Russell Brand’s Newsnight interview which propelled the current smashing up of lives by the Tory mindset into the mainstream discourse made me wonder what the left groups have been doing to help matters. Because they’ve been awfully quiet. The Tories have been marauding through the nation (although it seems to be a global phenomenon at the moment) largely unchallenged while the occasional set-piece demo and the odd flurry from our leaders is supposed to satisfy us.
I’m reposting my article (updated here) on what I saw going wrong when I was in the SWP and how chickens have come home to roost. It’s only one analysis of a small and, some say, a significant section of the left that I saw close up but I hope it gives an insight into a general pattern.
More SWP rape crisis accusations: “a dangerous environment to be in”
Originally posted Saturday, 9 March 2013
THIS VERSION UPDATED Nov 2013
When you treat human beings as disposable objects in the name of la causa, when appropriation of activists’ labour and good will is the norm, when exploitation of your own side goes unchallenged, sexual abuse is one probable outcome.
The rape allegations that sent the SWP into freefall and a near fatal crisis are a manifestation of a deeper problem in the organisation. The alleged sex abuse seems to have been of a different order to that of the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s and 80s: Gerry Healy regularly raped women activists and the WRP’s internal regime was straightforwardly violent. I was a member of the SWP between 1996 and 2001, and running the press operation for Globalise Resistance (Gr), Socialist Alliance (SA), Stop The War Coalition (STWC) and Media Workers Against the War (MWAW) until 2003. If anything, I found the leading men in the SWP curiously sexless and not half as attractive as the women, and can count the episodes of sex pesting I heard about on the fingers of one hand (without the thumb).
There was the guy who we jokingly named the Lothario of the Left, who seemed all talk and no trousers (he wished!) and who I thought posed no real threat beyond being a bit of a pain in the butt (he wished!). The more serious rumours concerned one senior member of the central committee (now dead) who was said to get so predatory when he was drunk that his close comrades had to keep him away from young women.
However, in 2012, the case of a young SWP woman comrade who accused a senior party member of rape — said to have occurred when she was 17 and he 46 — generated widespread horror when the arrogant, self-serving way they dealt with this case (plus at least one other involving the same party leader) demonstrated how distant from socialist principles they were. Having read the kangaroo court transcript (Jan 2013) and the cryptic comments at SU and seen SWP males up close, I suspect that two odd-looking men (politics being showbiz for ugly people) were so repressed that, when they were in proximity to female activists, the power of their party status went to their heads.
This has its roots not only in the larger society but in the culture of the organisation. It’s all very well the SWP flaming their critics, but this has been building for years. They continue to stick their fingers in their ears when they should have been addressing the objectification of their own members.
I can empathise totally with Comrade W, a woman who has struggled to get a fair hearing, sympathy and respect from her comrades, not to mention an overhaul of dodgy practises, over two years or more and then in desperation went for broke and reported it to the party’s internal disputes committee. Subsequent events are a clear marker of how far they have degenerated without even knowing it.
The cases of sexual abuse now surfacing are a symptom of a deeper problem inside the left. Whether it’s ripping off their activists for wages, thieving their intellectual efforts and claiming credit for their successes, ignoring patterns of abuse has emboldened the abusers and led to a diminishing regard for their members until the logical conclusion of that trajectory — where even someone’s body is no longer their own — is reached. And here we are at that particular terminus.
As one former SWP member says in today’s Guardian report on the matter:
She added that she was coming forward two years later because she believes the SWP is a dangerous environment for women: “I want people to know it’s a systemic thing. They’ve done this a few times, covered things up in the interests of the party and it’s a dangerous environment to be in.”
One long violation and shakedown.
In my own case, working full-time for no pay on the SWP’s press over several years while being subjected to their own form of obedience training left me heavily in debt and marvelling at my own stupidity.
When I joined in 1996, the SWP had no active press office yet complained bitterly that the bourgeois press always ignored them. “Did you issue press releases for your events?”, I asked. No they didn’t, evidently expecting the press to pluck their activities from the ether and report them. Ah, I can help here, I thought. And so began my complicity in my own exploitation for the next few years.
Paul Foot may have called me “the best press officer in the country” but that hasn’t stopped me being Stalinised by the left.
In my bid to help out and make a difference, I established and ran the press for their Globalise Resistance, Socialist Alliance (SA) and Stop the War Coalition (STWC) campaigns (I should have been working on my own writing), but however many hours I worked all unpaid, it was never enough for them. You can be behind the computer from 8am to gone midnight on their behalf when everyone else is earning a living, but if the district organiser demands you attend a paper sale at 6am you must do it — even if only she and one other turn up and no-one else in the whole of West London does — and you only sell one paper. There’s no sense to it except as obedience-training.
If the central committee head honcho tells you, f’rinstance, to use the SWP and Socialist Alliance e-lists to character-assassinate SA comrades, friends and sympathisers Paul Mason and Dave Osler (and, later, screw over RMT’s Greg Tucker) out of sheer bloodymindedness when they’ve done an excellent job — or precisely BECAUSE they’d done an excellent job — to refuse to obey their authorit-eye, as I did, is to invite the SWP’s collective wrath.
Or as one prominent SWP woman I appealed to around the time of the SA demise told me, “You should have done what he said. He’s on the CC and what the CC says, goes.” Luckily, I never checked in my brain along with my conscience at the door.
The head honcho I refer to here had offered me patronage when I’d mistakenly assumed his encouragement was appreciation of new blood. If only I’d realised before the sun went down that it was new blood in the way Transylvanian children of the night appreciate new blood, I’d have ridden the first coach outta town. My aim had been to bring any skills I might have into the organisation and leave it in a better shape than I found it — those skills chiefly being the ones I’d learned from the talented arts publicists who’d gained me a stack of press for my performance work. As a result the media were beginning to take notice and a strange glint was appearing in the comrades’ eyes.
I think I may even have done some good. When firefighter and SA executive member Steve Godward stood as candidate for the Socialist Alliance in Birmingham Erdington in the 2001 general election, he was targeted by the far right including one particularly infamous figure. They harassed Godward and his election group at their campaign stall and made it clear that they knew where he lived. Shockingly, instead of our party mounting a concerted campaign to support and protect him in solidarity, he was hung out to dry by head honcho, who dismissed him as “not representing anyone”. Appalled by this betrayal and abandonment of one of our own the moment he was under attack, I managed, as SA press officer, to get a small mention of the far right threat in the Mirror, as well as writing and issuing press releases for him when his own FBU bureaucracy cut up rough.
Senior SWP and SWTC members knew about this and other episodes because I made a point of making sure they were aware what was happening in our name. However, this vanguard of the class clammed up and protected the machine as they would do time and time again. Such as when I saw the membership print-outs in late 1998 and blew the whistle on numbers falling far below the ten thousand claimed at the time by the national secretary. They wouldn’t correct the multiple duplicated inclusions on the lists or remove people who’d been pleading to be taken off (I offered to do this) which would have brought it down to a more realistic number well below two thousand. It was quite eerie how everyone I told looked uncomfortable and changed the subject even though we were all aware of the chief commandment regularly delivered by Tony Cliff: never lie to the class.
With a touching faith that the CC would correct what I initially assumed was an innocent mistake on their part (they never did, although they did stop claiming ten thousand), I continued to promote our politics. I arranged media interviews for SA and STWC spokespersons, always declining invitations from producers to speak myself once I’d briefed them, as I didn’t want to build a media profile for myself out of my political activity (as it turned out others were effectively doing) — I believed that was what my art was for. The one time I spoke in the media about the SA was when I was invited by BBC Radio 5 Live to appear on Nicky Campbell’s programme in my capacity as writer and performer, which I turned into an opportunity to talk about why I felt the SA was necessary.
I was pleased to be asked to write for the International Socialism Journal which head honcho edited (pieces on Sergei Eisenstein and George Orwell). I was glad that the Socialist Review magazine — edited by one of his girlfriends — could use my cultural reviews. I was happy to help out proof-reading in the printshop (for this I received £20 per day once in a blue moon). And being trolley-dolly looking after the outside speakers at their annual Marxism events was fun, in parts.
However, head honcho’s sudden announcement that I was now on the Socialist Review editorial board was an unpaid duty too many (the others were all full-timers on the party payroll or had jobs). I was supposed to acquiesce to this command because of the star-fuckery honour of attending meetings at Paul Foot’s house. As magnificent as Paul was (I did his national press when he stood for the SA) it was yet one more time-killer and space-filler. On top of this, I was told I was to be the party’s press officer — with no consultation with me — when all I wanted to do was train up members to engage with the media (which they refused to allow). You can politely decline all you want but this sort of disobedience drives them several degrees off Sanity Central.
I’d tried to be a principled comrade, helping other members of the left. To name but three examples: doing the PR that broke SWP’s China Miéville into the public eye for free when he sought me out, complaining that his publisher wasn’t making him famous and that the SWP and Bookmarks were ignoring his brilliance — also lobbying for him inside the party until they started to feature him in activities; free publicity for SA chair Liz Davies’ book Through the Looking Glass (Verso); and in 1999 paying one skint SWP aristocracy member a fiver an hour we couldn’t afford for 4 hours cleaning per week (her idea and a fiver more per hour than I was getting for my labour for her party), and nearly taking out a £600 overdraft for her rent arrears before we realised her SWP parents (with their well-paid full-time jobs) were a lot better off than we were. Quite often I’d feed her a hot meal and we’d talk politics during allotted work hours, her correcting me and explaining why I was petit bourgeois because I was an art worker and we were all atomised. (Art workers take note that the SWP regard you as not of “the Class”.) Others were telling me I was petit bourgeois because I was Chinese and we all work in catering — not racist, then.
But no good turn goes unpunished and the blowback from these instances was typical of the irrational spite and fury permeating much of the left. All that talk of “comradeship” and yet I realised no-one ever had my back. Maybe it was something I’d done, something I said? But when I asked if I’d done something wrong either politically or personally to deserve the hostility I was getting from leading cadre, head honcho merely muttered that I was “exemplary”. He expected me to continue working in this environment. When I told him it felt like a rape, all he had to say was that I wasn’t allowed to use the word “like that”. I felt compelled to explain that I knew what rape felt like. And he still wouldn’t tackle the bullying.
You take someone who’s marginalised in society, marginalise them some more and then call it socialism.
Capitalism robs us of our humanity. The promise of socialism is that it’s supposed to liberate you from capitalism’s requirement for you to be a depersonalised cog in the machine serving Mammon, but the left’s mindset has ossified to the extent that they can’t see the contradiction in turning lively recruits with ideals into unthinking cogs in their own apparatus, whose only value is to serve the leadership. The party’s texts become holy writ and wholly wrong.
It’s like all the water has been drained out, leaving us with a parched desert landscape.
Behind the Potemkin-village presentations of cultural expression at their various events, the pressure to conform is astonishing. Not only to follow orders unquestioningly, but to stay in line and not stand out. The nail that sticks up has to be hammered down. I wondered why they put nearly a year and a half into recruiting a sparky half-Chinese woman from Hackney if they didn’t like what they saw.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, and so on. Instead of riding the wave of my fledgling career as a writer and performer, I’d jumped off it in order to service, not the revolution, but some fairly unpleasant middle-management types who wouldn’t have been looked at twice had they not climbed the greasy pole of the SWP.
I’d decided to rent out my flat for a year and move in with my boyfriend in order to write my book, Coolie, about the strike by several thousand Chinese workers on the American trans-continental railroad in the 1860s. Once fees and expenses were paid, that would allow me to live frugally. Yet here I was in 2001, four years later with nothing written because every minute of time and every inch of psychic space now belonged to The Party, going deeper and deeper into debt for them.
Mike Marqusee stated that, for the SA, I’d done single-handedly the equivalent of the Countryside Alliance’s 6 full-time paid press officers and their support with “flair and imagination”.
The Weekly Workercalled my unprecedented press successes “uncanny”.
John Rees described my work as being akin to turning a tanker around mid-ocean and like mining for diamonds.
None of that counts when they break out their airbrushes.
The STWC claim in their literature that they’d sprung fully formed from the ether in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001. But the SWP had actually joined what became, through various changes of name, the Stop The War Coalition (STWC) some time after others (including CND) had set up an anti-intervention coalition against the first Gulf war in 1990/1. Despite Paul Foot and the SWP trying to revive it for the Kosovo conflict in 1999, Stop The War, as it had become by the late 1990s, had never made much of an impact and was clearly moribund by 2001. The initial protests following the 9/11 attacks were organised as a three-way partnership between CND, the Muslim Association of Britain and the now SWP-led STWC.
Everyone dreaded the inevitable attack on Iraq by the US and its allies, which would probably include Britain. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, it was all hands on deck. The SWP began organising meetings and demos. I set out to wear down UK media resistance to the anti-war argument at national level by assorted means, with Marqusee writing the text of most of the press releases. As the SWP refused to even try working with the bourgeois press, largely confining themselves to coordinating demonstrations, Mike and I had to forge ahead on our own. Both in the regions and in London, a handful of left activists who engaged with local media would eventually emerge organically, but at the national level, the STW/SWP leaders refused my request to recruit press officers to help, or for me to train some. However, by having one person on the front line on the phone and email, making sure that the media knew the STWC arguments and activities throughout, we managed to wrest the anti-war brand from the CND in favour of STWC. Otherwise, these would have been just more demos, organised by the usual suspects and ignored by the press.
It was a slow process. I eventually got Richard Sambrook, Head of BBC News, on the back foot concerning severe under-reporting of numbers at a series of our anti-war demonstrations. There had been lots of grief on the left about this, with some good commentary from John Pilger, but no-one had battled the issue on the ground. My repeated complaints to Sambrook (with and without big STWC names on my communications) were brushed off until, by appealing directly to BBC Director General Greg Dyke, I managed to get a defensive response from him. This advantage was then wasted when none of our STWC leaders (mostly SWP and now Counterfire) and figureheads responded to my communications concerning this development, discussed strategy with me, advised me or instructed me on how we should take this further, let alone took it further themselves.
Now, you can write as many long screeds as you like but without someone yelling at the media to pay attention, you may as well send it up the chimney. Not that you’d know that from the sources who are now claiming press credit in the histories while giving me a Stalinesque airbrushing-out — naughty!
To have done all that work when no-one wanted to know and then watch Certain Parties fall over themselves to lay claim to it once something was up for grabs is not an edifying sight. No sirree, not by a long chalk. As an exercise in capitalist expropriation, this class (and gender and race) act on the part of the comrades is a wonder to behold.
The personal is political even on Planet SWP
Surely, Anna, I hear you say, it was worth it for the greater good what you done? Well, no, sadly. Head honcho took an axe to the Socialist Alliance to get into bed with the Birmingham mosque and then Respect. Then he did … er … more stupid things in Respect and, several years after I’d pointed out some questionable behaviour and been stuffed for it, he and his mates had to leave the SWP to form Crossfire or Counterfire, whatever the splinter’s called. But I get ahead of myself. And the class should never be premature … for then down comes the Big Monty Python Foot.
Even the massive anti-Iraq war demo ten years ago in February 2003 wasn’t immune. What a backstabbing palaver that turned out to be. Head honcho’s SWP side running the STWC were alarmed by the magnitude of the anger over the coming war and during one critical period instructed their members in the SWP via Party Notes not to build the demo, leaving it to the Socialist Alliance to mobilise (with the notable help of some/a few/several honourable SWP members in the provinces who effectively blew a big raspberry and carried on regardless).
Then Birmingham, the biggest and strongest STWC branch, was purged. The hippies who put together the amazing Peace Not War CD as a fund-raiser and cultural response to the impending war were screwed over. When a Jewish socialist group requested platform time to speak against the war, they were refused on the grounds that their presence would alienate Muslims. Mike Marqusee, who’d made their case, protested and was told by STWC convenor and SWP CC member Lyndsey German that “you people” were “too sensitive.” (It was German who provided the SWP with their Clause 4 moment by dismissing gay rights as “shibboleths”, and who, according to Ian Bone, recently described me in a most unsocialist manner as a chippy Chinese actress with a grudge against slave labour — one wonders with horror if chippy black actress would have been acceptable.) I was banned from doing the press on the day but went ahead and worked from home anyway, getting Bianca Jagger and Americans Against the War followed on the march by ITN, doing what I’d been doing all along … Oy veh, it got FUGLY.
That huge demo was built on the spine of the SA and yet the SA chair was denied a place on the platform while Lib Dem Charles Kennedy was welcomed with open arms … and then promptly supported “our boys” once action started. And where’s it all gone, anyway? If the SWP, Counterfire and STWC claim 1 to 2 million were on the march, then they have to give a good account of where they’ve all gone, ’cause it’s not into the left movement.
All that energy and good will from the biggest demonstration in modern British history should surely have led to action in the tradition of the Greenham Common cruise missile protests or the Faslane sit-ins. Independently, two train drivers stopped an ammo train and students held a protest, but the STWC’s leading SWP Rees/German axis declared direct action and civil disobedience to be elitist. Nothing further bar the usual march came from STW. They just sat on it while many thousands of innocents died, Iraq’s infrastructure was destroyed and JP Morgan led the syphoning off of the nation’s assets.
Even worse, we now know that the SWP leadership of the STWC took the decision not to mobilise our forces on the most important date — the parliamentary vote on whether to go to war. This happened on 18th March 2003, only weeks after the biggest protest in British history and on the day when there was a real chance we could have stopped the war. Labour MPs had promised to vote against the war but, without a massive protest outside, they were easily whipped into toeing the Blairite line. Let’s ask again: who gained?
What a waste. What a monumental dereliction of socialist duty. If only they’d put more energy into achieving our goal instead of acquiring personal power, status and all the capitalist baubles we’re supposed to reject, we might not have stopped the war but we’d have made it a harder ride for pro-war forces and come out of this with a strengthened left.
Caveat comrade: love-bombing SWP stylee
In the eighteen months of love-bombing it took to recruit me, I received numerous assurances of SWP superiority when it came to human relations. Tony Cliff’s partner, a dear sweet but fiery old lady called Chanie Rosenberg, would do her turn on the platform at conferences, making it clear how, perhaps not every sperm, but every member was sacred. “Like gold dust.”
More iron pyrites than gold, I’m afraid.
How many SWP staff are employed at below Living Wage rates and with no workplace trade union representation?
When you join a left group, you are having to trust complete strangers who are saying the right things, but of whose behaviour you have no experience. This is where Paul Foot came in. With this icon in its leading ranks, what could possibly go wrong? I signed up.
The ensuing episodes providing a stark warning were glossed over by one genuinely charming and idealistic full-timer as local abberations in a dysfunctional branch. She implored me to have my “eyes on the bigger picture” and the “bigger prize” which, as any socialist knows, is the revolutionary transformation of society into something much better.
So when on an east London Saturday paper sale (one of my first) one woman member stood laughing while a big white bloke had his fist in my face for 20 minutes, yelling at me that the police surveillance of the Stephen Lawrence suspects in their home was a breach of their civil rights, I was only stopped from walking out of the party when the full-timer assured me that the “Centre” (SWP HQ) were fully aware that they were “wankers”.
Caveat comrade; honeytraps and wishful thinking abound in this distinctly amaterialist, ahistorical milieu.
There’s a type of person I occasionally run into — mostly male, usually white, middle-class, clever rather than intelligent, a bit limited and emotionally clenched — who seeks to dominate and control someone like me. Complete strangers try to define me based on prejudice, and put me in my place (wherever that’s supposed to be) based on fear. The phrase that comes up again and again when they struggle to pin a tangible crime on me is that I’m a “loose cannon” (rather than a line-toeing hack, I’m pleased to note). An articulate woman of colour from a working-class background, I suspect I represent something wild out of their id, a negative anima who must be ground down, made to capitulate and kow-tow, my very existence representing something castrating to them at the centre of their own Heart of Darkness.
Of course, this is nothing to do with who I am: just someone happily trying to survive and maybe thrive as they help out. However, being somewhat bright, able to work strategically with a sense of fun and still get results, I’m regarded as a threat to be crushed rather than embraced as a comrade the way stronger, more secure males are apt to do with me. So by the time I welcomed a senior SWP member into my tiny workspace under the eaves of our Kilburn flat and he looked round at my third-hand computer and shelves of books and demanded, “How come you’ve got all this?”, I was able to sigh in the knowledge that this man, with his house and private parking in Cricklewood, was only projecting his own neuroses and anxieties onto me in a classic case of “othering”. Despite reading all the set political tomes about the way the world out there functions, this tribune of the people had zero knowledge of his own inner workings.
Oh ye of narrow bandwidth.
Unfortunately, the left is filled with such middle-class white men and women who reject self-understanding as an evil bourgeois indulgence, and so have no armoury when bits of their inner selves rear up and bite them on the bum. If only I’d actually committed some heinous crime to justify their fury, they’d be off the leash and enjoying the frisson of power the finger-wagging Red Guard (of which they are not too distant cousins) once wielded over their ideological enemies: their teachers, their parents, in some cases their nannies, always the outsider, and anyone who has abilities above their station. The poor startled lambs are vaguely aware that I’m “strange” (as they’ve called me) but can’t compute how I got off the leftie conveyor belt in this configuration. Non-conformity is not a thing to be enjoyed and savoured — it must be crushed. A working-class minority woman’s struggle to maintain her humanity and grow is of no interest — it is “bourgeois individualistic” and must be destroyed. Where in their rigid hierarchy is someone like me supposed to fit? A permanent two-minute-hate mode kicks in the moment something unknown and “strange” heaves into view, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s hardwired binary, off-on, ones and zeroes. Their psychic survival depends on it.
And so it came to pass that head honcho asked me to do work at East End Offset (their business centre and party HQ near Bow), write for their publications and do the meeting and greeting for the external speakers at the annual Marxism event.
I looked from pig to man and then man to pig and then back again and already it was impossible to tell who’d look better in a bacon sandwich. Then I looked a bit harder and realised that the senior women had been part of what I once rudely called the “fuck-circuit”: two power couples at the top; a complicated nexus of, ahem, “relationships” over the years; senior Central Committee member Lindsey German calling me into a room at SWP HQ (said to be swept for bugs) to grill me on my new boyfriend. They are OK if you come already attached to a partner but woe betide you if you change partners and the lucky fella’s not from the SWP pool. As the sympathetic partner of a senior member told me regarding my treatment, “It’s because you’re not available.” Mostly, it’s less about sexual coercion and more about idiotic ego.
My new boyfriend was author and music journalist Charles Shaar Murray who I’d known since my teens. He was a handsome dude in his sharply razored goatee and black leather, who stood out among the soberly-dressed comrades whenever I managed to drag him to our events. Male comrades of a certain age were friendly and welcoming as they’d grown up reading the NME for whom he used to write, and his byline pic was well known in the SWP printshop where his monthy column in MacUser magazine was popular.
Not long after Lindsey questioned me about him, something strange happened. Her boyfriend — head honcho — who had been a dull, studious clean-shaven geek given to pale polyester slacks and shirts, grew a sharply-razored goatee and took to wearing black leather.
This was beyond creepy and everyone ignored it. Except for my sweetie who swiftly went clean-shaven.
Once head honcho finally got himself a new special friend, she waltzed over at an SA conference in Birmingham where I’d just reported on the steady progress I’d been making in the press — including getting George Monbiot’s permission for us to republish his Media Guide for Activists (featuring my addendum with contacts) — and told me in a most unsisterly fashion that she was now doing my job, so there! Which would have been lovely had she done the work. She didn’t. However, the Marxist division of labour was interesting with head honcho handing to her like a love token the status I’d built up from sheer hard unpaid slog over the years, and me evidently designated the Boxer character in this particular Animal Farm scenario, continuing to build press relations round the clock within the movement.
This, too, was ignored.
The dead hand of the bureaucrats had stifled the Socialist Alliance, a political initiative described by John O’Farrell in the Guardian as “fresh and exciting”, with nary an objection from the comrades. Respect was torpedoed by the same parties and nearly sunk along with Organising for Fighting Unions (OFFU). The Stop The War Coalition is a stagnant perch with nothing left to offer bar the occasional meeting. It set up a pattern of destruction during a crucial period when the power elite went on the attack.
The left in its current line-up has ceased to be a force for liberation and has become another ruling-class-in-waiting led by people who want power over other human beings with all their privileges and perks intact.
However, they shouldn’t be surprised when when genuine opponents of oppression challenge the lip-service. The SWP and its splinters are a smorgasbord for males — whether exploiting labour, status or sex — facilitated by senior women who insist that men do NOT gain from female oppression, and the hacks who turned on a sixpence to protect the machine.
In the Stanley Milgram experiement that is the left, I’m one of the people who refused to press the electrocution button, and that’s what some of them will never forgive me for.
We need a strong left that is able to counter the coalition’s attacks on the working and middle classes that are looking like something out of the Enclosures movement. However, like anyone else who ever looked at the disgusting state of the world and wanted to do something about it, I never signed up for SWP abuse and I certainly never signed up for their omerta that they go around imposing on errant former members on pain of The Treatment. It is important that this stuff gets aired for so many reasons. If they can’t, after all this grief, look at themselves honestly, then they deserve everything they’re getting. And the working class is better off without them.
So, sister W, I sympathise and feel your pain. You learned the hard way that there is little solidarity or comradeship in that tiny corner of the left. I wish you the best of luck in rebuilding your confidence and your self-esteem. Your new life starts here.
What are we up against?
One of Comrade W’s friends spoke up for her at the conference:
“The first thing I want to say is that the complainant in this case frequently asked to come to this session, so she could be aware of what’s being said about her, because it is her case after all. She was prepared to speak out so that people could hear about her experiences and learn from what’s happened here, so that it wouldn’t happen again. But she was denied that right by the CC.
She was questioned about why she went for a drink with him, her witnesses were repeatedly asked whether she’d been in a relationship with him, and you know, she was asked about (The chair begins to talk over X to warn about providing details) … she was asked about relationships with other comrades including sexual relationships. All this was irrelevant to the case.
We’ve got a proud tradition in the party of rejecting that line of questioning by the state. This is about consent. To date she hasn’t been told what evidence was presented against her by Comrade Delta and by his witnesses. She felt she was being interrogated and felt they were trying to catch her out in order to make her out to be a liar. She did not accept the line of questioning, saying ‘they think I’m a slut who asked for it’.”“Her treatment afterwards has been worse. She feels completely betrayed. … The disgusting lies and gossip going round about her has been really distressing and disappointing for her to hear, and the way her own witnesses have been treated in Birmingham hasn’t been much better. … Is it right that a young woman has to plan her route to work avoiding paper-sellers, or that she comes away from a meeting crying because people refuse to speak to her? Is it right that her witnesses are questioned about their commitment to the party because they missed a branch meeting?”
It’s what they do.
Anna Chen writes about the state of the party in 2003 in A Bad Case of the Trots.
A Bad Case of the Trots: for the record.
The left’s invisibility bomb. How’s that liberation thing going for you?
SWP breakaway Counterfire group leads People’s Assembly: a public health warning.
The latest insight into how the SWP mindset works (Jan2014)as another CC member resigns. Remember: you never lie to the class.
The SWP opposition supporting the women finally have their say. Makes gruelling reading.
More details of the depravity in the SWP from A Very Public Sociologist.
Soviet Goon Boy on wtf’s wrong with these people?!
I’ve had several SWP goons going for me on Twitter. Here’s the latest. Hilarious.
The Guardian on more sex pest allegations inside the SWP.
Who is saying what about the SWP Crisis.
My Guardian article on Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45: Ethnically cleansing working class history.
My review of Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45.
CRUCIAL READING: How was anti-Iraq war demo energy frittered away? Demobilising the STWC on the most crucial day of the anti-war movement.
Anna’s food blog here:
http://annacheneats.blogspot.com/