets of anti-Semitism in the party, it’s the fact that certain unscrupulous right-wing individuals have weaponised false accusations of anti-Semitism and that must be fought against. ‘I am totally and utterly opposed to anti-Semitism,’ he concludes, ‘and all forms of racism, bigotry and prejudice, and I’ve fought them all my life, and I will continue to fight them side by side with Jewish sisters and brothers. Thank you for coming today. Thank you very much indeed.’
I found this very interesting resolution, proposed by the pioneering Labour leader, Pete Curran, at the third annual conference in Newcastle of the Labour Representation Committee, the ancestor of the modern Labour, in Max Beer’s A History of British Socialism (New York: Arno Press 1979). Curran moved the resolution, put forward by the Independent Labour Party, because the Committee had been swamped by an influx of Lib-Labs – working class political activists affiliated to the Liberal party, while some Labour leaders, such as Richard Bell, John Ward and the older trade unionists had returned to the Liberal party. Curran and the ILP was therefore determined to establish the Committee’s official independence from either of the two established political parties. The resolution stated
In view of the fact that the L.R.C. is recruiting adherents from all outside political forces, and also, taking into consideration the basis upon which the committee was inaugurated, this conference regards it as being absolutely necessary that the members of the Executive Committee and officials of affiliated organisations should strictly abstain from identifying themselves with, or promoting the interests of, any section of the Liberal or Conservative parties, inasmuch as if we are to secure the social and economic requirements of the industrial classes Labour representatives in and out of Parliament will have to shape their own policy and act upon it regardless of other sections in the political world; and that the Executive Committee report to the affiliated association or bodies any such official acting contrary to the spirit of the constitution as hereby amended. (vol. 2: 335.)
This shows just how far the Blairites have moved from the original purpose of the Labour party. Not only are they are Thatcherite entryists, more interested in appealing to the middle class and promoting the interests of big business than the working class, but they have also made a deliberate appeal to the two other, rival parties in order to oust Jeremy Corbyn. Last week three councillors in Lambeth sent an email to Lib Dems and Conservatives urging them to join the Labour party to vote against Jeremy Corbyn. And yesterday it was reported that Andrew Bridgen, the Tory MP urging May to declare a snap election in order to defeat Labour, had been approached by three unnamed Labour MPs, who wanted to support him as part of their plans to unseat the Labour leader.
The Blairites are a disgrace, and should either work to defend the working class and the historic principles on which the Labour party was founded, or should leave and go to their natural homes in the Lib Dems or Tories.
Yesterday, Mike also put up a piece from Medium entitled ‘Blairite Entryism’. This was about an email from three councillors for Oval Ward in Lambeth, Jack Hopkins, Jane Edbrooke and Claire Holland, appealing for people to join the Labour party so they could vote out Jeremy Corbyn. They made the usual noises about Corbyn and his supporters being unsuitable for government, stated that as well as trying to tackle inequality and protecting the most vulnerable, they were also active running basic council services, and threatened that if Corbyn was elected, it would mean the disappearance of many present Labour councillors. The email was sent to everyone, including Lib Dems and Conservatives. It was specifically targeted at the members of other parties, who were not Labour voters, to join simply to get rid of Corbyn.
Mike asks the question why Tom Watson, if he is so frightened by Left-wing entryism into the Labour party, isn’t also denouncing this Right-wing entryism, and demanding that they be duly punished in the same way as all the Trotskyites he imagines are out there.
Of course Watson won’t. Part of Tony Blair’s strategy to appeal to the right was to recruit Conservatives into the Labour party and the government. Those who switched sides were parachuted into safe Labour seats, often at the expense of the popular, Labour candidate for those areas. When it came to government officials, Blair decided that his was a Government Of All the Talents, and included even present members of the Tory party. This included Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong. It was noted by Blair’s critics that he was far more comfortable with these Tories than he was with traditional Labour party members.
As for the long paranoia and fear about left-wing entryism into the Labour party, this has been around since the 1920s. Labour were concerned about possible Communist party infiltration, and so passed a resolution to remove members of the extreme left. The official stance of the Labour party is opposition to the class war, which is one of the major planks of Communist ideology. There is a problem in that under Stalin, the Comintern did have a policy of turning western Communist parties into carbon copies of the Soviet Communist party, and using them to further specific Russian foreign policy goals rather than those favouring their own nations. One of the reasons Communist Yugoslavia split from the Soviet bloc and aligned with NATO instead was because Stalin tried this effect takeover of their nation through the international Communist organisation. Milovan Djilas, the dissident Marxist writer and one of the architects of the system of worker’s control in the former Yugoslavia, described this process in his autobiography, Rise and Fall. For example, the official Communist international line demanded that the press in the satellite countries printed stories mainly about Russia, to the exclusions of articles about the satellite nations itself. And the way Stalin took over and the nations liberated by the Soviet Union during the Second World War into Communist states under the sway of the Soviet Union was by infiltrating, amalgamating and purging the local Socialist and opposition parties. For example, in East Germany the Social Democrats were, against their wishes, forcibly amalgamated with the Communist party. The leading Social Democrat politicians were then purged, and the majority Social Democrats then reformed as a Communist party, along the way turning their country into a Communist state. This didn’t just happen to Socialist parties. It also happened to non-Socialist parties, which occupied the leading left-wing position, such as the Peasant’s Party in Hungary.
There were also attempts to take over the trade unions through the Soviet trade union organisation. It’s why Ernest Bevin, the veteran trade unionist and Labour politician, hated Communism.
And it wasn’t just the Communists, who tried these antics. The Socialist Workers’ Party, which is the country’s main Trotskyite organisation, was notorious for trying to infiltrate other left-wing groups and campaigns in order to turn them into its front organisations. The ‘Rock Against Racism’ movement fell apart in the 1980s after they gained a majority on its leading committee. The campaign then declared it was working in concert with the Socialist Workers. The majority of its members, who weren’t interested in Trotskyism but simply wanted to listen to rockin’ bands while saving the country from the NF and the rest of the Fascists, voted with their feet and left.
Other extreme left-wing organisations adopt the same tactics. In the early 1990s a group of anarchist troublemakers tried to infiltrate a re-enactment group of which I was part. They left en masse after they were caught discussing their plans to take control of it.
Much of the fear of left-wing entryism into the Labour party and the trade unions was also stoked by the Americans as part of the Cold War. Robin Ramsay and Lobster have published a number of articles describing and criticising the process by which the American and British intelligence agencies sponsored various working class movement and organisations to combat possible Soviet influence. The Blairite hysteria here over Corbynite ‘Trotskyites’ is part of this pattern, as Blair and the other leading members of New Labour were sponsored by the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, a Reaganite project to influence the coming generation of politicians in favour of the Atlantic alliance and American interests.
All this hysteria ignores the fact that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a Trot, and neither are his followers. They’re traditional old Labour. But this is too much for the New Labour capitalists, who get the vapours every time somebody mentions traditional, old Labour values, like working for the working class, protecting the unemployed, nationalisation and a mixed economy. New labour’s based entirely on copying the Tories and trying to steal their ideas and voters. And hence this attempt by the three Lambeth councillors to pack the party with voters from the Right, all the while screaming about the threat of the extreme left. The Blairites themselves are entryists – capitalist entryist, spouting Thatcherite nonsense. This should have no more place in the Labour party than Communists or Trotskyites on the hard Left.
Mike over at Vox Political has a very interesting piece from the BBC. The leaders of the Conservative, Liberal and Labour groups in the Local Government Association have written a joint letter to the Observer, stating their opposition to the government’s plans to turn all schools into academies. The stats actually demonstrate that all academy schools actually perform worse than the schools under state/ local government control. There’s also a graph with the article that demonstrates this.
Mike asks the obvious question of why, if Academy Schools are so poor, are the Tories so keen to convert all our schools into them? Is it because they don’t want an educated, critically-thinking electorate, but indoctrinated drones that will take low-wage jobs because they lack the qualifications for anything else? Or is it because they know that everybody else’s children are more intelligent than they are, and can’t handle the competition?
My guess is that the Tories are keen on privatising our schools for a number of reasons, not excluding those Mike has outlined. They firstly want to privatise them for the economic profit of their paymasters in big business, including one Australian-American media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, who also has an educational arm to his business empire. I think it’s called Aspire, rather than something more suitable, like ‘Despair’.
Secondly, it’s carrying on from Thatcher’s campaign to create a class of schools removed from local authority control. Like Mussolini, Maggie Thatcher is, to the Tory faithful, always right. Anything she does cannot be criticised in any shape or form and is absolutely correct, whatever happens. To quote the old scientist, it is very much a case of where there’s a difference between theory and reality, so much for reality. Thatcher was basing her campaign against state education, and more broadly, teachers, on the popular resentment in the 1970s and ’80s about teachers from the ‘loony Left’ indoctrinating children in state schools, teaching them that gays were equal and making them anti-racist, when they should instead have been teaching them good, hearty Tory values. Remember the clause in her education bill attacking the teaching of homosexual propaganda in school? And I can remember her also delivering a foam-flecked rant to the Tory faithful about how ‘Fabians’ were teaching children ‘anti-racist mathematics’. At the time, there were concerns about the failures of those schools which had adopted ‘progressive’ educational policies. Like one school in inner London, where the teachers decided not to teach, as this would ruin children’s innate creativity. There were also horror stories run in the press about Brent and Lambeth councils, and the bizarre, highly authoritarian attitude they took to education, in which nearly everything was suspected of racism. They were supposed to have altered the old nursery rhyme, ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, to ‘Baa, Baa, Green Sheep’ to make it less racist. It’s been stated several times since that this was just an urban myth, and that the Sun has admitted it made it up. On the other hand, I’ve met people, who did go to school in those boroughs, who claimed they did have to sing it. So I honestly don’t know. Given the mendacity and racism of the Scum, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had made it up.
Thirdly, there was and is a strong perception that comprehensive education, which was mostly introduced by Labour, but which also had some Tory support, had failed, and that standards had fallen. The older generation in particular looked back to the grammar schools with nostalgia as institutions where standards were much higher. It looked very much like Thatcher was using this nostalgia to try and reintroduce them, albeit in a slightly different, updated form. In actual fact, the Labour party under Crossland had decided to introduce comprehensive schools because the grammar schools were elitist. Very few working-class children were sent there. Instead, they were considered more suited to the secondary moderns, where they would be taught a manual trade. Grammar schools were reserved for those set on clerical careers and the like, and so were very much bastions of the middle classes.
There were immense problems with some of the comprehensives. Some of them were too large, too underfunded, and hampered with the kind of teaching staff that have become stereotypical amongst the Right. Hartcliffe, one of the comprehensive schools in my part of Bristol, had an unenviable reputation for poor academic performance, and chronic theft and bullying amongst its pupils. It has changed greatly since then. It’s been divided into two buildings, rather than a single huge one, and standards have risen markedly in the past few decades with a change of headmasters.
My guess is that the changes that occurred to Hartcliffe, have also been common amongst failing schools throughout the country. Standards in state education have risen. But this counts for nothing, as the Tory Right is ideologically opposed to state education. Tory toffs like Cameron, Gove, Osborne and Thicky Nikki seem to look back for their view of a good education system to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when schools, or at least, the grammar schools, were largely private, and the proles were given just enough education to allow them to get a job once they left school, which was at 12, then 14. Changes in industry mean that you now need a more educated, technically proficient workforce, and so they can’t get away with sending children that you out to work. So the higher education sector has expanded, but the Tories would like that to be the nearly exclusive province of the monied classes, and so have raised tuition fees to exorbitant heights after they were introduced by Bliar.
And so contemporary schoolchildren are going to suffer because of a political orthodoxy that started with Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s, and has continued through a mixture of greed and ideological inertia. Oh yes, and the Goebbels-like determination to keep pushing a good lie if it gets you votes.
The Canary has published a piece about how Lambeth council had an elderly resident sectioning an elderly artist, Tony Healy, so they could evict him from his home. This was despite protests from all four parliamentary candidates against moves to remove him. The sectioning was carried out without the knowledge or support of Mr Healy’s own GP.
The Canary writes
An 81-year-old social housing tenant has been forcibly removed from his home in South London, despite public and political opposition. Artist Tony Healy had been fighting against the eviction from his housing co-op, where he has lived for more than 30 years. Until, that is, Lambeth council made an unexpected move: sectioning him under the Mental Health Act.
Lambeth council began eviction proceedings against Healy in 2012. His ‘short-life‘ property is owned by the council, which lets them to tenants for fixed-term periods. However, in 2015 all four Vauxhall parliamentary candidates fought against the eviction of vulnerable tenants from these properties.
Despite this unified political opposition, Healy received another eviction notice dated 5 February 2016. The council then visited him on 2 March to persuade him to move voluntarily. According to Lambeth United Housing Co-op, the council were accompanied by medical health professionals.
On 3 March, Healy received a note saying he would be sectioned. Around 1am on the morning of 4 March he was taken to hospital, reportedly as a result of a second section order. He has also sustained a broken arm and hip for which he is being treated. Neighbours who have visited Healy say “these injuries appeared to have happened accidentally”. Campaigners against Healy’s eviction claim that Lambeth Council officers and bailiffs then tried to seize his house on 4 March, after he was removed. This effort was thwarted by his supporters.
The article also has links to a petition against Mr Healy’s eviction. There was also to be a demonstration today on the Housing and Social Care bill, which threatens to exacerbate the shortage of social housing.
This is chilling, because it so closely resembles the political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union to imprison dissidents in psychiatric wards. It was described by Solzhenitsyn. It’s victims included not just Christians, but also Communists, who genuinely believed that Socialism should represent the poor and ministers and public servants should be accountable to those they govern. It’s another way the politics of the 21st century is becoming more authoritarian as Britain becomes a Thatcherite police state.
Thatcher’s government was racked by a series of scandals involving rent boys, the best known and most notorious being Harvey Proctor. In this sketch from 1987, Spitting Image send it up as a Tory job creation scheme.
Horrifically, the recent paedophile scandals surrounding MPs, a dossier of 22 of whom has been handed over to police, including possible murders of two young boys and a Lambeth council worker, has meant that the culture of sexual abuse and exploitation at Westminster has gone far beyond any kind of a joke.
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