How One SWP Cadre Operates.

“Andy, this will be my only reply to you as I don’t make the effort to read your vile,nasty little rants against the SWP which pale into insignificance next to your filthy,spiteful and cowardly poison vis-a vis Islam.

If Unite the Resistance is a SWP front ( true we are the engine within it) what of Suffolk Coalition for Public Services ( which i support)? Who pulls the strings? Provides the leadership? The Trades Council does and who controls the Trades Council? There are many fantastic delegates to the Trades Council but the dominant person is a member of the Socialist Party and the TC itself has been little more than the industrial wing of the SP/Militant for 20 years.

You yourself are imbued with sectarian politics – you spoke at the TC before the first UTR meeting and said that the TC should have nothing to do with it as it is an SWP front.In other words unless you and Teresa McKay control something you are not willing to work with others.Narrow,minded conservative politics that you both espouse are the reason why UTR exists.

Your hatred of the SWP is well know.Sorry, but the SWP in Ipswich is here to stay. Soak it up or crack up.”

John Curtis SWP

These comments on this Blog demonstrate exactly what many people have always thought about you John.

This of course was the man calling for ‘unity’ with the narrow-minded conservative ‘string pullers’ and ‘poison’ spreaders a little while ago (actually in person he’s said a lot more in the same vein, including towards members of the Labour Party).

The Trades Council is very far from being a ‘front’ for anything but trade unions.

Note: E-Mail correspondence removed at addressee’s request.

Andy Newman, Witchfinder General: Does He Speak for the GMB?

Andy Newman Prepares for Work.

Socialist Unity may have bitten often more than it chew.

It has indulged in what many people consider to be red-baiting of AWL member Janine Booth. She  is now London Transport rep on the RMT’s national executive. A great fault in Andy Newman’s eyes.

Andy Newman remarks that given that the,

AWL is deeply hostile to the politics of Bob Crow, then it is hard to see how productive relations between lay members and full-time officials can be maintained, when Janine is committed to writing leaflets that undermine officials who the AWL describe as bureaucrats, and by implication break confidences (telling you what the “bureaucrat” won’t).

In other words Newman insinuates that Janine Booth will break RMT rules regarding the confidential nature of union business. This is an extremely serious charge.

He goes into make this claim,

The AWL says that their aim in RMT is to “prioritise recruiting new AWL members”. Significantly this is regarded as more important than strengthening the union. To this aim in May 2011 they set up a Tube workers’ AWL branch that caucuses around introducing their controversial politics into RMT branches.

“We have prioritised political discussion in the branch, increasing our confidence to sell the paper to more and more people. Together, we discussed, wrote and moved an amendment on Libya to last month’s regional meeting. Although we lost the vote, we impressed some people by articulating clear, distinctive and thought-out views” [AWL expands on London Underground, http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/04/awl-expands-london-underground  ]

Most unions in Britain have smaller and larger alliances of left, centre, or right-wing activists who stand for election. The AWL takes part in some, and, apparently in this case, organises its members who work on the Tube around their own body.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

It is no secret.

Newman was able to find the AWL statements even from darkest Wiltshire.

But wait, London Underground workers have faced a long (very long – going back to the 1980s) campaign against them. Led by the Evening Standard.

Some of the flavour of this attack – which can be called a witch-hunt – is given last year in the same paper (Here).

The three men orchestrating the RMT union’s two weeks of strike action from behind the scenes can be named today.

Steve Hedley, Brian Munro and Pat Sikorski each have a long history of battling Tube managers and leading militant campaigns.

While RMT general secretary Bob Crow is the union’s public face, he is said to be backed by an even further-Left clique of activists.

Socialist Unity seems to think that they should make their own attack on a “far-left clique of activists”.

For a GMB Branch Secretary (Wiltshire and Swindon) - Andy Newman -  to red-bait Janine Booth in her capacity as a RMT official is a very serious breach of normal  union protocol.

Put simply, officials, including lay-officials, do not publicly attack other unions, including activists in other unions.

How does this work for the GMB?

The GMB is run democratically from the centre.

To illustrate how this happens one of its principles (from the GMB Rule Book)  is that “Members or branches must not issue any addresses or circulars without getting approval from the regional council, regional committee or Central Executive Council. Also, members must not make our business known to  unauthorised organisations, unofficial journals or the print media without getting approval. “

Is this latest attack on members of other unions known to the GMB?

We doubt it, as we have great respect for the union.

We wonder how Newman squares his Web activities with his duties to his own union.

Scientologists Convicted for Swindling in France.

Nothing illustrates the different public stand towards religion in America, Britain and France, than the Paris Court which has just prosecuted the French wing of  Scientology for ‘swindling’ (escroquerie).

This is the first Headline in Libération this morning.

L’Eglise de scientologie française condamnée à 600 000 euros d’amende

Les deux principales structures françaises de l’organisme sont condamnées pour «escroquerie en bande organisée

The Church of Scientology ordered to pay a 600,000 Euro fine.

The two main scientology structures in France were condemned as a “band of organised swindlers”.

Here.

AFP carries a full report in English on this decision (on appeal) here.

This centred on this,

The case began with a legal complaint by a young woman who said she took out loans and spent the equivalent of euro21,000 ($28,000) on books, courses and “purification packages” after being recruited in 1998. When she sought reimbursement and to leave the group, its leadership refused to allow either. She was among three eventual plaintiffs.

Its conclusion is interesting,

While Scientology is recognized as a religion in the U.S., Sweden and Spain, it is not considered one under French law.

Founded in 1954 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the church teaches that technology can expand the mind and help solve problems. It claims 10 million members around the world, including celebrity devotees Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Belgium, Germany and other European countries have been criticized by the U.S. State Department for labeling Scientology as a cult or sect and enacting laws to restrict its operations.

We are surprised that, following the example of Greenfields School - a UK  Scientology day and boarding school – they haven’t thought of setting up a ‘free school’ or ‘academy’.

They would get financed directly by the state.

After all every other  money grasping business, crank, religious nutter, and bee-in-the-bonnet has taken a long hard look at this particular scam.

As this band of cultists have found in Suffolk  with their Maharishi Free School - here.

Vanessa Redgrave and the Red Sex Slaves: A Marxist Analysis, er..

Leftist Trainspotters of the world are fascinated by this story,

Vanessa Redgrave and the red sex slaves: How her bid to start Marxist revolution plunged her into bizarre scandal

By Tim Adler (from his The House of Redgrave.)
 

Aside from its radical politics, part of the appeal of the WRP for the Redgraves was its leader, Gerry Healy, who became a kind of father figure.

Like all leaders of cults, he maintained his personal domination by isolating members from their families and the outside world. Despite his contempt for the female sex, he gave Vanessa carte blanche to pursue her career, while Corin was swamped with Party work. Brendan Martin, a WRP member, said that Healy also extended to her ‘the privilege of having a lover who was not in the Party’….

….

Nothing, it seemed, could rock Vanessa’s steely allegiance to the WRP. So everyone wondered which way she’d jump when it was  suddenly split apart by a huge sex scandal in 1985.  

At the age of 73, the squat and unattractive Gerry Healy had been accused of ‘gross sexual misconduct’ and expelled by the Party he’d founded. It turned out that he’d had sex with at least 26 comrades, and — in the words of the West Croydon branch — had ‘turned women into his sexual slaves’. As trades unionist Roy Lockett revealed: ‘He told the girls it was their revolutionary duty.’

It also transpired that he’d slept with the daughter of two of his closest friends and then beaten her up, leaving her almost crippled.

Vanessa did what she always did: she held a Press conference. ‘These allegations are all lies and the women who are supposed to have made them are all liars,’ she raged. ‘I don’t care whether it’s 26, 36 or 236 — they’re all liars.’

Corin insisted what Healy did in his spare time was his business, adding that he was ‘neither for,  nor against, rape’ but ‘for the  social revolution’.

Afterwards, Michael Banda, the newly-elected leader of the WRP, blasted the Redgraves for defending ‘the corrupt sexual practices of a “leader” who thinks nothing of abusing his political authority to degrade women and girl comrades’.

Proceedings then descended into farce. The Redgrave faction tried to expel Banda. And Banda expelled the Redgraves.

Blaming MI5 propaganda for  Healy’s downfall, Vanessa and Corin left the WRP and named their breakaway faction ‘The Marxist Party’.

So now there were two parties, each with its own newspaper and each fighting for control of the party’s  £1.5 million war chest — much of it donated by Libya, Iraq and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Banda described Vanessa’s new Party as a ‘bogus WRP, bereft of all credibility, detested and reviled by the vast majority of members’.

…..(Fast-forward to the present)…

She did, however, have a string of new causes: among them, opposition to the Iraq war, defending human rights in Chechnya and demanding the closure of Guantanamo Bay. For once, however, her views have been in tune with a substantial section of the middle classes.

Many leftists find it hard to understand why Vanessa Redgrave has been allowed to pontificate in the mainstream media – as she does – about any issue to do with human rights at all.

More from the Daily Mail, the leftist’s friend,  Here.

Bob Pitt gave a detailed and important account of the WRP’s history in full some time ago – here. 

It remains worth reading.

On the facts related above Pit says,

The final nail in Healy’s political coffin was the eruption of a sexual scandal centring on his corrupt relations with women comrades.