Workers’ Liberty went on the People’s Vote demonstration on 20 October with placards (see below), red flags, banners, stalls, and chant sheets.
Ours was the only organised left-wing presence on the demonstration. The full count is not yet in, but we must have sold about 300 copies of Solidarity on the demonstration, as well as books, pamphlets, etc., and collected contact details from many people who want to keep in touch.
We distributed the “Left Against Brexit” leaflet produced by the Nottingham and Sheffield Left Against Brexit groups.
We distributed chant sheets. We joined the “Left Bloc” organised by “Another Europe is Possible”, and most of the bloc took up our chants. They were the only chants anywhere on the demo to go beyond “we want a people’s vote” and “bollocks to Brexit”, as far as we could tell.
The demonstration numbers are reported as 700,000, and it was certainly huge. The speakers at the end were more on a Lib-Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru wavelength than left-wing: the middle-of-the-road Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was probably the most left-wing.
There was hardly any Labour Party presence as such. We came across many Labour voters and Labour members on the march. Like the majority of Labour supporters and members, according to many polls, they oppose Brexit, and are unhappy with the Labour leaders’ fence-sitting on the issue.
There were very few banners from Labour Parties or union branches, or indeed from any organisations, on the huge march. The marchers were on average a more prosperous, more Lib-Dem-ish crowd than those who join other leftish protest marches, and non-white marchers were a smaller minority than they are in London’s general population; but given the huge overall size of the march, it was also a big turnout of non-white marchers.
Our aim now is to expand and step up the activity of the network of local “Left Against Brexit” groups.
Probably like many people I am somewhat confused by the strange relationship between the SWP and The Morning Star. the Trots and the Tankies. I made one of my occasional forays into my boyhood and young man’s stamping ground of East London this morning and dropping into a shop in Hackney to see a solitary and very lonely copy of The Morning Star lingering amongst the other Red Tops, well the star is red! When I bought it I asked the Turkish guy whose shop it is how many he sold a week to which he replied one and was I buying it for the “old guy”. Further enquiries revealed that for many years an old gentleman had bought the paper but I was in first and not feeling particularly well disposed towards apologists for Stalin I took it.
The lead story by Peter Lazenby is about the recent SWP controlled attempt to recruit on the basis of a united front against the rising populist wave sweeping Europe. The same event is reported on http://www.socialistworker.co.uk with almost the same photo of the hall and the crowd with the same estimate of the number of people, 1400. A rough head count of those there reveals probably half that and I always wonder why such obvious lies are told. At least the Socialist Worker in house photographer Guy Smallman always uses a narrow focus and the caption is then about a section of the hundreds who crowded the meeting. He must be the only professional photographer in the world who doesn’t have a wide angle lens!
The Star article was interesting in that it claimed an incident that isn’t reported anywhere else most interestingly by the SWP. Lazenby claims that there was an attempt to attack the meeting as it was ending by up to twenty ” drunken fascists” who were dealt with by the stewards. Lazenby was very specific when he refered to a ” four hour drinking session in a pub near the conference venue, The Friends Meeting House in Euston Road”. I find this strange both as it’s not reported elsewhere and that telling porkies is usually the preserve of the SWP.
I was also interested to read about Giles Fraser being in Walsall. More please on this if you have it as he is definitely on the downward slope. He started his journalistic career when he was stationed at St Paul’s Cathedral an allowed a bunch of demonstrators about something or other to set up camp in front of the building as if he were a medieval priest giving sanctuary.
This, and his rhetoric, got him moved to a church in South London where he supplemented his C of E salary with writing articles for The Guardian which were so bad , even by Grauniad standards, that all comments were disabled. He was also the beneficiary of Lutfur Rahman, he of the Tower Hamlets Caliphate, largess for writing glowing articles in, yes, The Guardian, about how he was a really nice guy and all the stuff about corruption was lies and smear and of course wascist and Islamophobic. He went a bit too far when he pocketed £2000 from Lutfur for chairing Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission which came to the conclusion that if you were poor in Tower Hamlets then life wasn’t fair. I haven’t seen him The Guardian of late so I suppose he’s got the boot from there as well. I digressed a bit here but I hope it’s been of interest.
Dave Roberts
October 22, 2018 at 2:58 pm
Whenever my opposition to Brexit requires a bit of a boost, I just have to look at the dishonest, illogical, ignorant utter shite written by Brexiteers – and especially the would-be “left” Brexiteers.
Jim Denham
October 22, 2018 at 3:14 pm
[…] By Andrew Coates at Tendance Coatesy: […]
700,000-strong People’s Vote march denounced by regressive “left” – Shiraz Socialist (Second Run)
October 22, 2018 at 3:45 pm
Very true Jim, though the Left Bloc was a real boost as well.
Now there is this:
Andrew Coates
October 22, 2018 at 5:26 pm
Posts are disappearing again Andrew. A long one of mine.
Dave Roberts
October 22, 2018 at 7:05 pm
Michael Mosbacher in the October issue of the (virulently pro-Brexit) ‘Standpoint’ magazine:
“One of the great achievements of the Brexiteers is how thoroughly they have managed to toxify the idea of a second referendum. Vote Leave and its strategists Dominic Cummings and Douglas Carswell actively considered running the Leave campaign with a two-referendum strategy — one on the principle of leaving and one on the final deal — when they thought that this would be a more likely route to victory. It was only abandoned as a plan in early 2016 because of pressure from donors who hated the idea of having to fight the battle twice and the growing notion that the Leave campaign might actually win.
“If the referendum had gone the other way, it would have taken Nigel Farage days, rather than the months it took Remainers, to argue that the result had been a cheat and a second referendum was needed. Indeed, Farage was laying down the groundwork for just such a strategy with the tone of his “concession” speech, blaming Project Fear scaremongering, shortly after the polls closed, when he appeared to think that Remain had won.”
Jim Denham
October 22, 2018 at 7:12 pm
Very true Jim, I directly heard the daily gaggle of xenophobic nutters that sat in the centre of Ipswich, saying that they would never except a Remain result
Andrew Coates
October 23, 2018 at 5:38 pm
Referring to members of the public who just so happen to have a difference of opinion with yourself, especially over a bipartisan political issue such as Brexit, as “nutters”, just makes you look, well, nuts. Projection and all that… “Nutters”, a word that doesn’t even exist in the psychology/ psychiatric lexicon. So obviously coming from someone with absolutely no qualifications/background in psychology/psychiatry whatsoever. Good day to you, Sir!
Dr Jordan Peterson BSc, MA, MD, PhD, PsD
October 23, 2018 at 6:49 pm
they’ve got to be protected, all their rights respected, ’till somebody WE LIKE can be elected! –Tom Lehrer
oiltranslator
October 24, 2018 at 2:18 am
Up yours, Jordan!!
Andrew Coates JSA
October 24, 2018 at 5:22 am
😀
Andrew Coates JSA, SWP
October 24, 2018 at 5:23 am