Far Right Brexiteers Annoyed Boris Gave Award to Bristol Police Chief Who Allowed Attack on Colston Statue

The gravel-voiced anonymous individual behind the website ‘We Got a Problem’ got very annoyed yesterday about one of the peeps Johnson decided to reward in the New Years’ honours. ‘We Got a Problem’ is a pro-Brexit, anti-immigrant channel on YouTube. It views non-White immigrants as a serious threat to traditional British citizens and particularly concentrates on reporting crimes committed by people of colour. Such migrants are reviled in some of the crudest possible terms, which also clearly reveal the party political bias of the faceless man behind the website. One of the epithets he uses for them is ‘imported Labour voters’. This nameless individual was upset because Johnson has, apparently, given an award to the Bristol police chief, who resolutely sat back and did nothing to stop BLM protesters pulling down the statue of Edward Colston and throwing it into the docks. He therefore decided to put up a video expressing his considered disapproval yesterday, 6th January 2021. I’m not going to provide a link to his wretched video. If you want to see it, all you need do is look for it on YouTube.

Now I am very definitely not a fan of Black Lives Matter nor the destruction of public property. But the Bristol copper actually had very good reasons not to intervene. ‘We Got A Problem’s’ video contains a clip from an interview the rozzer gave to the Beeb about his inaction. He states that there’s a lot of context around the statue, and that it was of a historical figure that had been causing Black people angst for years. He was disappointed that people would attack it, but it was very symbolic. The protesters were prepared. It had been pre-planned and they had grappling hooks. The police made a tactical decision not protect the statue in case it provoked further disorder. They decided that the safest thing to do was not protect the statue. What they didn’t want was tension. They couldn’t get to the statue, and once it was torn down the cops decided to allow the attack on the statue to go ahead.

‘We Got A Problem’ takes this as an admission of incompetence by the Bristol copper, calling him a ‘cuck’, a term of abuse used by the Alt-Right. The YouTuber is also upset that while the cop got an honour, that hero of Brexiteers everywhere, Nigel Farage, didn’t. As all Brexit has done is created more chaos, and seems set to create more misery, including food and medicine shortages, the further destruction of British industry, especially manufacturing, and massively increased bureaucracy for trade and foreign travel, Farage doesn’t deserve to get one either. But this is lost on the fanatical Brexiteers like ‘We Got A Problem’, who cling desperately to the belief that somehow Brexit is going to lead to a revival of Britain’s fortunes, ending Black and Asian immigration and propelling us back to a position of world leadership.

As for the lack of action taken by the chief of Bristol’s police, I think he made the right decision. The statue the BLM protesters attacked was of the slaver Edward Colston. Colston was a great philanthropist, using some of the money he made from the trade to endow charities and schools here in the city. But understandably many people, especially Blacks, are upset that he should be so honoured with a statue. There have been demands for it to be removed since the 1980s. One Black woman interviewed on Radio 4 said she felt sick walking past it to work in the morning. However, the statue was retained because when Bristolians were asked whether it should be taken down, the majority were against it.

While ‘We Got A Problem’ presents the attack as a riot, in fact the only thing that was attacked was Colston’s statue. None of the other buildings or monuments were touched. Not the statue of MP and founder of modern Conservatism Edmund Burke, not the statue of Neptune or to the city’s sailors nearby, or of Queen Victoria just up the road by College Green. Nor were any of the shops and businesses in the centre attacked, unlike the riots of 2012. This could have changed, and the attack on the statue become a full-scale riot if the police had tried to intervene. The police chief doesn’t mention it, but I also believe one other factor in his decision not to protect the statue was the issue of racism in the police. One of the causes of the St. Paul’s riots in Bristol in 1981 was the feeling by the Black community there that the police were ‘occupying’ the area. It seems to me that the Bristol cop was worried that an attempt by the police to defend the monument would lead to further accusations of racism and a deterioration in their relations with Bristol’s Black community.

It was only one statue that was pulled down. It has been recovered from the docks, and I think is either now on display or awaiting going on display in one of the Bristol’s museums. No-one was hurt and no other property was damaged. I think four of those responsible for the attack have been identified and charged. Mike in one of his pieces about the incident made it clear that they should have been allowed to go free. I think this would be wrong. While you can sympathise with their reasons, it’s still an attack on public property. Allowing one set of vandals to go unpunished would encourage others to make similar attacks, possibly to monuments to figures much less deserving of such treatment. While I don’t think very many people are genuinely upset about the attack on Colston’s statue, attacks on others, such as that of Winston Churchill, may have caused far more outrage. While it was a good tactical decision not to defend the statue when it was attacked, it’s quite right that the attackers should receive some punishment in order to prevent further, far more controversial attacks, from taking place.

Anti-Black Racism and the Anti-Semitism Smears

Looking back at two of the most notorious instances, where decent anti-racists have been smeared as an anti-Semites, it occurred to me that behind them there’s a very nasty strain of anti-black racism. These two cases were the attacks on Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum by the Campaign Against Truth and the Jewish Labour Movement, and against Marc Wadsworth by Ruth Smeeth. Both were not only passionate and committed campaigners against all varieties of racism, they were also Black.

Walker is Jewish by descent and faith. Her partner is Jewish, and she sent her daughter to a Jewish school. She is an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid, and began attacking it through her activism against its counterpart in South Africa. Because of this some Zionist organisation has apparently identified her as the second most dangerous threat to Israel along with Jeremy Corbyn.

She was accused of anti-Semitism when snoopers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism dug up an old Facebook conversation between her and two or three other historians and scholars discussing Jewish financial involvement in the slave trade. Walker made it clear that she was looking at it partly from the angle of being a Jew herself. She said that the Jews involved were ‘my people too’. It’s a legitimate area of historical research, and Jackie has subsequently very ably defended herself by citing studies of this by mainstream, respectable Jewish historians. Nowhere did she claim that the Jews were solely responsible for the slave trade, or even its main investors. She has made it clear that the responsibility for the slave trade lies with the Christian monarchs of the states that engaged in it.

Nevertheless, her words were taken out of context and further distorted, and she was the subject of a vile article in the Jewish Chronicle claiming that she had. This formed the basis for a complaint against her to the Labour party demanding her expulsion. She was also accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement. They secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of the Holocaust for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jackie complained that she was unable  to work with their definition of anti-Semitism and objected to the way Holocaust Memorial Day concentrated exclusively on Jewish suffering to the exclusion of other groups, who had also suffered similar genocides, like Black Africans. I believe the definition of anti-Semitism to which she objected wasn’t the normal definition that it is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, but the IHRC definition, which conflates it with opposition to Israel. And while Holocaust Memorial Day does mention the holocausts of other ethnicities, there is increasing hostility amongst some Zionists on their inclusion. As Tony Greenstein has shown, the Israeli state is keen to present the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon which targeted only Jews, despite the Nazis’ determination to murder other groups and races, like the Roma and the disabled, not to mention the Slav peoples they intended to enslave and turn into a class of peasant serfs.

Jackie was duly expelled from the party, though not for anti-Semitism, which he accusers couldn’t prove, but on other, spurious charges, like bringing the party into disrepute or some other nonsense. Since then, she has been the victim of sustained, vicious abuse. She has been told that she should be hanged from trees, or killed and her body dumped in bin bags. This is so vile, that she has forbidden her daughters from reading her email, because she doesn’t want to see them upset by the abuse their mother is getting. And amongst these accusations is the claim that she cannot be properly Jewish, because she’s black. Which is itself definitely racist.

Now it seems to me that at the heart of these smears against Walker is the assumption that, as a Black anti-racist activist, she must be an anti-Semite. This is based on the very public comments several decades ago of two leading Black American figures, Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Farrakhan is, or was, the head of the Nation of Islam, the religious movement led by Malcolm X. Although it sees itself as a form of Islam, it is by Muslim standards highly heretical. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, as God incarnate. It also has elements of those new religious movements centred on UFOs, like the Aetherius Society. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico to an orbiting ‘mother wheel’, where he was told that W.D. Fard and Jesus were alive and well on Venus, where they would direct the future war against Whites.

As well as bitterly hostile to Whites, Farrakhan is also vehemently anti-Semitic. He really does believe that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This is definitely rejected by every proper scholar of the subject, including Jackie herself. 

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Farrakhan organised a series of events protesting against the conditions of Black people in America. One of the most spectacular was the ‘Million Man March’, in which a million Black men were to march on Washington D.C. It was supposed to be a men-only event, as the religion has very traditional views on sex and gender roles. Women were supposed to be at home, looking after the children. And it was supposed to be for Blacks only. In the event, the organisers could only reach the numbers they wanted through letting Whites join.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was a Christian minister, who was also a Black anti-racism activist. He was popular, and at one stage it looked like he might win the Democratic presidential nomination. Eddie Murphy in his stand-up comedy routine included jokes about the shock White racists would get after they drunkenly voted for him as a joke, only to wake up the next morning to find Jackson in the White House. It’s possible that two decades before Barack Obama, America could have seen its first Black president. Jackson’s political ambitions took a nosedive, however, when he began to move close to Farrakhan and made anti-Semitic comments. The most notorious of these was when he called New York ‘Hymietown’ because of its large Jewish population.

It therefore seems very strongly to me that the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Walker were partly intended to recall the real anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and Jackson. The implication there seemed to be that because she dared discuss Jewish involvement in the slave trade, she must share Farrakhan’s odious views. Not least of which is because she’s a Black anti-racist activist, and so was he.

Ditto with Marc Wadsworth. He was smeared by Ruth Smeeth because he caught her passing on information to a Torygraph journo next to her at a Labour party event. She then claimed that he was guilty of using the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as leaders of a conspiracy against her. The lamestream press had a field day with this, repeating this lie and even screaming that he was the Labour activist, who made her cry.

Wadsworth is not Jewish, but he is a committed anti-racist activist. Among his achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He also worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to formulate improved legislation to protect Jews from real anti-Semitic violence after a spate of attacks by the NF/BNP in the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s. He’s very, very definitely not a racist. But truth doesn’t matter to these scoundrels, and they libelled him as such anyway.

Like Jackie Walker.

I think part of the underlying assumption here is that both Jackie and Marc must be racist themselves, because they’re Black. When riots broke out in Black communities across Britain in the first years of Thatcher’s reign c. 1981/2, the Tory press claimed that they weren’t caused by poor social conditions, lack of opportunities, high unemployment suffered by British Blacks, or institutional racism in British society. No! The real reason Blacks in Toxteth, Liverpool, St. Paul’s, Bristol, and Brixton in London, was because they were anti-White racists. And although nearly four decades have passed since then, I think that’s still the assumption, or the implication, behind the accusations against Marc and Jackie. Black anti-racism activists must be anti-White, and anti-Semitic, because of the assumptions and events of over three decades ago.

Meanwhile, it’s noticeable how uninterested in combating racism, or actively racist those making the accusations of anti-Semitism are. the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has precious little to say about real Fascism and anti-Semitism, preferring to rail instead against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Margaret Hodge did so little to combat the NF/BNP in Islington, that when the BNP’s Derek Beacon and his storm troopers got onto Tower Hamlet’s council, they sent her a bouquet of flowers. Tom Watson, who has done his best to facilitate these accusations in the Labour party, was a friend of Phil Woolas, who was prosecuted for running an islamophobic campaign portraying Muslims as terrorists. David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has written on his blog about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s did their level best to prevent Jews from going on anti-racist marches and events like Rock Against Racism. The ostensible reason was that they were afraid Jews would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspected that the real reason was that the Board did not want them mixing with people from different races and communities. And the respected historian of Jewish community in Britain, Geoffrey Alderman, was put under pressure by the Board in the 1970s to remove from his book his finding that 2 per cent of the Jewish community in the UK voted for the BNP because they hated Blacks and didn’t want their children going to school with them.

Of course, the people making these defamatory accusations of anti-Semitism against decent people don’t confine them to Blacks. They also make them against Whites, and particularly against Jews critical of Israel. These latter, who obviously include Jackie, are subjected to the most vile abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from non-Jews. Like some of the comments Tony Greenstein has received by Zionist Jews, telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Shoah.

But it seems to me that behind the smears of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth there is nevertheless a very strong undertone of anti-Black racism, a racism that permeates their accusers and the right-wing media, which supported those smears.

 

 

Racism, Colonialism and Asian Paedophile Gangs

One of the major news stories this week was the trial in Huddersfield of yet another Asian paedophile gang. From what I gather – I haven’t really followed the story – this was a group of taxi drivers, some of whom were of Pakistani descent, and the case was very similar to the Rotherham and other paedophile gangs. Including the reaction of the authorities to the exploitation of the female victims. The girls – now young women – have said that they have only now come forward because when the abuse was occurring they were not believed. The reporter discussing the case on the Beeb’s News at Six described how the authorities in this and the other cases didn’t act because they were afraid of disrupting ‘community cohesion’. In the case of Rotherham, one of the local authority officials or senior police officers, who could have stopped, stated that they were afraid of it starting riots. As a result, nothing was done for years, and the abuse continued until eventually these thugs were brought to trial.

This issue is delicate, as we’ve seen how the various surviving Nazis and Islamophobes are trying to capitalize on it. The EDL and the racist hooligans of the Football Lads’ Alliance have been goose-stepping up and down, pushing the idea that this is how Islam, and all Muslims, see those outside their faith: inferior beings, whom they can exploit freely without any pang of conscience. I’ve got a feeling that it was this case in particular in Huddersfield that Tommy Robinson was commenting on outside the courthouse when he was arrested and banged up for contempt of court. His followers then declared that it was a free speech issue, and their leader had been unfairly silenced by the pro-Muslim dhimmis of the establishment. It was nothing like that, of course. There are strict regulations covering the reporting of court cases affecting everyone. They’re designed to stop a miscarriage of justice by reporters spreading biased or mistaken information. Robinson violated them, not least with his antics shouting angry questions at the men was they were being taken into court, questions and comments which assumed their guilt. If let unchecked, this could have resulted in them being acquitted or the case collapsing following a motion by their lawyers that the reporting was preventing them from getting a fair trial.

And the Islamophobes of the EDL, FLA, DFLA, and Pegida UK, etc., aren’t interested in protesting against paedophiles per se. There are plenty of cases of the prosecution of Whites for the same offences, at which they haven’t shown their faces. They are only interested in these cases because the perpetrators are Brown, and they can use them to work up hatred against Muslims and the wider Asian community.

And let’s deal with another canard the islamophobes have been repeating about the case: that this shows essential Muslim attitudes towards non-Muslims. If the crew in Huddersfield are like the other Asian grooming gangs, such as Rotherham, then they say absolutely nothing about Islam in this regard. Again, from what I gather, the Rotherham gang were Muslims in name only. They weren’t practicing Muslims and never attended the mosque. Or if they did, it was once in a very, very long time.

But nevertheless, there are racial aspects of this case that do need investigation, discussion and comment. The gangs’ victims were White, and it’s because they were that the issue was ignored. As has been said, the authorities were afraid that if they acted, it would provoke race riots. It’s a gift to the Far Right, who can honestly say that in these cases, the authorities weren’t interested in combating anti-White racism and exploitation. Now I have spoken to Whites, who believe that they have been racially abused and insulted, but that when they tried to raise it with social workers, they were refused help. One man said that the social workers flatly refused to believe him, and said ‘Oh, they’re not like that.’ I’m sure most BAME people aren’t. But some are, just like some Whites. And for a brief moment at the start of this century, round about the time of the Oldham race riots, there was more anti-White racial crime than against Black or Asians. I’m fairly certain that this situation has been reversed following 9/11 and the abuse and violence against Muslims that unleashed, and the immigration crisis.

Paedophiles and those who enslave and sexually exploit children and women exist in all levels of society, and in all colours. The Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches have been rocked through similar scandals with White clergy, whose crimes were also disgustingly covered up and their perpetrators were protected, in order to avoid a scandal. Paedophiles are also manipulative and enter professions where they can prey on the vulnerable, like teaching. Which is why that profession has very strict regulations about dealing with their charges, as well as reporting and dealing with possible incidents of sexual abuse that they may uncover amongst their students and pupils.

But historically, as well as exploiting those of their own race, nations and ethnic groups across the world have also exploited other races. White racists see Blacks as more sexual and promiscuous than Whites and ethnic groups. But this is a prejudice created through the slave trade. White Europeans and Americans trading and travelling in Africa actually reported that Black African women were very chaste, more so than their own people. What altered this image was the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by White men in the plantations of the New World. And where it did not involve rape, it frequently consisted of prostitution, with the White man giving the woman a few coins for her services. Which may also have been unwilling. And some of this sexual exploitation may have been directed against Blacks partly because White women, or at least of those of respectable status, were protected and the chastity jealously guarded. Which is also not an excuse for the men not controlling themselves and raping and exploiting their slaves instead.

And it does look to me like something similar is going on here. That the men in these gangs, like the Whites who sexually exploit Black women, are doing so because they do consider White women less worthy than their own. Yasmin Alibhai-Browne in the Independent and then the I has written many times about anti-White racism amongst BAME communities as well as ordinary White racism. And she has described how some Asians view White women’s sexual freedom with horror, as promiscuity and a lack of ‘respect’. And so I do wonder if the Asian men in these gangs had the same attitude White planters had to their Black slaves: they could abuse them freely, not just because they were in their power, but because they believed their race also to be more promiscuous than their own women, and so their rape and abuse didn’t matter. They were ‘tarts’, and so deserved it.

I am certainly not suggesting that all or most Muslims or Asians in this country approve of or share the attitudes of these Asian rape gangs. Just as I don’t believe that the majority of Whites in this country think that Black women deserve rape or sexual exploitation. But I am saying that these men’s attitude does show a racial as well as sexual contempt for their victims. And that this needs to be recognized and discussed alongside other forms of racism.

I also think there’s an issue with the racial elements of prostitution and sexual exploitation in this country generally that isn’t being discussed, and of which these cases are a part. For example, one Asian commenter on a similar case complained that there was sexual abuse within the Asian community, which was being hushed up. I’ve also heard of White men using the services of Muslim prostitutes. And way back in the 1980s I can remember a Black friend from St. Paul’s here in Bristol complaining that the Black community there had a reputation for prostitution, but the girls themselves were Whites from Hartcliffe.

Racism and racial exploitation has no colour. People of all races can be prejudiced, abusive, violent and exploitative towards others. And this seems to have happened in the case of these Asian grooming gangs, who are not representative of Asian Britain as a whole. And I’m sure that racism is also an element in other forms of rape and sexual exploitation committed and suffered by people of other ethnic groups. And this needs to be recognized, discussed and acted upon. Rather than swept under the carpet and angrily denied in case it cause further racial friction.

Republican Ted Cruz Wants Increased Police Patrols in Muslim Areas

It’s not just Trump who is promoting a very anti-Muslim line in America. It’s also Ted Cruz, another far-Right Republican. Over on The Young Turks they’ve actually been debating who would be worse for America – Trump or Cruz. While Trump’s been talking about banning Muslims from entering America, for example, Cruz has actually been doing it. He’s behind a law to prevent, or at least limit, further Muslim immigration.

After the terrible attacks in Belgium this week, Cruz got up to recommend that there should be increased police patrols in Muslim areas. The Young Turks naturally took a dim view about that. Cenk Uygur, one of the Turks’ anchors, who is himself of Muslim Turkish heritage, said that while they were at it, why not move Muslim communities somewhere else, and create a ghetto. He was, of course, being bitterly ironic, but his attack does voice fears that what Trump wants is internment camps for Muslims after the Trumpenfuhrer stated that Muslims should be forced to carry identification documents. And now it seems, Cruz holds similar views on policing Muslims.

Such a policy would be both nasty and counterproductive. Nasty, because it criminalises millions of ordinary people, who aren’t terrorists, don’t sympathise with terrorism and have nothing to do with terrorism, simply because of their faith.

It’s counterproductive because such heavy-handed methods will only increase radicalisation, and very definitely not catch the terrorists themselves. Older Brits may remember a series of riots that shook Britain in about 1981/2 against Maggie Thatcher. These broke out in poor communities throughout the country, and particularly in Black and ethnically mixed areas. Among those affected were Toxteth in Liverpool, Brixton in London and St. Paul’s in my hometown of Bristol. The people in those areas have said since that they weren’t race riots, though that was how they were perceived at the time. Racial discrimination, and a lack of jobs and opportunities for Black youngsters, was certainly one of the causes of the rioting, as is stated in the Scarman Report. One of the newspapers has also described the riots as ‘a series of insurrections against the police’. Certainly there was a very heavy police presence in St. Paul’s. It was and is a high crime area, and one resident interviewed in the local media stated that there was a feeling at the time that ‘the police were occupying St. Paul’s’.

This is what will happen in America if Ted Cruz has his way and starts introducing a heavier police presence in Muslim areas. It will turn Muslims away from co-operating with the authorities and the police, and make violence and disaffection more, not less likely. And it won’t stop the real terrorists.

Now it’s true that so far, many of the Islamic terrorists caught have come from a network of organisations and mosques. But police are worried about ‘lone wolf’ attacks, where individuals seeming come out of nowhere to run amok. Several of the terrorists caught have been self-radicalised, through material they’ve read or watched on the interwebs.

When the IRA began their bombing campaign in Britain in the early 1970s, they had a very clear strategy to avoid detection. They deliberately avoided moving in Irish expatriate communities, visiting Irish pubs or community centres. They kept a very low profile in order to merge with the general British population. And this is what ISIS wants to do with their ‘lone wolf’ policies. Mercifully, the police were able to catch some of the terrorists, but over the years the IRA was responsible for a series of horrific attacks in Britain which left hundreds maimed and killed. And the presence of the British army in Northern Ireland, who had originally been called in because the RUC was too sectarian and brutal in its treatment of Roman Catholics, became a symbol of the British occupation of Ulster, as it was seen by Irish Republicans and some of those on the wider British Left. Now I wasn’t a supporter of the ‘Troops Out’ campaign, because before the Good Friday peace agreement was concluded it just seemed to me that without the army, the paramilitaries in Ulster, whether Republican or Loyalist, would just increase the violence exponentially until it became far more of a bloodbath than it already was. But there’s no doubt that the presence of the army was resented by many, possibly most, Ulster Catholics.

Cruz recommendation of increasing police patrols in Muslim areas is likely to repeat all the mistakes Britain made in policing Black areas in Britain. They will become a focus of hatred for American Muslims, just like many Roman Catholics in Ulster resented the presence of the British army. And like the IRA, the real terrorists will find ways of avoiding them. Cruz’s policy is worse than useless. It should be dumped, along with Cruz himself. America’s a great country, which deserves better than these intolerant buffoons.

Hope Not Hate: Neo-Nazi Group to Goose-Step in Bristol this Saturday

Hope Not Hate, the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation has reported on their website that the New British Union will be holding a demo in my fair city this coming Saturday. The NBU are an outfit that parties like it’s 1939: they march around in an approved uniform of black slacks, tops and caps, waving banners with a lightning bolt symbol not too far removed from that of the British Union of Fascists. How they get away with this I don’t know, as I understood that political uniforms were made illegal when the government cracked down on Mosley and co.

Hope Not Hate says not to worry too much, as they only have 11 members, one of whom lives in Cyprus. They also speculate that another two may be members of Zionist organisations seeking to disrupt them. That’s also likely to be true. I did wonder, however, if it was a general excuse these organisations make when they fall out with each other. It’s not over ‘ideological’ differences, but because there are ‘Zionist’ spies in their ranks.

The stories at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/bristol-and-bust-4719 Go there for more information and pics of the Mosleyite wannabes.

I’m not actually very sure what they hope to achieve. Bristol’s got a very ethnically mixed population, with sizable Black and Asian minorities. Like other cities of this type, it’s got its racial strains and there is a branch of SARI in St. Paul’s, I believe, for the victims of racial attacks. But mostly, touch wood, it’s a cool place. If you go down to the centre, you’re far more likely to be faced with charity canvassers, the homeless selling the Big Issue, and the normal run of buskers, than fiery-eyed maniacs preaching jihad or race war or whatever other bloody nonsense.

The EDL also turned up here a few years ago, and there was trouble then. It annoyed my mother to think that they could campaign successfully in Bristol, and cause trouble. My own feeling is that there could be trouble due to this bunch of morons, but most likely they’ll be treated the way they should – and ignored, leaving them to slink back to wherever they came from, shamed at not being able to get even a rise out of the people of this great city.

Cartoons Against Police Shooting of Blacks

These are a couple of cartoons I came across on 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only), bitterly satirising the way American police shoot and kill Blacks unnecessarily. The first is a response to the shooting of a young Black man in Chicago, and the second a more general reaction to the problem. Many of the victims were unarmed, or were actually walking away when they were shot. Some seem to have been killed simply because they talked back to the officer, who responded violently. This situation escalated under the officer pulled his gun and shot his victim.

I’m reblogging these because the Tories are considering arming the police, supposedly to protect us against a terror attack by allowing them to respond immediately, instead of waiting for the armed police units to arrive. There have already been incidents in Britain where the police have shot and killed innocent people, as I’ve pointed out in my last post. This will only increase the problem, till it reaches a crisis, as in America now.

And the presence of armed police on duty against terrorists has already resulted in the death of an innocent man. This was Jean Charles Menezes, the Brazilian student, who was gunned down by the police in London after he was mistaken for an Islamist terrorist. And this was done by supposedly highly trained and responsible police officers. Arming the ordinary police in preparation for suspected terrorist attacks will just make the deaths of innocents like Senhor Menezes more likely.

And it will increase Muslim disaffection. A few years ago, someone wrote a piece in the Independent arguing that the 1980 riots that broke out up and down Britain were not generally about race, but were ‘local insurrections against the police’. This is also true, though much of the rioting was motivated by racial tension. St Pauls in Bristol was one of the areas hit. It’s an area with a highly ethnically mixed population, including Blacks, Whites and Asians. It was a high crime area suffering from high unemployment, and there was a very heavy police presence. One Black resident of the area has said in a piece in one of the papers that there was a feeling at the time that ‘the police were occupying St Paul’s’.

Now consider the immense disaffection that would similarly break out if armed police start patrolling majority Black or Muslim areas. It’ll lead to similar feeling that the police are ‘occupying’ those areas, and drive some, perhaps only a minority, but certainly some, into the arms of the extremists.

We cannot allow this. Good policing is done by consent, not just armed force. And the latter should always be the last resort.

19th Century Campaigns for Trade Union and Working Class Representation in Parliament

One of the issues that desperately needs to be tackled is the electoral disenfranchisement of the working class. The existing political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, adopted neoliberal economics and concentrated on gaining middle class support to the exclusion of the working and lower middle classes. In the case of the Conservative party, this has meant little difference in the way the party fundamentally sees itself. It has always represented industry and the traditional social hierarchy against the working class, although under the influence of Thatcher its policies have become much more extreme. New labour, however, aimed at gaining middle class support while neglecting the very people it was formed to fight for in the first place.

I am planning to write a much longer post about the formation of the Labour party, and how it was explicitly formed by trade unions and various Socialist parties and organisations, such as the Independent Labour Party, the Social-Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society, to represent the interests of the working class in parliament. The aspirations of trade unionists and working people to be represented in parliament goes back long before the official foundation of the Labour party. Many were active in the Chartist campaigns for the enlargement of the Franchise.

London Radicals and the Mid-Victorian Campaign for Votes for Working Men

Henry Pelling, in his A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987) notes in many areas artisans had held the freeman’s franchise before the Great Reform Act of 1832. This was particularly true of Liverpool in the 1790s, where local politicians were careful to win the support of the Shipwrights Society.

The first time a trade union candidate stood for election to parliament was in 1852 when William Newton of the Engineers Union stood as the Radical candidate for Tower Hamlets. He did not, however, have the support of his union, and only polled a thousand votes, which was insufficient to get him elected. Nevertheless, this marked the entry of working people into parliamentary politics.

Pelling goes on to describe the way the trade unions again became active in the 1860s campaigning for the further extension of the voter to include the working class:

In the early 1860s, however, a number of factors brought union officials into politics. They had already been drawn into an unprecedented public debate about the merits of unionism at the time of the London builders’ strike, which revealed the existence of a number of potential allies of trade unionism among the professional classes. There were, for instance, Christian Socialists such as J.M. Ludlow and Thomas Hughes, who were both barristers, and there were Positivists, that is, adherents of the positive social philosophy of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, such as Professor E.S. Beesly of University College, London, and another barrister called Frederic Harrison. Several of these men had been involved in the preparation of the report on trade unions presented to the 1860 meeting of the National Social Science Association. Contact with such sympathizers, and the desire to reciprocate their support by helping them in any parliamentary elections that they chose to fight, were no doubt factors pulling Applegarth and his colleagues more fully into the political arena. But in any case, the union leaders felt not only that they could benefit from political activity but also that they had a right and a duty to participate. This view was clearly expressed in an Address to the Trade Unions published by a newly founded body called the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, and actually written either by Applegarth [Robert Applegarth, secretary of the Amalgamated Carpenters] or by George Howell, a young bricklayer who shared his views:

We do not wish you to relax one iota of your efforts in reference to the amelioration of our social condition … Nor do we wish to turn our trades societies into political organisations, to divert them from their social objects; but we must not forget that we are citizens, and as such should have citizen’s rights. Recollect also, that by obtaining these rights we shall be able more effectually to secure our legitimate demands as Unionists. (Pp. 50-51).

Pelling notes that members of Applegarth’s organisation and supporters were in the reception committee which welcome the great Italian nationalist, Garibaldi, when he visited London in 1864, supported the North against the South during the American Civil War, and that a number joined the International Workingmen’s Association. Most of the London union leaders also fully participated in campaign of the Reform League, formed in 1865, to gain the vote for working men. A committee of trade union supporters was formed to assist Thomas Hughes when he stood as a Radical for Lambeth. Other politicians were also assisted by trade union support, such as Joseph Cowen in Newcastle, who was greatly aided by John Kane of the National Association of Iron-Workers. (pp.51-2).

The Bristol Trades Council and the Entry of Working Men into Parliament and on the Council

In Bristol in the 1880s the local Trades Council turned away from supporting the Liberals and started campaigning for the direct representation of working men in politics. David Large and Robert Whitfield describe the campaigns of the trades council in Bristol on behalf of working class representation in their pamphlet, The Bristol Trades Council 1873-1973 (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Assocation 1973):

Nevertheless, by 1885 the Council had become dissatisfied with the meagre results of this policy. It was well aware that for some time there had been a growing agitation in the city for direct representation of labour on local bodies and eventually in parliament. Consequently it issued a stirring invitation to ‘fellow workmen’ to subscribe 1/- a year to create a great ‘Local Labour League’ to achieve this. The Council urged that the distinguished part played by the T.U.C. Parliamentary Committee in shaping legislation had demonstrated ‘The Royal Right of British Workmen to seats in the British Senate’ and now when ‘the long neglected Tillers of the Soil were about to exercise the vote for the first time, ‘the toilers of the town should fraternize with them and ‘be astir’ to take hold of what was within reach, seats on local bodies even if running a candidate for parliament was still out of their reach. The Council’s call was heeded. The Labour League was established and in 1886 scored its first success when John Fox, a prominent member of the Trades Council, was returned unopposed in the school board elections to the chagrin of the Liberals, who had done all they could to take him under their wing and prevent him standing as a Labour candidate. A year later a more spectacular victory was won when R.G. Tovey, who doubled the role of secretary to the Trades Council and the Labour League, became the first labour councillor by winning St. Paul’s. (p. 6).

At the moment there is considerable debate over the demographic representation of ethnic and minority groups in parliament. MPs and various political and civil rights organisations outside parliament, like Operation Black Vote, are keen to see more Black and Asians MPs in line with the size of their communities in the British population, along with far more female MPs. However, parliament is still predominantly upper and very middle-class. This should be changed as well. More working people should be voted into parliament to represent the needs and aspirations of their class, rather than the increasing narrow interests of a middle class, neoliberal elite.