SRSM Threats and stalking of the TAL Fanzine editor

Date: 4th June '01

Name: Barney O Toole

I just received this statement from a friend and colleague of mine.
It was sent to James Tait who has been accused by the SRSM's Donald
Madperson of fomenting a feud between the SRSM and the 'Tiocfiadh Ar
La' Celtic supporters fanzine by forwarding mail from their Scottish
Republican egroup onto the Red Action discussion site. For more
information relating to this matter see the Red Action site where all
of Madperson's threats, insinuations and allegations against TAL's
editor have been put into the public domain. I would have posted this
to the Scottish republican list myself but it seems that, in his
eagerness to find the "mole", Madperson has booted me from the
list.... I only joined it last night! The mail below does I believe
raise some very important questions which the SSP will have to deal
with. Regardless of what their members may think of Stevie Lees on a
personal level, and whatever his conduct in the past, I do not
believe that he and his family deserve to stalked, threatened and
harassed by the SRSM.
B.

Hello James,

I would like to apologise for the way that suspicion has been cast
upon you for the forwarding of emails to the Red Action discussion
site. I hope that you will forgive me for not contacting you sooner
about this, but to be honest, I think that anyone who does not
completely tow the SRSM line and follow "Der Fuhrer's" diktats on
that list will inevitably come under his paranoid spotlight. Red
Action already have someone on the Scottish republican list and it is
this comrade who has been keeping me up to date with the nonsense
that has been appearing there. I am sorry that its not for better
political issues that I am contacting you again after all these years
but I just want to say sorry for the way that you are being
interrogated online by Mr Anderson.

This morning I have put all the posts so far into the hands of my
solicitor, not because I am intending taking any legal action, but
more as a precaution that if anyone is prepared to act on some of
these quite insane threats against me, my friends and comrades (and
other interested parties) will know exactly who to hold responsible.

It is quite clear from the mails that have been posted on the SR list
since the TAL Statement about Jason Kelly appeared on the net that
there are elements within Scottish republican circles who have been
responsible for stalking my family over a long period of years now.

The latest rants of Mr Anderson are perhaps the funniest so far when
he actually says that my surname is "English". What a narrow-minded
little nationalist he really is. Not that it matters but Lees is the
fourth sept of the Clan MacPherson in most Scottish clan books and I
would have thought that Mr Anderson of all people would have known
that. However, if it suits his purposes to portray me as "English"
now, so be it. Maybe he is attempting to incite violence against me
and my family from Welsh nationalists? I don't know, but it is truly
a weird tangent that he has taken.

For the record, I have never claimed to be Irish. I do not have an
Irish passport, although I would qualify for one on account of my
grandmother being born in Mayo. I am a Scot of Irish descent and
nothing more. I support the Irish struggle for political reasons not
for reasons of blood and soil.

I left Glasgow in October 1997 not for "health reasons" or because I
was `run out of town' but because I wanted a good place to raise my
kids. The lease was up on the flat I had in Finnieston and the rent
for a house in Wales was half that of a flat in Glasgow. For sound
economic reasons rather than screwy political ones, we made the
decision to move here. My partner's father was Welsh and a Welsh
speaker. Although she was born in the south of England, she has
family in Mid-Wales and the Valleys. It's a beautiful country and I
take a full part in my local community here and get on well with the
locals. My children are growing up bilingual (Welsh and English) and
we couldn't have picked a more beautiful part of Wales to live. In
short, I don't miss living in Glasgow for a minute. The biggest thing
I miss is going every week to the football, but I still get up to the
city frequently to see Celtic play and I am still very involved with
the fanzine.

I do not live in fear of the SRSM and their threats certainly do not
deter me from visiting friends, family and comrades in Glasgow
whenever I feel like it and can afford it.

I am on the electoral register in Wales (which is probably how the
SRSM stalkers "tracked" me). At the Assembly elections I voted Plaid
Cymru and I will vote Plaid Cymru again next week at the Westminster
elections. Plaid Cymru are obviously limited politically but in the
area where I live there is nothing more radical than them. There is
no Welsh Socialist Alliance candidate and no Welsh republican
candidate or I would vote for them instead.

I am curious as to how this "feud" with the SRSM started up again.
The threats have been coming thick and fast against me pretty
frequently for the last two years. I had been under the impression
that all concerned had left this behind. I certainly had. Jason Kelly
is only the patsy in all of this and it is his inability to keep his
big mouth shut that has brought all this to the fore again. However,
it is interesting that the revival of the hate campaign against
myself and my family has coincided with the SRSM's link up with my
old colleagues from Militant in the shape of the Scottish Socialist
Party. It really makes me wonder who or what is the real driving
force behind this campaign?

Again for the record, I was never expelled from Militant. I left
Militant in 1987 for political reasons. I had always had problems
with their politics regarding Ireland, but it was also down to an
incident where a female member of my Militant branch in Springburn
was sexually harassed by a leading member of the organisation. After
the branch demanded action to be taken against this "comrade" and
being stonewalled by the leadership, who actually defended the sexual
harasser (a man by the name of Kevin McVey who is still the SSP's
organiser in Cumbernauld), myself and half the branch resigned in
protest from the organisation. At the time of my resignation I was
branch secretary in Springburn, a member of the district committee
and a member of Militant's Scottish Committee. I was not expelled
from Militant.

I mention this because obviously someone in the Militant wing of the
SSP is feeding Anderson misinformation and he is repeating it parrot-
like on the internet. Curiously enough, when a couple of IWCA members
called upon two people very close to Tommy Sheridan himself recently
to discuss the possibility of some joint campaigning work, one of the
people that they spoke to launched into a tirade against me making
the claim that I was a "state agent". Is Anderson merely carrying out
what others are winding him up to do?

On the rebound from Militant I was "wooed" by the SWP. I attended
some SWP meetings over a 6 month period (as a result of working
alongside some of their members in my local anti-poll tax union) but
soon got fed up with them as they really are a bunch of middle class
wankers and looked to have even less internal democracy than I had
experienced in Militant.

The only organisation that I have ever been expelled from is the
Labour Party. And of that I am quite proud. I was not, as Mr Anderson
has alleged, expelled from the Labour Party for violent or "neddish
behaviour". Myself and another two comrades from Springburn were
expelled for selling Militant whilst giving out Labour Party election
material during the 1987 election campaign. Our expulsions were well
documented in the press at the time because we were the first
Militant supporters to be expelled by Labour in Scotland. My
expulsion was ratified by the Labour Party in 1988 after their
Kangaroo-Court "enquiry team" came to Glasgow. Despite having left
Militant the previous year I was not prepared to rat on them and say
publicly that I wasn't a supporter any longer of their politics and
anyway, from my own experience, I had by then been completely
convinced that the British labour Party was a waste of space and was
glad to be getting out of it. My "entryist" colleagues took another
couple of years to reach the same conclusion. When the enquiry team
came to Glasgow, myself and the other comrades who were expelled were
supported by Militant and the SWP, both of which organisations
organised demonstrations and lobbies outside the Labour Party's
Glasgow HQ. These lobbies were, at the time, enthusiastically
supported by people like Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes (Alan was
someone that I counted as a personal friend at one time but
apparently no longer).

During the struggle against the Poll Tax my politics seriously
radicalised and it was through a former member of the RCG in Glasgow
that I was introduced to the politics of Red Action and Anti-Fascist
Action. I do not need here to go into my record in AFA in Scotland.
You know much of it and you know that I was in the frontline on
nearly every occasion that the fascists took to the streets. That
Anderson can dismiss AFA's contribution to the fight against the
fascists because he has some kind of personal fixation with me is
quite disgusting. I never on any occasion came across Anderson or the
SRSM at any anti-fascist mobilisation in Scotland. The only time he
attended a joint AFA/NUS public meeting was in Govan when Ray Hill
from Searchlight spoke. Even then Anderson raged to Irish republican
friends of mine about being searched by an AFA member who had been
previously associated with Matt Lygate's Workers Party of Scotland
(WPS). Everyone was searched on their way into that meeting. It
wasn't our decision to search people; it was something demanded by
the ludicrous Searchlight organisation themselves and their
associates from the National Union of Students.

I remained active in Red Action and AFA in Scotland up until I
departed Glasgow in 1997. One of my last activities with AFA in
Scotland was to attack the BNP inside the general election count at
the SECC. The tickets for AFA mebers were supplied by some of my
former colleagues from Militant, who appeared to have no problem
working alongside me that night. Very different from the insinuated
threats from Mr Anderson that "some of his former colleagues would
like a word with him".

Well, I hope that has filled in some of the blank spaces and answered
quite a lot of the misinformation that is being put about by the SRSM
and the SSP.

I hope you are well and still active in the struggle against fascism
and that these people do not cause you problems by continuing to
accuse you of something that you haven't done.

Best wishes,
Stevie Lees (and I haven't changed my name either!)

PS If you think it will serve any purpose you have my permission to
publish this on the Scottish Republican list.

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