The Big Issue

A Sun editorial approvingly quotes a Guardian pundit, who in turn echoes a consistent theme of Red Action’s articles and editorials. It might seem an unlikely watershed, but this is exactly what happened on December 19 when Hugo Young rounded on "the left for recklessly playing the race card and risking social cohesion for political advantage". Young accused Jack Straw and Bill Morris in particular of "instinctive exaggeration" in response to William Hague’s remarks on policing and MacPherson. Morris likened Hague’s mundane efforts to Enoch Powell’s infamous rivers of blood speech in 1968, while Straw employed terms like "disgusting" and "disgraceful" to milk any perceived advantage. If anything The Mirror editorial on the same day went even more over the top when in the interests of ‘democracy’ it called for Hague to resign. "It is now impossible" it continued "for any decent person to vote for the Tory Party under Mr Hague" while Blair and Straw were championed as "men whose boots he is not fit to lick". To his credit, Young found the whole performance "grotesquely irresponsible", commenting that it was "a lot more likely than Hague’s words to stir up antagonisms which many good people, including Bill Morris, have spent years working to reduce. On the whole it is the left by recklessly interpreting Hague as racist who have raised the temperature more than he did."

‘Wogs out!’ is one way to play the race card the other, and arguably more damaging way, is as Young points out "to accuse the other side of playing it when the card is so firmly face-down that hardly anyone would otherwise notice it."

Detecting unconscious racism while simultaneously dismissing in-your-face evidence of studied aggression is of course a balancing act British liberals have finessed to an art. For instance finding ways 'to ban racist thinking' was an idea that MacPherson toyed with, but when a Mori poll on October 23 explained that 66% of the population felt there were ‘too many immigrants in the country’, if remarked on at all, this was dismissed by liberalism as a blip. A successive Mori finding that ‘race relations were now worse most felt than five years ago’, which is to say pre-MacPherson, drew no comment either. Not even the warning from the Lawrence Family solicitor Imran Khan, that the near 100% rise in racial harassment is not in his experience "reflected" in victims being "more confident in reporting harassment" (Guardian, 22.11.00), which is what the CRE, when confronted with the Runnymeade Trust statistics, offered by way of explanation. What a remarkable gift for people whose job it is to see racism at every turn, to detect the positive in such a negative tale?

Further confronted by a British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey published toward the end of November which revealed that of the increasing number of those who describe themselves as English rather than British, 37% admitted openly to being "very or a little prejudiced against people of other races", uberliberal Polly Toynbee remained steadfastly up beat. "In the world of Goodness Gracious Me and Lenny Henry, Britain, says the Runnymeade Trust, is the least racist country in Europe." (In a Europe where the leader of a party that wanted to put ‘homosexuals on spikes’ took 30% of the national vote as in Romania recently ‘Britain as least racist’ (even if true) is not much of a boast.)

Of course for liberals like Toynbee, racism is absurdly irrational for the inexcusable error of applying to whole peoples, common and garden prejudices the enlightened British middle class properly reserve for their social inferiors. Only from such a standpoint could Toynbee maintain that only "to be liberal is to be free of superstition and irrational fear". Consequently as "people become more liberal the more educated they are" and "as graduates will soon be half the population… If we are the elite", she smugly concludes, "that is because we are winning." Such idiocy (if only the educated are progressive who votes Tory?) is not restricted to the ‘elite’. All to readily when provoked the ‘hard left’ subscribe to not dissimilar reactionary palliatives. Take the editor of the Weekly Worker, Peter Manson’s comment that the poor showing of the BNP in the Preston parliamentary by-election "ought to scotch once and for all the notion that extreme right wing groups" are worth even bothering about, Though no doubt stoutly maintaining his ‘internationalism’ he nonetheless seems to believe that as an ‘island race’ the same paternalism extolled by Toynbee that is failing all over Europe is working here. "For too long the left has spent too much time," he added, "chasing tiny bands of fascists, instead of putting forward our positive [Socialist Alliance] alternative."

Considering the overwhelming majority who make up the SA, took absolutely no political responsibility, and played no positive role in dealing with the far-right, how different their ‘positive alternative’ is from the thinking and sentiments of the likes of Toynbee bears investigation. In October Liverpool City Council announced that it would not take any more refugees because of unpaid debts owed to it by the Home Office. In November’s Searchlight, SWP member Dave Renton took the council to task, "What would you think of a hospital that tried to win an argument about funding by stopping operations? What would you feel about a school that raised school funds by excluding all of its students? The council is using refugees as the victims of its row with the government. The injustice of its action is clear. Asylum seekers should not be punished for a problem which they did not create." Tortured analogies aside, the logic is less than compelling. Liverpool Council should continue to take refugees regardless of what the government owes. Let the local working class foot the bill in reduced services, greater competition for housing, medical treatment and school places and to hell with the social and political consequences. Under no circumstances should the government’s failure to meet its commitments, much less the demand ‘for extra resources to help grease integration’ be raised for fear of polluting the anti-racist ‘ideal’ with criminal materialism. If the rights of the working classes were considered on this issue who knows where it would end?

It therefore follows the working class must continue to be punished, (and ‘recklessly’ denounced as racist for uttering the mildest of protests) for a problem deliberately created by the state. Rather than advance toward a genuinely independent working class position, there is this constipated funk. With the upshot that it falls to Michael Heseltine, a Tory ‘wet’, to be the first to even raise the question (albeit negatively) of working class communities paying the price, for commitments reneged on by New Labour.

Plainly not prepared to break with the liberal consensus strategically, when pushed, the case for ‘refugees welcome here’ is even made for the boost provided by immigration to the economy, the ‘black economy’ that is. This remarkable line of argument was advanced by London Socialist Alliance candidate Mark Steel in an article in The Independent on August 3. "For example farm-owners in Kent are currently complaining that tons of strawberries are rotting in the fields because of a shortage of people willing to pick the things. This is the same Kent which we are told ‘can’t take any more of them we’re full up as it is’. This is why most people find economics so confusing. If the problem involves a field of desperately unpicked strawberries and a group of people desperate for work, some might suggest the solution is for the potential workers to pick the strawberries. But they’d be stupid." Of course not. In the liberal world of the Toynbee’s, Renton’s, Manson’s and Steel’s the really "stupid" would be the potential workers who resented being forced to take less than the market rate. A crime for which they would in turn be condemned as "racist", "uneducated" and "irrational" in short order. This is why most people find socialism so confusing. This is why Hague is not racist but opportunist. The Sun knows this. Hugo Young now knows. Red Action do too. The final recruit to this otherwise extraordinary alliance was, to the utter dismay of Socialist Worker and company, William MacPherson himself.

Strategical disarray of such magnitude promises profound political upheaval, possibly as early as May 3. If that happens - remember - you read it here first.

A Republican Perspective On The Palestinian Uprising

The second I heard someone had been killed in ‘crossfire’ I knew it meant someone had just been murdered in broad daylight. ‘Crossfire’ is one military euphemism for cold-blooded murder, ‘ricochet’ is another.

I was present at a Republican ‘riot’ in west Belfast when Sean Downes was killed by just such a ‘ricochet’. The plastic bullet that killed him, was fired point blank into his chest by an RUC man from a distance of six feet. Within hours the media were happily regurgitating that ‘ricochet story’, giving short shrift in the process to ‘Republican allegations’. Nothing more might have come of it were it not for footage shot by a Canadian camera team being released. Similarly with the 12-year old Palestinian deliberately targeted by Israeli security forces. There too, cold-blooded murder was captured on film. In the same way too, when the two undercover Israeli soldiers were captured by Palestinians and killed on camera, it drew instant reminders of the killing of the two British soldiers by Republicans after they too took a ‘wrong turning’. Indeed as one commentator remarked, the public explanation by the Israeli and British authorities as to how they came to be in the vicinity at all were ‘practically identical’.

In much the same way as Republicans believed the undercover unit were SAS and up to no good, the Palestinians were insistent that the Israelis were also specially trained undercover assassins. By the time the counter-spin of the authorities had been given a good airing, far from being assassins, the victims had been reduced to pacifistic non-combatants, who with hindsight, ought not really to have been allowed out on their own. How the Israelis could ‘stumble’ through so many of their own road blocks, or how the Brits could possibly have been unaware of a high profile IRA funeral, the subject of international media coverage, remains a mystery. Just how mysterious largely depends on how you view the respective national liberation struggles.

On that score, to say opinion is divided is an understatement. For those like Danny Morrison, who see the Palestinian cause through the prism of Irish Republicanism, partisanship comes easy. "For this past two weeks I have watched the news about the Middle East on television but even in middle age I want to kill Israeli soldiers. Are they not the biggest cowards in the world? They shot dead a kid with his schoolbag on his back.." Opposite is the view presented by the Jerusalem Post who opinioned that, "The gruesome televised pictures of the deaths of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy and an ambulance driver who tried to save him indicate the depths to which the Palestinian use of violence for political gain will sink"

As if in rejoinder. Morrisson counters "Don’t get me wrong. The IRA have killed people. Have killed men, women and children. Caused grief. We caused grief and pain and unlimited pain. But we were held to account by our consciences, our community, and by a thing called humanity. These restraints and considerations are completely missing from the conceited and arrogant Israelis, whose conceitedness and arrogance is only made possible because the USA finance the bridgehead in the Middle East and intimidate us with the Holocaust to try and make us feel guilty."

In war as in politics, perception is everything. So in the midst of the slaughter, victimhood is the most sought after of prizes. Which is why with a killing ratio of over 20-1, Israeli propaganda began to refer to its enemies not as Palestinians but as ‘Arabs’. As the Palestinians are few and without a pot to piss in, and the Arabs deemed numerous and rich, the Israeli state with the fourth largest standing army in the world, saw advantage in inverting the David and Goliath nature of the contest. Proving that while aggression is prized in military terms, it is largely frowned upon diplomatically. And so, if it is only the enemy that is dying, it is only because like the IRA hunger strikers they are ‘fanatics’, or because like the Palestinians they “actively invite casualties”.

Alex Brummer, City Editor of the Daily Mail, expanded on that point when he asked: "what kind of people is it that sends out its young people with stones, bottles and whatever weapons can be mustered against a modern army? This is the behaviour of those who would sacrifice their children for hollow propaganda" Then again what kind of people is it that sends out a modern army that responds to stones with bullets, and to bullets with artillery, and happily sacrifices other people’s children for hollow propaganda? People who would buy a paper like the Jerusalem Post which recently ran a feature on child victims with the imperishable headline: “Child sacrifice is Palestinian Paganism”, presumably.

With one propaganda flourish worthy of Goebbells, the Palestinian is depicted not only as aggressor but as Anti-Christ. Anti-Christ is also how the Pope is depicted by Protestant fundamentalism too. Arrogance and conceitedness are also features of Unionism. Or were. For unlike Israel who are sure of the continued backing of their US sponsor, Unionism has grave doubts about the fealty of Britain and so are as divided on strategy as the cocksure Israelis are united. Until America stops believing that what happens in Israel influences the domestic policies of the United States, Israel will never feel compelled to act with ‘restraint’, to act like a democracy. Until that happens Israel will, as the Sun reminded us, remain ‘our friend’. US policy may of course some day change, but if it does ‘conscience and humanity’ will have nothing to do with it.

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 9, November/December '00

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Paulsgrove Protests

The beginning of August witnessed an upsurge in working class activity that sent ripples, if not waves, throughout Britain. However, unlike distant Seattle and the excited anticipation of the Prague G8 summit, this particular combination of class-consciousness, and direct action, failed to spark the type of opportunism normally associated with the British left. No demands of support, banners or paper sellers. At best the response was one of mute disapproval, tinged with the type of throwaway remark, more at home in right wing broadsheets. The Left as a whole were ‘agin it’.

Though it was hard to find out what they were ‘for’. Typical was Socialist Worker, who advertised the “Answers to Paulsgrove on pages 3, 4, 5, 9”, yet never advanced any alternative - apart from quiescence. ‘Let the police and professionals deal with it’ was the uniform message. “Is this” as one sceptical pundit put it “the inherently racist police force that ‘bungled’ the Stephen Lawrence case or is it another lot?”

In many ways the confusion that besets the liberal left, when the ‘delicate’ issues pertaining to reality in working communities ever arises is almost comical. There is the, ‘oh what now?’, sense of irritation. But overriding all liberal ‘instincts’ is the undeniable fear and sometimes loathing that instantly manifests itself on such occasions against what are perceived as entirely ‘lumpen’ elements. A sense of outrage at the insolence of these people, who repeatedly mess up the liberal lefts’ wholly misconceived ideas of how the working class ought to behave. what issues truly affect them, who their enemies really are, and what are considered harmonious solutions. Furthermore, as events like Paulsgrove make clear, the distinction between the stance of the liberal elite and the revolutionary vanguards - if it exists at all - is marginal.

So if the working class aren’t ragged trousered philanthropists standing around picket line braziers, or the unsullied and plucky working class folk that spontaneously attend every SWP demonstration, then what are they? Well, according to ex-communist David Aaronovitch, writing disdainfully in The Independent, the Portsmouth protesters were contemptible if only for their “peroxided hair” and “pale faces... brought on by a diet of hamburgers. cigarettes and pesticides’

Adrian Chiles, on Radio Five Live, felt that the community reaction to the campaign to oust paedophiles was tantamount to a ‘feelgood factor’ -where burglars, muggers and assorted ‘scum’ (read working class opponents’) could vent themselves against a lower social denomination, i.e. paedophiles.

Other observers from further left harboured a similarly malevolent tone. The SWP’s Socialist Worker talked of ‘lynch mobs’ and ‘murderous vigilante attacks’ and on August 1 2, desperately struggling to maintain its distance from the real issue, cited a Daily Express allegation that News Of The World editor Rebekah Wade had even “approached the nazi National Democrats group” in order to collate further information on child sex offenders

Mary Godwin, writing in the Weekly Worker (27.7.00) went even further, cursing about “scapegoating”, “hysteria” and “an orgy of vilification” against paedophiles. She aloofly questioned the nature of the prison hierarchy, whereby prisoners “feel it is their duty” to attack sex offenders, especially child sex offenders. Communists “are not in favour of scapegoating anyone, including paedophiles (if that is what is meant by those who abuse rather than love children)”. “Our goal” she went on “is a just, and truly humane society, in which people have the best chance to develop fully as human beings, liberated from the distorting influences of capitalism and the commodification of everything, including social relations”. Are we to assume then, that we can comfortably avoid contending with all social and political wrongs on the grounds they are merely a product of “capitalism and commodification”? Trade unionism, anti-fascism, national liberation, can all be accurately so labelled.

Typically, rather than address itself to the real issue of working class communities being used as a dumping ground for sexual predators, Socialist Worker as apologist-par-excellence grubs around to provide its readers with the ‘facts’ that accord with it’s own instincts: “93% of paedophiles don’t reoffend whilst being supervised by probation... In Britain 97% of child sex offenders comply with the sex offenders register, this means the police know where they are... More children are killed in car accidents... 90% of child sex abuse takes place in the home... etc”. Apparently unaware she was proving the case for the opposition, JulieWaterston took up the cause of the innocent victims of mob terror”

Of the 20 names on the Paulsgrove hitlist, “three” she announced triumphantly “were people who never committed any crime”. And the rest? Paul Barker, senior research fellow at the Institute of Community Studies, summed up the hypocrisies succinctly. Writing in the Evening Standard “In defence of the women of Paulsgrove” (14.8.00), he described the actions as an “outcry by the powerless”, whilst adroitly acknowledging that “the marchers were, mostly, from the rougher end of the working class, not the respectable end”. A fact that he seems comfortable with, unlike our predictably extenuating left counterparts. “If” he went on “the protesters had been black or brown, we would have been told by all the usual public mouths that - first and foremost - we must listen to their concerns. And rightly so. I sometimes think that no-one terrifies the chattering classes so much as the white working class. But they too have a right to their say”.

Though coming from an unusual quarter that of course is entirely the point. The working class, even when white and from the rougher end of the market - ought to have rights. Though bizarrely you’d be hard pressed to find a ‘revolutionary’ to agree with you. For them victimhood has become inverted. For many of them too, paedophiles are possibly the last ‘sexual outlaws’ and therefore almost romantic figures. This intellectual belief in ‘inter-generational sex’ does not however extend to their own off-spring. These social experiments are, it is presumed, to be conducted with other peoples kids. Working class ones. And though not mentioned by anyone it is ‘self-respect’ rather than ‘scapegoating’ that motivated the women of Paulsgrove. Class in other words permeates the whole affair.As The Guardian’s Julie Burchill put it: “The fact is that the contempt shown to anxious parents is part and parcel of the contempt shown to the working class of this country over the past twenty years. For make no mistake it is working class children who are the victims of abduction, assault by strangers and murder; the rest of them live their lives in a cradle to rave bubble of of play-dates and people movers.”

Paul Barker concurs: “When the letter-writing classes say that for example paedophiles should” he observes “be reintegrated into ‘the community’ these are the communities they mean. Not on our own doorstep, thank you; and excuse me now while I load my daughter and her friend into the four-by-four to take them off to their fee-paying nursery school:’

Oddly enough, though approaching the problem from precisely this perspective, it is The Guardian which stumbles on the solution. According to it’s editorial, the “standoff” has “exposed the chasm which divides the 3,000 or so estates like Paulsgrove from the more affluent sheltered parts of Britain:’ Here it claims “calmer discussion prevails”, based on “the liberal arguments familiar in the newspapers, TV studios, parliamentary tea-rooms and bishops studies:’ Well, if true, the solution is surely obvious. If as Socialist Worker says “press witch-hunts or repressive sentencing is not the answer:’ if the long-term solution is to be reintegration, then it is within the ‘affluent, sheltered, liberal, communities’ sex offenders should be re-housed. There, at least they could be ‘outed’ without having a brick (or worse) thrown through the window. At the same time the temptation to abuse their trust, would due to the ‘cradle to rave’ culture be limited to the point of non-existence. Wonder why no one has thought of it before?

LSA Election Results Compared To BNP's

“THE NAZIS ARE SMALL. They only managed to get around 60 to 100 votes in many areas”, was perhaps the principle reassurance in the election supplement rushed out by Socialist Worker (SW) following both the Greater London Assembly and local election results on May 4th. Not only are the BNP pitifully small now, but are moreover “trying to claw back from their all time low after they were smashed in the mid-90’s by Anti-Nazi League mobilisations” we are told. A mere half-dozen sentences from announcing how ‘small’ they are, SW spin doctors ruefully admit “across London they [BNP] polled 47,670 votes”. “Half the number” they hurriedly add “for socialist candidates”.

Hardly the entire story. Not even close. But then outright lying, dissembling the facts and withholding evidence are pivotal in spin-doctoring’s black arts.

In the ‘first past the post’ Constituencies list, where the BNP did not stand, thus allowing the LSA a free run in the ‘radical alternative slot’, the LSA managed 46,530 in total.

Only when the LSA is stitched together with the vote of bitter rivals, Socialist Labour, plus the Communist Party of Britain, and adding on the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation and even more dubiously Gay Rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, is SW able to ‘legitimately’ say, the BNP took only “half” the socialist vote.

In the mayoral election however where the LSA did not stand, the BNP candidate Michael Newland received 78,906 votes, just short of 10% of the 846,686 first and second preference votes that put Red Ken in charge of London, and almost exactly 90% of the total ‘socialist support. And again in the Top-up lists; the only real ‘head to head’, the BNP spanked the LSA with a resounding 46,670 to 27,073.

In the general election in 1997 the BNP managed a mere half of the 70,000 strong socialist vote. But just two years later in the Euro elections, their 35,000 then almost tripled to 102,000. Significantly bettering in the process, for the first time ever, socialist representatives in national elections. In London the BNP received 18,000 votes in 1999. On May 4th, there was, as we have seen, a quadrupling in the number of voters, prepared to put an X next to BNP.

Ignoring for a moment Hague’s shameless stealing of BNP policies on Clause 28, law ‘n’ order and asylum, the BNP result in the GLA election extrapolated, puts the BNP on a staggering 400,000 votes nationally - a ten fold increase in three years. So much then for the ‘small Nazi vote’.

Instead we have, for those who can bring themselves to look, the first real sighting of the ‘reactionary reservoir’ many have sought to deny, and militant anti-fascism has long claimed existed. And thankfully, planned for accordingly.

Why the 400,000 figure appears so startling is because like the ANL, all too many, particularly in the liberal media and the Left, have, for different reasons and to different degrees, long sought comfort in denial.

Denier-in-chief is of course Searchlight. When in 1999 the BNP almost tripled it’s vote Searchlight insisted quite bizarrely, that the BNP ‘vote share’ had nonetheless depreciated by over a third. ‘Failure’, ‘fiasco’, ‘disastrous’, were the soubriquets attached to the BNP campaign then. In searchlight; April 2000, “any comparison” between the 119,000 the NF took in London in 1977, and the electoral pull of their contemporaries was described as “both alarmist and inaccurate”. But based on the larger 43% turnout in 1977, the BNP would have easily crashed the 100,000 target - not nationally this time, but in London! Or put more precisely, on current standing electoratly, the BNP (4.6%) polling are only about 15,000 less across London, than the NF (5.6%) achieved - at its peak!

Shortly before the election, in an interview with BNP supremo Nick Griffin in the Independent on Sunday, the 100,000 votes for the BNP in Euro elections of just eleven months ago was entirely ignored. Instead, in calculating the possibility of an ‘electoral breakthrough’, the distinctly less impressive 1997 general election returns were used as the reference point, Even then, Searchlight toady Nick Ryan, evidently felt compelled to trim even that meagre amount by a third to bring it down to “25,000”. Only then did he have a reading that would tally with a typically toffee-nosed, self-satisfied, summing up. Similarly in another extensive interview with Griffin two weeks after the election, Kevin Toolis, only after reassuring the ‘Guardian reader’ that all the National Front can “muster” these days is “three van loads of skinheads”, does he bring himself to mention, and then only in passing, the biggest vote for the British far-right in a quarter of a century. Searchlight would no doubt approve: for them too “everything” as openly admitted during Stalin’s show trials “is true except the facts”.

But then state sponsored ‘anti-extremism’ rather than simply anti-fascism, is the Searchlight raison d’etre. From such a perspective it is as important to hoodwink the far-right as it is the far-left. Not that they generally need much encouragement. Yet another canard raised in the SW supplement and further afield, is the idea that “Hague’s rants over asylum are feeding the Nazis”, and that race attacks are climbing as a direct result. Race attacks, as has repeatedly been pointed out, have been rising unabated since the electoral demise of the NF in l979. Thus the Tory playing of the ‘race card’, even while authenticating BNP ‘concerns’ long term, self-evidently takes votes from them, in the short term at least. Much as the ANL/Searchlight self serving propaganda machine demurs, the ‘European pattern’ is as predicted, just beginning to repeat itself over here. This is reality. All concerned parties will need to substantially adjust rhetoric on related matters accordingly, ‘Less race in anti-racism’ would be a positive start.

Reactions To Asylum Seekers

HARD on the heels of the Barry Hearn off the cuff comments on immigration on Radio Five Live came the Sun/Daily Mail Blitzkrieg. Of the Hearn outburst one critic noted: “it is only because the rest of us let them get away with it” that people like him see them as “self-evident truths supported by the vast majority”. Nimbly jumping on the passing bandwagon, a Guardian columnist commented that Brixton had become “a beggars’ Mecca, with its heady combination of cheap crack and the infallible kindness of the indigenous church going population and middle-class Lefties”. Otherwise ‘liberal’ Alison Pearson too felt compelled to record that ‘their’ children “looked drugged, or maybe just numb, a state to which their mothers - if mothers they be - appear sullenly indifferent. And they are dirty...” Her spleen vented, “the worst thing about this story” she reflected “is that it puts a smile on the face of every thin lipped fascist who thinks “refugee” is just another word for sponger.”

For all the Straw/Widdiecombe bombast one political leader was at least pleased to see them. Unlike “the church going West Indians and the humble ex-Raj Asians”, writes BNP supremo Nick Griffin, whose arrival the latest batch, “Albanians, Afghans, and Somalis”, come from “traditionally violent bandit cultures”. Adding with a smack of the lips that the new arrivals will “cause trouble not in twenty years time -but virtually immediately!”

In head to head confrontation with the British National Party in the London Assembly elections on May 4 will be the London Socialist Alliance (LSA). In tune with the Euro-Nationalist dictum ‘of putting power before principles’, the BNP no longer call for ‘immediate repatriation’. Putting principles before all else is, it appears, the approach favoured by the LSA.A call for an end to ‘racist’ immigration controls would be normal enough, but a demand for the ‘scrapping of all immigration controls’, outside of a distant aspiration, is unusual, in even the most flamboyant of sects. Perhaps the LSA genuinely believe ‘Refugees welcome here’ is a simple statement of fact. Perhaps they believe that ‘the war is won and we won it’ as LSA candidate and ANL activist Weyman Bennett informed an AFA audience back in October. Perhaps it is they, rather than Barry Hearn, who are speaking ‘self-evident truths’. Maybe politics, like religion should be a matter of ‘morality’, irrespective of consequences anyway.

So when a journalist in a mixed race marriage warns in The Observer that “middle class whites” like them “have got to realise there are not a few bad apples out in society ruining their ‘multi-cultural’ dream. The bad apples are in the majority and the so-called multicultural dream is actually a nightmare” has the LSA taken into account what he or anybody else thinks? Who knows? But one thing is certain. That policy on immigration will put a smile on every fascist mug, thin-lipped or otherwise, who is convinced that ‘socialist’ is now just another word for “loser”.

BIG ISSUE PREDICTION: The Left ignores working class perspectives at their own peril.

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 6, April/May '00

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Holocaust On Trial

“Holocaust goes on trial” was the Daily Telegraph headline which announced the beginning of libel proceedings being brought by historian David Irving against fellow author Prof Deborah Lipsdadt, following her accusation that Irving was the most prominent, and thus most dangerous “Holocaust denier” in the world.

At issue is not whether Nazi concentration camps existed, but whether the inmates, and Jews in particular, were systematically and deliberately exterminated therein. Irving, who graciously accepts that between “one and four million Jews” died during the conflict, insists it was not as result of having been gassed, but more probably due to “overwork, starvation and typhus”. He also claims that the “Americans built the gas chambers at Auschwitz”, while the Poles, he insists, “admitted in 1995” to being responsible for a similar post war construction in Dachau. In the past he has referred to Auschwitz as a “tourist attraction” and has called the Holocaust a “blood lie” against the German people.

For his detractors, he is “a liar driven by his extremist views”. As Prof Lipshadt’s lawyer put it:” By exposing that dangerous fraud in this court the defendants may be properly applauded for having performed a significant public service”. Accepting that few people in Britain up to now have ever heard of Irving, much less the notion of the Holocaust as fiction, what ‘service’ and to ‘whose public’ is a moot point’ With January 27 in future to be known as Holocaust Memorial Day, and plans afoot to make any questioning of the Holocaust a criminal offence in Britain as in Germany, the fall out from the planned twelve week trial, seems likely to carry national and international repercussions.

That Irving is politically partisan in his motivation is beyond question. Fellow historian Andrew Roberts who visited his flat in Mayfair described it thus: “On one wall were framed copies of the then Nazi newspaper Vokischer Beobachter dating from the thirties. On the desk was a framed autograph in a familiar, spiky hand, which on closer examination read ‘Adolf Hitler’. At his parties - to which I was not invited -the cocktail swizzle sticks featured small glass swastikas. Here, the place proclaimed, lives a True Believer.” (Sunday Telegraph 16.1. 00). A little more than a day into the trial he was castigated by the judge for blatant bias. An SS telegram, which according to Irving disproved the notion of ‘a final solution’, which had demanded that ‘the execution of Jews in Riga be stopped’ had had the rest of the sentence which continued ‘and must be done more discretely’ - deleted. Similarly, during the Hitlers Diaries debacle he suddenly declared the forgery genuine, only days after pronouncing them false. When asked why he simply explained: “That’s show business”.

Now, if it were merely a question of Irving’s integrity these anecdotes alone, would in a normal libel trial, prove damning. However it is not, it must be remembered, Irving who is on trial. And for those who want, as one Jewish critic put it, to make “the Holocaust central to civilisation” it may yet not prove to be all plain sailing. Put bluntly. Irving it appears is not the only one with the capacity for invention. For example, since the de-Communisation of Poland it has been conceded that the figure of many millions put to death in Auschwitz alone, is an exaggeration. For the moment no figure can be agreed. Moreover, the Yad Vasheem museum in Jerusalem, which has a deserved reputation for being scrupulous, admits that even the wider figure of the ‘six million’ is itself an arbitrary one. Intriguingly, Professor .Lipshadt herself concedes that “the notorious tale of the Nazis making soap out of the bodies of dead Jews is a myth probably fabricated by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the former Soviet Union” (Christopher Hitchens, London Evening Standard, 12.1.00).

When you consider one of the reasons the recent Brad Pitt film, Fight Club, was widely condemned as ‘Nazi and fascist’ was for a ‘shameful parody’ of something which Prof Lipshadt now acknowledges is a metaphor, it serves only to highlight the reverence attached to the approved reading of history, and the implications of it unravelling.

Back in 1987 when identical accusations of being ‘fascist and Nazi’, were laid by amongst others the Union of Jewish Students, it caused the dramatic cancellation of the Jim Allen play Perdition. In this drama, based co-incidentally on a libel trial, the defence counsel argues that “Israel is a paid watchdog: a nation built on the pillar of Western guilt and subsidised by American dollars”. Similar reasoning is of course to be found on the far-right. Nonetheless such a rationale cannot be deemed fascist merely out of coincidence; more particularly if objective fact.

Norman Finkelstien for one, a left-wing and political scientist argues that the ‘Holocaust industry’ was created by the pro-Israel lobby in 1967 to “justify aid for Israel”. In effect “the Holocaust is the Zionist account” of history. “It was,” he claims “seized upon and methodically marketed” because it was politically expedient” (The Guardian, 18.1.00). One notable consequence of this relentless marketing is that the notion of anti-fascism and anti-Semitism, has become so interlaced, it has fused in the public mind, to the extent, that everything and everybody else is squeezed out. In his Schindler’s List Oscar acceptance speech for instance, Steven Spielberg dedicated it to the “6 million who can’t be here” as if Jewish persecution was the be all and end all of Nazi philosophy, and therefore, everything, and everyone else caught up in it, ‘a mere detail of history’.

In the similar way, anybody or thing, deemed in some way ‘anti-Israeli’ is automatically turned up side down in the quest for some pro-Nazi baggage, while anti-fascism is itself widely assumed to be motivated by, and the pejorative of, essentially ethnic considerations. In the late 80’s, an AFA representative negotiating with Hackney Council for some funding for the AFA ‘Unity Carnival’, was challenged by the Sierra Leone head of the race equality department, who assumed it was an event exclusively “for the Jewish community”. Around the same time and just as bizarrely, an Asian activist was physically ejected from an anti-racist meeting in the East End, on Searchlight’s instruction, simply for being in possession of a PLO scarf.

Behind the scenes, while “Never Again!” iconography remains the jewel in the crown of ANL propaganda, the militant anti-fascist pedigree is under constant attack due to its un-apologetic working class orientation. Considering that the primary ideological basis of fascism is the pursuit of antagonism WITHIN rather than between races, such thinking, betrays analytical untidiness at best.

In recognition that for the best part of half a century the far-right have sought to put the ‘Holocaust on trial’, make it an item of controversy, a defensive reflex under the circumstances is to be expected But now with the archives being opened in the former killing fields of the Eastern front if, as seems likely, the lid is to come off, better in the long run, ‘our side’ is seen to do the lifting. ‘Political expediency’, if not clarity and candour would appear to demand it.

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00

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Sinn Fein Take Positions in Northern Ireland Assembly

One paper described it as “a nauseating spectacle” while another compared the appointment of Martin McGuinness to the position of Minister of Education as the “political equivalent of child abuse”. Difficult to assess whether the gnashing and wretching is because McGuinness is alleged to be an ‘IRA Godfather’, or simply because he failed the 11 plus. Where there is consensus on both the Left and Right is that the acceptance of ministerial office represents the final ‘embourgeoisment’ of Republicanism both north and south. “The republic” according to the Observer “is now richer than the North, has no time for the fantasy of a socialist republican Ireland”. While Trimble along with the socialist Left in Britain crows, “that once terrorism is left behind you’re left wondering what the party [Sinn Fein] actually stands for”. The widespread hope and belief, allowing for the odd spasm of doubt, is that republicans have at the end of the day, despite all the twists and turns finally ‘been fooled by the fancy diplomatic language’. Which was why Trimble was widely congratulated for his ‘masterstroke’ in convening another Ulster Council Meeting in February to ratify decommissioning. Objections from the IRA that this was outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement were dismissed by the Guardian as an organisation “outmaneuvered by Mr. Trimble, indulging in one last whinge”. Which is nice.

However, far from being the genius he is painted, all Trimble has actually done is pencil in yet another potential crisis for the peace process, his party, and of course himself, for February. Moreover with ‘IRA guns under the cabinet table’, what in practical terms is Unionism’s reason for being is now the pressing question? Equally, the prospect of SF, already the fourth biggest party on a 32 county basis, entering government in the south while “appalling” is again clearly far from ‘fantasy’. All in all it does make you wonder, “How” as Michael Collins once asked “these fellas ever ran an Empire”.

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 4, Dec '99/Jan '00

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Far Right Success in Austria

Haider

THE BEST electoral result for the European Far-Right since the war would, it could be guaranteed, be greeted with a mixture of sanguine complacency along side panicky warnings of dictatorship.

Thus liberals contrive to be wrong on either side of the debate. For instance, on the grounds that Haider does not call for a new Third Reich, or have a tattoo of a swallow on his neck, The Times concludes that 'Haider is no Nazi'. A verdict shared by some of his political opponents in Austria who insist that he is a mere 'populist'; his prominence 'transitory' and his 27 % plus of the national vote dismissed as a 'protest'. This ignores the fact that Haider's 'overnight success' has been flagged up for more than a decade and no one has been able to stop him. Making something of a mockery of the SWP position for instance that 'fascism is only a threat when it involves large numbers of people'. Well, one in three of the population must satisfy that criteria, so what now?

'Waving banners', jeers of 'Nazis out', 'defacing election posters with Hitler moustache's' has rather surprisingly not proved a deterrent so we look with interest at what will pass for Plan B. It is not inconceivable that in the face of further defeat, and as an alternative to a total collapse in morale the Left will in time begin to take comfort in the Times prognosis. While not conforming to a stereotype 'Hollywood Nazi' Haider nonetheless lacks for nothing in the credentials department. Both parents were involved with the SS. The Freedom Party has been a home for unreconstructed fascists since the war. Little surprise then, when he describes Hitler's unemployment polices as "orderly"; SS veterans as "men of character" or brands concentration camps as "punishment centres".

Some nine months before the recent election, when asked to comment on new medical legislation, Haider remarked that it meant in future "Any bush nigger will have the possibility to treat his colleagues in Austria". An outburst that has led to incitement charges under the penal code. In all an inconvenient curriculum vitae for the 'Haider - not so Nazi' school. Others, like the Guardian, who reluctantly admit he might indeed be the 'genuine article', instead seek refuge in the myth of 'special conditions'. For them the "low poll" (ie. the election was somehow unrepresentative of a more decent Austria) is presented as sufficient reason not to take the Far-Right "very" seriously; retaining just sufficient objectivity to acknowledge that the statistic of "one in two workers" voting Far-Right is "startling".

Not however to Red Action readers. Nor Fighting Talk either. Instead Austria merely confirms a pattern long identified and evidenced in every country where the Far-Right are in the ascendant. To be able to confidently claim as Haider's does that "We're more socialist than the socialists" shows they have absolutely outflanked the conservative Left and won the 'battle for position'. With the result that in Austria as well as France, Italy and Germany and elsewhere, the Far-Right are perceived (quite rightly) to be the radical alternative.

So despite Haider's need to 'touch base' occasionally, with for instance the deliberate use of the word 'Uberfremdung' (coined by Goebbels to suggest a country over run by foreigners) far from the strident calamities the defacing of his electoral posters portend, his real strategy is, in the words of the newly elected BNP leader, 'to put politics before principles in order to acquire the power to put principles into practice'.

By comparison for socialist/anarchist sects 'let the class perish but let my principles remain immaculate' remains the watchword. Politically marginalised when fascists seek to set the agenda, they have little option but to hug the sidelines shouting instructions, or throw in their lot with the establishment parties. Compounding a fatal lack of ambition and confirming their innate conservatism in the eyes of those who most seek change.

Big Issue Prediction: More to come.

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 3, Oct/Nov '99

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Labour and the Euro Elections

IT STARTED with the Euro elections. An overtly confident party personified by it 's leader did not bother to campaign. Yet nobody was more thunderstruck than the Tories at victory. More than just the matter of defeat it was the nature of it which will trouble Blair. Of course a participation factor of less than one in four, combined with the core Tory vote turning out, is hardly Gradgrind evidence of a "seismic shift". It was not as if all recent converts had returned to the Tory fold or something.

Far more ominously, only months after declaring 'we are all middle class now ', a spectre returned to wreak revenge, albeit in a negative way. Explaining how Labour lost all 31 council seats in the Rhondda, Peter Hain put it bluntly: "the government appears gratuitously offensive to it's own natural supporters." Improbably blunt for a member of the Cabinet, but in reality not blunt enough. For after only two years of Blairism, Labour no longer has natural supporters to offend, nor the activists to campaign enthusiastically in order to get a core vote it no longer has, out. Rather than address the fundamentals, Blair in typical New Labour fashion simply decreed without benefit of any electoral mandate, and more or less off the cuff, that hunting was to be outlawed instead.

A gesture which earned him the undying hatred of the 'hunt an ' flog 'em ' fraternity, without altering in any way the catatonic indifference of Labour's former constituency. And where a mandate, as in Ireland, was waiting to be fulfiled, he who began with the trust of everybody broke 'his own rules ' so promiscuously he ended up without neither an 'Agreement ', nor the trust of anybody. To function without principles is one thing, to function without credibility something entirely different.

BIG ISSUE PREDICTION: Not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning.

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 2, Aug/Sept '99

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Elections for Scottish and Welsh Assembly

When former Militant member and Labour MP Dave Nellist was elected a councillor in the local elections last year our editorial posed a question: The last of the Socialists? At first glance Tommy Sheridan's election to the Scottish Assembly from Pollock in Glasgow might seem to disprove the thesis that socialism, ie. the collection of failed recipes through which the Left has identified for at least half a century, is dead. Perhaps working class rule can be achieved without a serious revision of theory, practice, strategy and tactics. Perhaps socialism's demise has been exaggerated. Perhaps all 'isms' are not 'wasisms'. Perhaps as one SWP commented: 'There has never been a better time to be a socialist!' Hardly.

Despite the low turnout which should favour fringe parties, the SWP, the biggest party on the Left who stood candidates in Scotland and Wales never came close. Or even made a fight of it. Their best result was under 3.5%. Against that Sheridan polled 5,611 and 21.51% in Pollock However the Scottish Socialist Party vote across Glasgow was a mere 7.25% and the total vote nationally 1.99%. Yet that Scotland is different is proved by the 13,887 votes for Scargill's SLP in Scotland South where the SLP did not even manage to field a candidate! The SLP vote in this former mining area was a personal testimony to Scargill, in the same way the victory in Pollock was a personal vote for Sheridan. He would have won had he stood as an independent, because the work in Pollock has been put in. At the polling station it was all, thanks for fixing that stuff with the house Tommy', and the like. Sheridan won because he deserved to. He did the work on the ground. It was not a vote for socialism much less Trotskyism and clenched fists. Immediate class interests, the core programme. Hard work the secret ingredient. .

BIG ISSUE PREDICTION: The exceptions prove the rule.

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 1, June/July '99

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Rosemary Nelson Murder

APART FROM allegations of RUC collaboration in the murder of Rosemary Nelson, the Observer (21.2.98) suggested that the bombing was not carried out by the Red Hand Defenders as claimed, pointing instead to the shadowy 'Ulster Resistance'. Ulster Resistance is the military wing of the grouping known as the 'Committee'. The Committee was the title of the book that exposed the role of Ulster's 'social aristocracy' in the systematic targeting and assassination of it's nationalist opponents. Libel damages to the tune of £500,000 have already been paid out to the author, Shaun McPhilemy, by one national newspaper for repeating attacks made by David Trimble under the protection of parliamentary privilege.

Rosemary Nelson was born, lived and died in Lurgan. Lurgan is in David Trimble's Portadown constituency. Trimble's constituency is also regarded as the heartland of the 'Committee'. Not only was Rosemary Nelson a high profile civil rights lawyer like the other Committee victim Pat Finucane, she was also Sean McPhilemy's solicitor. Until amended recently in an effort to 'accommodate' the Metropolitan Police, institutional racism was defined as a top down, systematic process of discrimination. Whatever the merits of describing the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, (ie no evidence of collusion with right wing death squads) the RUC which is 97 % Protestant and 100% Unionist undoubtedly fits all available criteria. And more.

Now the political order in the North of Ireland is Unionist. And Unionism is institutionally racist to it's very core. Institutional racism is pivotal to it's existence. A reality that renders any notion of genuine power sharing as an impossibility. For if unionism shares power; it is by it's own definition no longer unionist. And so as long as unionism exists, not only will the past not be history, the past will not even be past.

BIG ISSUE PREDICTION: Unionism to be decommissioned.

Reproduced from RA vol 3, Issue 6, Apr/May '99

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THOUGH euro notes and coins are not due to appear until 2002 the 'euro' has arrived. According to the Economist "it is arguably the most momentous innovation since the establishment of the United States dollar in 1792." (2.1.99) So how momentous is it. Well, if as it is argued that an army and currency are the two classical features of being an independent state - the monopoly of legal force and the monopoly of legal tender in a territory - then the states that have already signed up have surrendered one of the two features that made them sovereign and independent. Loss of sovereignty in turn may mean nothing less than the collapse of meaningful democracy, in that the peoples of the countries affected will no longer be able to determine key policy through their elected representatives. Instead major economic policy will be made by, and no doubt, in the interests of those controlling the European Central Bank. The Euro is in other words very, very, big business indeed. While lacking popular legitimacy the 'European super state' is without doubt going to happen sooner rather than later. Within fortress Europe national borders will disappear and with their demise the raw points of conflict between countries. Instead national conflict will be replaced by the renewal of a more ancient hatred: naked and direct, international and indisguisable, continuous and simultaneous, between the haves and the have not's, the governors and the governed between - classes.

BIG ISSUE PREDICTION: class war

Reproduced from RA vol 3, Issue 5, Feb/Mar '99

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Liberal Reactions To William Hagues 'Racism'

A Republican Perspective On The Palestinian Uprising

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 9, November/December '00

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Paulsgrove Protests

LSA Election Results Compared To BNP's

Reactions To Asylum Seekers

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 6, April/May '00

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Holocaust On Trial

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00

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Sinn Fein Take Positions in Northern Ireland Assembly

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 4, Dec '99/Jan '00

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Far Right Success in Austria

Labour and the Euro Elections

Elections for Scottish and Welsh Assembly

Rosemary Nelson Murder

The Euro

Decommisioning

The Real IRA

The Lawrence Inquiry

Combat 18

Liberal Reactions To William Hagues 'Racism'

A Republican Perspective On The Palestinian Uprising

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 9, November/December '00 top

Paulsgrove Protests

LSA Election Results Compared To BNP's

Reactions To Asylum Seekers

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 6, April/May '00 top

Holocaust On Trial

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00 top Sinn Fein Take Positions in Northern Ireland Assembly

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 4, Dec '99/Jan '00 top

Far Right Success in Austria

Labour and the Euro Elections

Elections for Scottish and Welsh Assembly

Rosemary Nelson Murder

The Euro

Decommisioning

The Real IRA

The Lawrence Inquiry

Combat 18

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 9, November/December '00

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Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 6, April/May '00

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Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00

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Sinn Fein Take Positions in Northern Ireland Assembly

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 4, Dec '99/Jan '00

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