Bracknell UNITE Invited Me to Speak on the Labour Party Witchhunt – You Can Guess What Happened Next!

The Chair of Bracknell Labour Party, ex-Cop Roy Bailey Asked  for Advice on whether Labour Party Members are Allowed to Attend the Meeting!!

Roy Bailey - an 'excellent communicator with strong analytical skills' - all of which seem to have deserted him'

At first I thought I must be hallucinating. Surely it couldn't be someone whom Tony Benn had described as “the greatest socialist folk singer of his generation” engaging in a vicious McCarthyite witch-hunt. I thought he had died. But no, it wasn’t that Roy Bailey.

This was a New Labour version who had obtained a doctorate in the quack discipline of ‘criminology’ which is really about control in a capitalist society and as such is pretty worthless, a reservoir of prejudices dressed up in the language of science.

There was a time when people like Bailey believed that criminality was inherited and indeed Max Nordau Deputy President of the World Zionist Organisation was an ardent believer in such nonsense.  He even wrote a book about it, Degeneration.

Nordau was influenced by the work of Italian psychiatrist and founder of criminal anthropology Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), who argued that criminality was inherited. You get a flavour of Nordau’s ideas and the origins of Zionism from what he wrote about Oscar Wilde. Nordau’s bio op on the British Museum site states that

Roy Bailey's modest profile on Linkedin. He is apparently an 'excellent communicator' and also 'a strategic thinker with strong analytical skills' all of which seemed to have deserted him!  

After having attacked the ‘predilection for suffering, disease and crime’ in influences such as Swinburne, Nordau argues that Wilde ‘has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works.’ Denouncing his dress sense as the ‘pathological aberration of a racial instinct’, Nordau adds that ‘what really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed’; ‘it is above all a sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily’. Dismissing Wilde’s poetry as derivative, and focusing instead on his prose essays, Nordau concludes that ‘Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime’.

You can see why Roy Bailey, who is also a devotee of Zionism, is so attracted to the study of criminology and thus passes himself off as an academic and no doubt as an intellectual too. However I digress.

In his Linkedin Profile Bailey describes himself as a ‘Strategic thinker with strong analytical skills’. Unfortunately his skills seemed to have deserted him when an invitation arrived from Bracknell Unite informing him that I was speaking to a meeting on September 2^nd on the Labour Party witchhunt and that Labour Party members were welcome to attend

You can just imagine the reaction in Roy’s mind.  He is a good member of  Progress and the idea that an EXPELLED Labour Party member has the audacity to share his opinions with people, on behalf of an organisation called Labour Against the Witchhunt, was too much for him. This was taking democracy too far.

Almost immediately the cop in Roy came to the fore. Wasn’t I expelled from the Labour Party as an anti-Semite? The fact that I'm Jewish was irrelevant since obviously I was the 'wrong sort of Jew'. One suspects that his first reaction was to reach for a law book and see if there was a law against this kind of thing.

It matters not a jot that my expulsion, like that of so many, was carried out by a kangaroo court headed by the Witchfinder General Maggi Cosins and was because of my views on Zionism. As far as Roy is concerned there are no bad laws and there are no miscarriages of justice or bent and corrupt coppers. What matters is those who got away. 

The fact that war criminals like Tony Blair is still a member of the Labour Party, alongside fellow racists like Tom Watson, whilst socialists are expelled and suspended has probably never bothered Bailey. After all, despite his pretensions to be an academic he is at heart a simple fellow.

The Police mentality is a simple one.  The law is there to be obeyed, not to be challenged or questioned. The idea that the law simply reflects existing property relations and that the police and state are there to preserve the interests of the ruling class is anathema to Roy. 

The fact that hunting with dogs is now illegal but Police spend their time harassing hunt sabs rather than those who evade and break the law on hunting is probably dismissed without a second’s thought by this upstanding ex-cop.

All that mattered to Roy is that subversive thoughts and ideas may be up for discussion and, quite understandably, the cop in him rebelled at such a prospect.  As I said in my letter (below), Roy may have left the police force but they have never left him.

It reflects on the sad state of the Labour Party  today that people like Roy Bailey are officers of their respective Labour Parties and secondly that they feel the need to ask for advice on whether Labour Party members should be allowed to hear from someone who has been expelled.  I guess in his studies on criminology our Roy didn’t come across cases like the Guildford 4 or the Birmingham 6 and if he had done he would have dismissed them with the ‘rotten apple in the barrel’ theory.

We should not be harsh on Roy Bailey. In his own blundering way he simply reflects the mentality of those who are working to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn. In so many ways Roy Bailey, with a police state inside his head, is a good example of Progress and the Labour Right’s intolerance for socialist politics and ideas.

Tony Greenstein

By email to: royjbailey@btinternet.com 

September 24 2019

Dear Mr Bailey,

I was made aware, earlier today, of a post on Terry Pearce’s Facebook page. Terry is Chair of Bracknell Branch of UNITE and they have invited me to speak to them on September 2nd.

Apparently you are seeking advice from the Regional Labour Party as to whether or not Labour Party members are allowed to attend my talk as I have been expelled from the Labour Party. It would seem that you are treating members of Bracknell Labour Party, of which you are I believe Chair, as if they were still at primary school.

It speaks volumes about the state of democracy in the Labour Party if you believe that members need permission to attend a trade union meeting. I realise that any mention of forbidden topics to do with a certain state in the Middle East are considered ‘anti-Semitic’ unless they are part of a re-education programme that goes by the name of ‘training. However I am surprised that even a member of Progress (treat as in Newspeak where War is Peace) should consider that permission is needed to attend a union meeting.

My first thoughts when I heard of your request was that maybe you were auditioning for a bit part in a play about the Inquisition. Torquemada perhaps? But then I realised that I wasn’t treating the matter with the seriousness it clearly deserves.

I understand that you are by your own description a former Senior Police Officer in the Thames Valley Police Force, one of the most backward forces in Britain. You may recall A Complaint of Rape which was shown by the BBC in 1982, a savage interview by 3 officers of a rape victim who effectively became the accused. It achieved, as you are aware, national notoriety and was responsible for a revolution in how rape victims were treated nationally.

However the Labour Party is not a police state. Members are, even under the regime that the supporters of the Israeli State would like to introduce, still free, at least in theory, to attend whatever meetings they may wish to participate in.

Of course you could have attended my talk and if you had disagreements expressed them. This is called freedom of speech, concepts which are clearly quite alien to you.

I understand that your concern is that I have been expelled from the Labour Party when so many racists such as Tom Watson, to say nothing of war criminals like Tony Blair, are still at large. Please allow me to allay your concerns. I stand in a long and honourable tradition.

Sir Stafford Cripps, Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer was expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 as was Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. Ken Livingstone was also expelled before being readmitted and then forced to resign by narrow minded bigots.

I was expelled because I am a Jewish anti-Zionist. Like Whites in South Africa who opposed Apartheid I oppose Zionism. This is termed anti-Semitic by Labour’s racist right-wing just as 30 years ago people like you argued for ‘constructive engagement’ with Apartheid.

I realise that you don’t understand why some of us are not so enamoured with a state that arrests Palestinian (not Jewish) children in the early hours of the morning, blindfolds and beats them before forcing them to confess in a language they don’t even understand.

Israel is a state, not of its own citizens but its Jewish citizens and indeed Jews who are not its citizens. That is what a Jewish state means. It is a state that demolishes the homes of its Arab citizens in order to make way for Jewish settlers. It is a state where Jewish residents of the northern city of Afula demonstrate against the sale of a single house to an Arab. It is a state where there is a separate education system for Jews and Arabs. I realise that this presents no problem to you and your racist supporters in Progress but that is what I will be talking about.

I am sure that if you want to explain why you support a state based on racial supremacy that people will be more than interested to hear your arguments. What people will not understand is why you should want to prevent other people hearing them.

You seem to have a contempt for freedom of speech and democracy. It would appear that although you have left the Police force, it has not left you.

Tony Greenstein