Re: Julie Waterston mad or bad

Date: 2nd Aug '01

Name: Kevin Burns

Country: Scotland.

I know what you mean about screaming SWP women from Scotland and I like the way that it was dealt with. Now that's what I call "equal opportunities"!!!

There's a story doing the rounds of the left in Glasgow at the moment of a Red Action member 'breaking the jaw' of a female SWP member outside of the Scotia Bar some years ago. The actual incident referred to is quite a bit different from the one being ascribed to Kier McKechnie, a leading member of the SWP in Scotland, who wasn't even there but who is being cited as an eyewitness.

The story going around is wrong both in terms of a lone SWP female member being assualted and even wrong in terms of its location. I know because I was there.

The real incident happened outside of The Plaza Nightclub where the Red Action member was leafletting the crowd going into a Wolfetones gig with a flyer for a public meeting about the forced strip searching of republican women prisoners in the north of Ireland. Three SWP mebers, one of them the abnormally tall and burly Gary Kelly, Tommy & Marie also from the SWP were waiting drunkenly in line. When the short-arsed RA member approached their part of the queue, they started on about "what's this shite" that he was handing out. One of the men, Kelly I think, grabbed the leaflets out of his hands, another person grabbed his woolly Celtic hat from his head and there then ensued attempts by the RA guy to retrieve both the leaflets and his hat. Despite being outnumbered, and with an obvious height and weight disadvantage, the RA member managed to deck one of the guys and in the melee the extremely mouthy and aggressive woman got slapped (once) out of the way.

The following Saturday night the woman with the allegedly "broken jaw" was in the Old Barns pub drinking to her hearts content and apologising to RA members for the trouble caused outside of the Wolfetones gig by herself and her two male colleagues.

The tales people tell up here - you just would not believe the half of it.

Now if you want to hear about the 'real' incident outside of the Scotia Bar... well that involves two very male and very macho Militant full-timers (one of them a former sargeant in the British Army with several tours of the north of Ireland on his CV) and two members of RA (the short-arse was there again) who were confronted by the Millies on their way out of the pub. The ex-Brit indulged in calling short-arse a "Wee Chucky Bastard" (what could he have been referring to, I wonder?)

To cut a long story short, the incident ended in the two Militant 'hardmen' being splattered across the road with the 'military man' requiring extensive dental surgery...

Altogether now.... aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!

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