The BBC has become little more than the mouth piece of the ruling elites.

Don't Ever Pay these Thieves and Liars Your License Fee

 Posted: 08 Jan 2014 05:30 PM PST
This article first appeared on the excellent Outrage Site



The reality is that the BBC has always been a spokesman of the ruling class.  In the 1950's and 1960's it banned the War Game about the reality of nuclear war and its Irish and anti-colonial coverage was equally bad.

Theodor Herzl - didn't care about Dreyfuss and believed that anti-Semitism was good for the Jews

My most recent experience of the BBC is Simon Schama's appalling History of the Jews.  It was nothing of the kind, it was a History of Zionism.  I complained to the BBC and its gone to the BBC Trust, filled with establishment types.  It portrayed the Dreyfuss Affair, a pivotal area in fighting anti-semitism, which Zionism says is impossible though Theodore Herzl's eyes.  But Herzl had nothing to do with the Affair, the only Zionist who did,  Bernard Lazarre, resigned from the Zionist Actions Committee and Herzl didn't even mention  it in his booklet  The Jewish State published nearly two years late in 1896.  In this 4 volume Diaries has mentioned it cursorily

Instead I pointed out that Herzl sought and got, a friendly review of his pamphlet from Edouard Drumont, author of the Eternal Jew, which on its first print run sold a 100,000 copies.  Although Drumont was a dedicated anti-Semite he was also a devout Zionist.  Schama's only response to this was that it came from the 'unsavoury' part of the anti-Zionist movement until I provided chapter and verse for him.  Like most ruling class and especially Zionist historians, they know very little, though even most Zionist historians consider the tale of  Herzl's Zionism starting with the Dreyfuss Affair a myth.  Not so the BBC which stood by this most reactionary of Zionist story tellers.

The BBC has a history of saying nothing when Gaza is under siege, but the moment a rocket is fired they spring into action.  Israeli deaths merit attention, Palestinian lives are cheap.  So it was  till the end days of Apartheid.  During the period up to the early '70s the BBC was happy to broadcasat sporting events from South Africa.

In an article 'BBC admits pandering to Israeli propaganda' byAmena Saleem of The Electronic Intifada (London 14 December 2012)

Amena Saleem cites the Israeli justification for not mentioning Israeli attacks on Gaza, an unarmed enclave, unless it is in the context of Israel's defence:

'In an email sent on 21 November to a member of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and seen by this writer, the BBC Complaints Department explains in some detail how the broadcaster had gone out of its way to lay the blame for the violence of the previous eight days on the Palestinians.

The email, signed off “BBC Complaints,” states: “Since the news of Israeli air strikes in Gaza our coverage has pointed out on numerous occasions that the attacks are in response to recent rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”

It adds: “Our initial online report on 14 November pointed to how the attack on Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari and another Hamas official ‘follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory’ and how ‘the United States said it supported Israel’s right to self-defense, and condemned militant rocket attacks on southern Israel.’”

Seemingly oblivious to or unfazed by the inaccuracy of its own reporting, the message goes on: “On the BBC’s News at Ten that same evening, the BBC’s Gaza and West Bank correspondent Jon Donnison’s report explained that ‘Israel says the strike followed a wave of rocket attacks from inside Gaza,’ before hearing directly from Israeli Army Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich as she explained how ‘I can just elaborate that the target of the operation is to protect Israeli civilians. The same lives of Israelis that have been under constant rocket attack for the past year.’”

In a twist of almost comic absurdity, given eight days of reporting which squarely blamed Hamas for the violence and equated the fear caused by the 12-pound and 90-pound Palestinian rockets with the terror induced by Israel’s 500-pound to 2,000-pound bombs, the email ends with: “We will continue to report on developments from the region in a fair, accurate and impartial way.”

Official line

All BBC journalists stuck to Israel’s official line that the assassination of 14 November, and what followed, was in retaliation to Palestinian rockets — and conveniently omitted from their reports the fact that Israel had been engaged in killing Palestinian children in the days immediately preceding al-Jabari’s execution.

Israel’s 10 November 2012 killing of 18-year-old Ahmad Dardasawi was not deemed newsworthy by the BBC.
(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

 The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote to the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs program Today on 12 November to ask why it had not covered the killing of the five Palestinian teenagers on 8 and 10 November.

The program’s assistant editor, Dominic Groves, wrote back to say: “Even in the space of a three hour program it is not always possible to cover every development in a story — especially one as long running and complex as the one in the Middle East.”

Time was the excuse I was given when the BBC couldn't defend Schama's lies.

And yet the killing of five young boys by Israel isn’t a “development in a story;” it is news in itself. When the Today program can give prominent coverage to a Palestinian rocket attack on a bus in April 2011, which killed a 16-year-old Israeli schoolboy, how can Groves claim the same program has no room to report on the slaughter of five Palestinian boys by the Israeli army? (“Israeli boy Daniel Viflic dies after rocket hits bus,” 18 April 2011).

The Miners' Strikes

Police Mobs at Orgreave

Yet  none of this should be a surprise. At the time of the General Strike it supported  the Government and Lord Reith, its Director-General, refused to broadcast a peaceful message from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In the 1984-5 strike it dealt with Police violence at Orgreave, where all the police cases of 'assault' were thrown out, by the simple method of reversing the video of  Police attacking Miners and Minters defending themselves.  What was broadcast appeared to be the Miners attacking the Police and the Police responding.  The corrupt South  Yorkshire Police that the BBC had said nothing about.

 

Nelson Mandela

Mandela whose death the BBC did much to trivialise

One of the most significant events of 2013 was the memorial for Nelson Mandela, marred by the bogus interpreter, who made random movements while standing alongside those paying tribute.

Whilst BBC covered Mandela's death and the aftermath extensively - as we would hope for one of the great figures of the 20th Century. It also took delight in reporting on fake signer Thamsanqa Jantjie.
The more the BBC spoke about the bogus signer though - at the detriment of other news - the more irritating it became. Not because it was frivolous - we are used to the BBC being self-indulgent and frivolous - but because over recent years the broadcaster has become more and more like Thamsanqa Jantjie.

My view is that the BBC is simply not transmitting an accurate account of reality. Over the space of the year it has ignored significant news and spun events to present something quite different from what those involved witnessed.

Ignoring, muting or giving a distorted representation of news would be a serious accusation for any broadcaster in the UK, as news programmes are obliged to be balanced. For the BBC, however, it is an even more serious matter.

One of the key reasons that the BBC is such a tarnished brand is that it harboured one of the most prolific paedophiles in the world. The tarnishing was exacerbated by its flagship news programme Newsnight spiking an exposé of Savile, who was instead featured in two nauseating tributes during prime time Christmas slots in 2011.

After the Newsnight spike came to light, in 2012, the BBC was on the back foot and it was completely on its arse later that year after Newsnight broadcasted an 'investigative journalism' piece accusing an unnamed Tory of abusing children. Jigsaw identification, made easy by Twitter, revealed the figure to be Lord McAlpine, who turned out to be the wrong man but did prove to be promiscuously litigious.

Many of us who grew up with Newsnight being as vibrant as The Day Today - which was inspired by Paxman's abrasive approach - have been concerned about how timid the programme has become since the Savile spike and the McAlpine McScrewup. I would go so far as to compare it to a whining, castrated dog licking its groin and rather more interested in its wounds than the world around it.

Some have linked BBC news' ongoing timidity to Tory grandee Chris Patten being helicoptered in as chair of the BBC Trust. Such is its apparent reluctance to question domestic political decisions that it does sometimes seem that the broadcaster has become a public-funded PR agency for a failing government.

This view was reinforced in 2013 when Tory Party chairman Grant Shapps / Michael Green / Sebastian Fox suggested that the BBC would lose income if it doesn't free itself from bias. The most bizarre thing about that statement was not that Grant Shapps has at least three identities but the suggestion that the BBC has a left wing bias. If the BBC is currently left wing my name is Corinne Stockheath.

Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis both characterised BBC journalists as "pinkos" but they can rest assured that this is far from the case these days. If it were still the case then student protests, in which young people were beaten by the police, might have been broadcasted rather than eventually posted online with the focus shifted to a wheelie bin fire.

A diligent broadcaster would have also put such protests in context by examining how student dissent is being stamped down and politically aware students are being spied on by the police. The BBC did not.

If the BBC is "pinko" or even neutral we might have expected it to broadcast a confrontational interview with Grant Shapps about the allegation that fraud may have been committed within one of his business ventures. Channel 4 News revealed that although the police have dropped an investigation into past business affairs of Shapps, lawyers who advised the police say some of his company's activities may have amounted to "an offence of fraud".

If the BBC was a neutral broadcaster working on behalf of the public that funds it - let alone "pinko," we might have expected it to broadcast the mass protest about hospital cuts and the sell-off of the NHS, brokered by a political party that hasn't won an election for 22 years. BBC journalists were at the Tory Party Conference, outside which the demonstration took place, but throughout the day neglected the 50,000 marchers.

Throughout 2013 we have had very little debate on BBC news programmes about the relentless asset stripping of the NHS and a much greater focus on individual examples of poor practice. The BBC's coverage of the NHS in 2013 reminded me of a spoilt child trying to get its more virtuous sibling into trouble to get itself out of trouble. Helping to undermine the NHS in the hope of saving its own skin, frankly, is sickening and will not be forgotten by the public.

Police mobs at Orgreave  - the BBC hid behind the Police

The BBC will not redeem itself in the eyes of the public by towing the party line on policies the government wants to push and citizens oppose. The only way the BBC can redeem itself for Savile and the McAlpine fiasco is to produce accurate, balanced news for those people who pay them. That is not the Tory Party. It is not Grant Shapps. It is not Sebastian Fox. It is the British public. To ignore and distort news to appease a government is as outrageous as the BBC hiding news about Savile to protect itself.

By Will Black, who writes for the Huffington Post and has a background in anthropology and mental health care

Mr Gradgrind and Scrooge Return with a Vengeance

Blaming the poor for poverty

Do you remember Ian Duncan Smith and hi The idiot who the Tories put in charge of poor bashing IDS in the days when he was 'concerned' about poverty  s Centre for Social Justice?  After Tory MPs passed a vote of no confidence in him and he was forced into resigning as leader he apparently underwent a damascene conversion.  He set up him Social Market Foundation and visited Easterhouse, the most infamous of Scottish housing estates in Glasgow. Apparetly the "levels of social breakdown which appalled me. In the fourth largest economy in the world, too many people lived in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children were leaving school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities were blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality, many of them with stunningly low levels of life expectancy The idiot who the Tories put in charge of poor bashing What IDS has done is to cut benefits to the bone.  Housing Benefit for under-25's will soon be gone.  The 'granny tax' will and is ensuring new levels of homelessness,  massive levels of sanctions are forcing people into starvation.   All the while  his friends in the City and Utility companies reap the rewards of making the poor pay for their gambling habits. Below is an excellent article from the 'Outrage' Blog.  The 'quiet man' of politics has become a spluttering mass of incompetence.  His universal credit, aimed at combining 6 benefits and working 'real time' has been so complex that the IT systems couldn't cope and it is way behind schedule, if it ever materialises. But what has the opposition to say?   Rachel Reeve the new Shadow Minister for the DWP said New Labour would be tougher than the  Tories on welfare recipients, proving that  New Labour wouldn't recognise a principle if it bit it on the buttocks.  But as Dennis McShameless has proved Miliband's New Labour is corrupt and useless as the Tories. Tony Greenstein Like his 18th century counterparts Iain Duncan Smith has managed to turn a profit out of the sick, disabled and unemployed, who next OAP? Posted: 28 Nov 2013 05:35 PM PST The 18th century would have approved of entrusting the disappearance from sight of the poor, the afflicted, the workless, the seeker of asylum and the criminal, to new superintendents of the poor, including A4E, Capita and Serco. When the powerful invoke "fairness", and represent the privileged as victims of exploitation by the powerless, it is usually the prelude to some spectacular act of injustice towards minorities, the excluded and the poor.  The Quiet Man is not happy The singular achievement of the present government has been to appoint new "overseers of the poor", although it forbears from using this term, which dates from the 16th century, when it designated the administrators and distributors of poor relief. These new overseers are far from the flinty and ignorant officials of the Old Poor Law, as they are – and not for the first time – commercial entities. The poor have often been eyed covetously by enterprise, as they represent an apparently enduring group in society, out of whom it must surely be possible, in one way or another, to make a profit, the word David Cameron has cleansed of any association with dirt – perhaps prematurely, as G4S and Serco demonstrated, when they charged the government for tagging prisoners who did not exist. Atos, tasked with the judgment of whether individuals are fit for employment, finds itself the inheritor of an ancient debate about the "deserving" and "undeserving". The fate of the most vulnerable people – in children's homes, prisons, care homes, rehabilitation centres, adult care homes and probation services – is increasingly in the hands of private providers, just as they were when known as orphans, felons, the lame and the halt, and the aged, who have "borne the heat and burthen of the day". This government's use of private companies – a policy re-affirmed last week by Francis Maude – in the improvement of pauper management has its antecedents in the 18th century, when the task was widely outsourced to willing providers. Far from being an "innovative" approach to poverty, the present government looks deep into a punitive past for inspiration. Perhaps these modern Conservatives hark back to the Poor Law Relief Act of 1723, when local justices of the peace were allowed to contract the administration of relief out to those who would feed, clothe and house the poor. Relief was given according to a prescribed quantity of labour, and was calculated to put an end to the "false and frivolous pretences" under which many people were believed to have found relief. The poor were to be managed by the contractor at so much a head, or maintained for a lump sum agreed in advance. In the first case, it served the contractor to cram as many people into the workhouse as possible; in the second, it was in his interest to keep them out. This was achieved by the payment of pensions that cost less than the paupers' upkeep in the workhouse. The standard inside was so low that people willingly accepted miserable payments as "out-relief". The poor rates duly declined. Everything that could be was contracted out – physicians for medical services, carpenters for making coffins, shifts for living paupers and shrouds for dead ones. Of course, the rhetoric has changed: the oratory of the 18th century has decayed, and is now inflected by a show of caring: we shall not neglect you or abandon you to worklessness, says George Osborne, but his embrace of the excluded is as uncharitable as it ever was, as he also declares that the "something-for-nothing culture" is at an end. The indolent and the workshy, identified during half a millennium of Poor Laws, are impervious to threats and exhortations. Those who suffer will be people whose lives have already been blighted, and many of whom were born to an inheritance, not of "hard-working strivers", but of despair. They are, for the most part, highly vulnerable and, if among them foxy cheats dissimulate themselves, these should not be used to inspire terror in the weak and wounded of society. What useful purpose is served by compelling the injured and humiliated of the world to sign on daily, to clear litter from the streets, to work for charities for nothing? Picking oakum looks, by contrast, like a positively purposeful activity. What triumph lies in compulsion intended for the defeated and the demoralised, the unloved and abused, the frightened and the mentally infirm, the under-endowed and the psychologically damaged (often with invisible handicaps), people immobilised by depression or detached, not from society, but from life itself? It is one thing to boast of hard work and achievement, but in the presence of the shut-ins and the frightened, the twilight world of the addict and the obsessive, these heroics are tainted. This is why it is ignoble to attack those predestined to lose all the rewards and prizes with which the rich and capable have so effortlessly made off.If there is a ghostly quality in the language of today's warriors against the poor, it is because the prescriptions they offer have been tendered at least since the consolidation of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. When Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Frank Field and former archbishops give their prescriptions, it is like being at some cosmic seance, as they are enunciating a wisdom from beyond the grave. In 1798, Jeremy Bentham published Pauper Management Improved. He proposed institutions for regulating the poor and, to facilitate this, he drew up a map of what he called Pauperland. This was an inventory of "that part of the natural livestock which has no feathers and walks on two legs". He meant those who labour. In his opinion, "Not one person in a hundred is incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper, but ought to be turned to account in the way of profit." Bentham's cheeseparing scheme for the poor inspired generatio/ns of administrators: he would make hats brimless so as not to waste material; bedcovers would be fastened by clips to save on superfluous fabric. What an inspiration to the tax on those in social housing with a spare room, even if it holds necessary aids that enable disabled people to participate in society. Meanwhile, turning the "wink and the whisper" of the sick to profit is admirably pursued by Atos, which has deemed fit for work people with terminal illness, some of whom have indeed died within days of being declared employable. The 18th century would have approved of entrusting the disappearance from sight of the poor, the afflicted, the workless, the seeker of asylum and the criminal, to new superintendents of the poor, including A4E, Capita and Serco. The charge is not one of parsimony, nor even of the elevation of efficiency over humanity. It is that the richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon the least defended. If anthropologists wish to examine life and labour in a savage society, they no longer need seek out rare, uncontacted peoples in the Amazon or Polynesia; all they require is an airline ticket to contemporary Britain. By Jeremy Seabrook

The Self-Destruction of the Socialist Workers Party – Now is the Time for a New Left Party

Sexual Harassment & Alleged Rape Were the Symptoms Lack of Democracy was the Cause

Martin Smith on the look-out for teenage SWP members?

On Sunday March 10th an Emergency Meeting of the SWP voted to endorse the Central Committee’s [CC] handling of the allegations of rape and sexual harassment against Martin Smith ‘Comrade Delta’, as well as upholding the expulsion of four activists.  The CC had used to good effect its control of the SWP machine, coupled by bullying, threats of physical attack and plain old fashioned rigging, to maintain its position.  The immediate response was the resignation of scores of activists and the formation of an International Socialist Network.   The CC has won a Pyrrhic victory and in so doing possibly created the catalyst for a viable socialist party in Britain.

The original source of the conflagration in the SWP and its causes have been dealt with previously in SWP Crisis Over Cover-up of Rape & Sexual Harassment Allegations against former National Secretary Martin Smith  SWP Central Committee - Rabbits Caught in the Headlights - Gilad Atzmon Rides to the ‘Rescue’ of Martin Smith and the SWP leadership as well as guest posts by Simon Pirani Parallels Between the SWP and the WRP?  A Comparison by Simon Pirani formerly of the WRP and Women’s Liberation & Class Oppression by Camilla Power. 

People can also refer to the Weekly Worker which has made much of the running on the issue including printing the first open resignation letter, by former Socialist Worker journalist Tom Walker..
 
Feminism
 

The SWP as it would like to be thought of

To some, like Tom Walker, the cause of the problem in the SWP was a hostility and inability to come to terms with feminism.  I disagree.  This was the symptom of a deeper malaise.  Feminism is a movement of democracy within capitalism, it is not a complete analysis or solution.  It too is subject to factors of class. 
 

Martin Smith's only non-SWP supporter - Gilad Atzmon

In other words feminism and women’s liberation are not immune from class society.  Women operate as both oppressors and oppressed.  Who can doubt that white women in southern Africa or Israeli women are/were, at one and the same time, both oppressors of Black and Palestinian people – women included – at the same time as they were oppressed by white or Israeli men?  Who can doubt that the White woman on a slave plantation was superior to the Black slave, of either sex?   Did Nazi or SS women show solidarity with Jewish women?

The answers to the above questions are obvious yet they are ones that the feminist movement has avoided, as have some of its male proponents.  Thirty years ago, with the formation of the Jewish Feminist Group and its adoption of a pro-Zionist position, supported by the feminist magazine Spare Rib, Black women and Women of Colour produced Outrage by way of reply.

SWP leadership's leading internal critic - but with a strategy that guaranteed defeat

A parallel is a national liberation movement where the future oppressor and the present day oppressed combine to demand freedom and independence.  One of the key differences between the revolutionary socialist and Stalinist traditions has been whether or not the oppressed classes economically should keep silent and postpone their own demands for socialism and equality in order not to alienate the richer capitalist section of the movement.

The communist parties were particularly appalling in this respect as one can see today from the support of the South African Communist Party for the police massacre of the Marikana miners.  In Britain after 1945, the Communist Party even proposed the continuation in power of a National Coalition including the Tories!  In Iran, the alliance between Khomeini and the Tudeh Party led to the butchering of thousands of socialists.

Laurie Penney - an early astute critic of the SWP's handling of rape allegations

At certain key times women come together across class to make specific demands.  The suffragettes were a good example.  The demand for the right of women to vote crossed class boundaries.  But even then the Women’s Social & Political Union, set up by the Pankhursts, later organised exclusively among the middle class.  It broke from its alliance with the Labour Party because the latter adopted the call for universal suffrage!  Why?  Because it supported the maintenance of the property qualification for those voting.

It is no accident that a number of officers and members of the WSPU ended up in Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, including its General Secretary, Nora Dacre Fox (Elam) who became their Southern Women’s organiser.  Emmeline Pankhurst and two of her daughters, Adela and Christabel, moved to the far right after the First World War.  Only Sylvia campaigned for universal suffrage and opposed-imperialism and fascism.

SWP students - nearly all of whom have now resigned or been isolated

The idea that the root cause of the SWP’s problems lie in the magic properties of feminism are an illusion.  Feminism in the 1970’s and ‘80s produced Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, whose hostility to the working class is matched only by their ardour to secure equality between oppressors. 

However an organisation which is undemocratic and whose leadership behaves in an exploitative and manipulative fashion, is indeed likely to replicate the patriarchal aspects of capitalism.  And being astute, the SWP CC thrust its leading women comrades into its defence.  Of the 7 members of the SWP’s Disputes Committee who exonerated Smith, no less than 5 were women. Candy Udwin chaired the crucial session at the AGM, which not only exonerated the CC and Smith but which barred the victim from attending or listening to the session.  The same session which was packed with pro-CC speakers and which was forbidden from discussing the issue itself was confined by Udwin to the question of whether procedures were followed.

The Changing Contours of Capitalism - There’s no success like failure
 
It seems to me that there are two, interrelated causes of the crisis in the SWP.   The first is, like the Bourbons, the far-left is condemned learn nothing and forget nothing.  It is the antithesis of the Marxism it nominally espouses.  The leadership of the SWP saw socialism and desire for an end to alienation and oppression, including personal oppression, in much the same way as the leaders of the Catholic Church take Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and its injunction that the meek are blessed and one should seek righteousness to heart.

In The Left: There’s no success like failure’ I pointed out the obvious.  Capitalism has restructured the working class and to a large extent, atomised it.  There are no big battalions of miners, car workers, and shipbuilding workers in Britain today.  The concentration on the working class at the workplace and strikes, which are of course important in their own right, is not in itself an answer to the question of how to build socialism.  Capitalism no longer lives in fear of the industrial proletariat.  Many classes – serfs, peasants, indentured labour – have been oppressed and exploited but the concentration on the working class was because of its potential for it being able to change society.  Unfortunately there is no evidence for this bar Russia nearly a century ago, one of the most backward capitalist states in Europe.

Rather than face up to this, the SWP has concentrated its fire on the supposed threat to Leninism.  What was Prof. Callinicos's (or Stallinicos as he is known) response to the allegations of rape against a former National Secretary and the way it was handled?  Nothing.  Instead we have a patently dishonest article In Defence of Leninism  or rather the SWP Central Committee’s interpretation of Leninism.  In Leninism is finished: a reply to Alex Callinicos Louis Proyect argues, on the basis of Lars Hi's Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context, that Lenin had never even sought to build a vanguardist democratically centralist controlled party but a party modelled on the German Social Demoratic Party. 

I claim no expertise in these matters but as I showed in Rabbits Caught in the Headlights  with my own expulsion, the SWP CC use democratic centralism not in order to intensify the fight against the state, whilst preserving our own secrets, but in order to control its own members.  It was bureaucratic centralism, honed to perfection by the CC. 

This means that like the Papacy, the CC is infallible.  It cannot make mistakes.  There is no analysis of history, where it has gone wrong, whether its root assumptions are correct. Respect, the Socialist Alliance, the failure of anti-war movement - these never happened.  Therefore no lessons were drawn.  Factions are verboten for all except 3 months of the year and the CC’s own permanent faction.   All attempts to discuss the failure of the socialist left, the failure of resistance to the Coalition’s attacksor even to discuss the question of how to resist the Government’s Divide & Rule tactics between benefit claimants and workers or the public and private sector go by default.  Even to map out a simple explanation of what has caused the latest capitalist crisis, its options and perils, is fraught with peril.

Far from Democratic Centralism providing some form of solution to the infiltration of spies such as Mark Kennedy in anarchist and direct action groups, it has actually done the State’s job for it by neutralising far-left groups politically.  The key task ahead, the formation of a socialist party from the grassroots upwards, not the ghost that presently masquerades as the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, is an urgent necessity not least because if we fail now, then the far-right in the form of UKIP+ could step into the breach.

Just in case they feel missed out, as they have barely commented upon what has happened, a few words for the Socialist Party.  They may not have the horrific practices of the SWP and their own internal structures, whilst no more democratic than the SWP’s at least seem able to tolerate a measure of dissent, but they are wedded to the same idea.  The belief that the road to socialism lies in the incremental growth of the revolutionary party, though with the SP it is in alliance with left trade union leaders in a rerun of the formation of the Labour Party.  In short economism long past its sell-by-date.

How should the SWP Central/Disputes Committee have reacted?
 
What would a democratic party have done if it had faced the problems that faced the SWP leadership over Martin Smith?

The first thing that should have happened, if the CC was seriously interested in investigating the matter, was to suspend Martin Smith's membership pending an investigation.  This is the normal response of an employer in these circumstances and one would indeed expect such an action in response to a complaint of rape or sexual harassment by a woman member of the union.

The second and most obvious solution would be for the woman alleging rape to be helped, supported sympathetically and directed to a Rape Support Group or the Police.  Comrades should have been specifically directed to support her whilst the matter was investigated.  Instead she and the woman who alleged sexual harassment were left to hang out and dry and even worse - they were victimised and villified.

If the alleged rape victim was unwilling to either go to the Police, understandable given their record, or to a Rape Crisis Group and she positively wished the Disputes Committee to deal with the problem, despite them having no forensic powers, or powers to question under oath, then they clearly faced a choice.  Either to refuse to undertake the task or to accept that both people could not remain in a single party and to therefore decide the question of whether the woman was raped on the civil test, the balance of probability.

In actual fact, if Martin Smith was concerned at all for the fate of the SWP as opposed to his own power and privilege, he would have resigned until his name was cleared. 

Those who personally knew Martin Smith on the DC should have stepped down.  That they did not do so suggests that there was a determination to exonerate a trusted comrade and dispense with what they saw as a nuisance complaint.  The woman concerned should have both been represented and allowed to cross examine Smith.  Instead and quite outrageously, the women were denied all sight of Martin Smith’s evidence but he was allowed to see what they had said.

People complain about bourgeois justice but there are strict rules about things like Disclosure.  In employment tribunals, where I practice, there are standard Orders whereby all parties have to provide a Standard List of Documents.  If the employer provides evidence during the Tribunal one can object and usually one will succeed.  Likewise in a criminal trial even more stringent rules apply and lack of disclosure can be fatal for the Prosecution.  This, it should be borne in mind, has been forced from the bourgeois state.  It was not granted as of right until the cases of wrongful conviction and police racism and brutality that sparked the riots of the early ‘80’s, became too much. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 was brought in.  It has to be said that the SWP’s ‘justice system’ is not a patch on the bourgeois state's.

Likewise through a representative Smith should have been able to cross-examine his accuser, but not about her drinking habits, sexual relations, mode of life but about the allegations themselves and any relevant context.

The third thing would have been to look at the evidence itself, after a serious and reasonable investigation.  It is of course impossible for me to comment on what, if any evidence was uncovered or gathered.  However there is one matter I am curious about and yet no one seems to have touched upon it.

The woman herself seems to have been a very young comrade, 17 apparently.  Smith is, I guess around the age of 50.  If this is the case then Smith is about 3 times as old as the woman.   There is no law against this but in general inter-generational sex is exploitative and to be frowned upon.  A man of 50 is about 2/3 through his life.  A woman of 17 is about to start adult life.  There is a biological clock.  People become more frail as they get older and the younger partner is expected to care for them in later years.  This is not exactly equality as most such relationships involve older men.  But an older man forming a relationship with a teenager has a confidence, in Smith's case a party reputation and perspective that a teenager doesn’t possess.  In other words he has power over her personally.  Such a ‘relationship’ cannot be equal.  It may not be a crime but it is indicative of a breach of trust for a senior member of the SWP to sleep with young members of the party and calls into question his own motives. 

But there was a second charge by another woman, a full-timer who has it would seem been dismissed, of sexual harassment.  Even the Chair of the Disputes Committee, Pat Stack, who I always knew in the student movement as an ultra-loyalist, believed that it was proven.  Together on the balance of probability I would therefore reach the conclusion that the rape accusation was more likely than not and on that basis Martin Smith would have been expelled.  That is not to say he was guilty but faced with two conflicting versions I would have preferred the testimony of the woman in view of the second allegation and the admitted sexual relationship.  

But of course this was not an option.  It did not happen and the woman in question was effectively called a liar.  It now appears that the rape allegations against Smith aren’t the first of their kind amongst the SWP leadership.  Allegations of rape and sexual harassment against another full-timer were also heard by the Disputes Committee  when the allegations against Smith first surfaced.  The evidence was overwhelming re the sexual harassment and he was suspended for two years.   Unlike the 4 SWP Facebook members who talked about the allegations who were expelled, instantly, without a hearing, by SWP Secretary Charlie Kimber.  Allegations of rape are less serious, it would appear, than conversing over Facebook.

Is there a pattern?

The SWP CC is a self-perpetuating body.  It employs about 100 full-timers who keep tabs on the membership and quell any incipient rebellion.  It presents a slate for election to annual conference.  It is not possible to vote for or against individual members.  There has rarely been an alternative slate and there has never been a successful challenge.  The SWP leadership is quite immune from challenge and as recent events demonstrate it will do anything to keep its power intact.

Clearly any democratic party of the Left has to have an internal democracy which means that its leadership is elected and that members have the rights to form factions.  The alternative is a leadership which sees itself as apart from the membership and even begins to see that membership as a threat.  Sections of the SWP leadership seem to have developed a cult-like relationship.  It is inconceivable that some members did not know of Martin Smith’s tendency to form relationships with teenage party members, itself a sign of potential abuse.  The possibility that Smith’s behaviour was not a one-off are strong. 

In SWP: We need to talk about "Karl"  there is another allegation of a cover up of rape, this time by a full-timer a District Organiser.  According to Andy Newman of the increasingly right-wing Socialist Unity blog, a ‘long-time editor’ of SW (presumably the late Chris Harman):

‘used to have a reputation that “no means yes”, and when he vistied some districts, experienced comrades in the know sought to ensure he was not left alone with young women.

When women who had been assaulted complained, they were diminished and hounded out of the SWP. I know of one occasion when a victim of sexual assault was sat down with a senior woman CC SWP member who told her to keep quiet for the good of “the party”, excusing the behaviour because “capitalism fucks everyone up”, and then warning if she didn’t keep quiet then no-one would believe her, and the SWP would destroy her reputation.

During the 1980s there was a strange phenomenon of several angry young womwn comrades who used to talk about the sexism of this leading comrade, but they had been intimidated out of explaining what had happened, and instead the discusion often focussed on seemingly trivial details, like the fact that he always referred to women socialists by their first names, and male comrades by surnames (lenin and marx, but Rosa and Clara, for example)

To fnd an organisation that systematicaly for decades covered up sexual assault and who intimidated women who complained into silence praised in this was is disgraceful.

Even worse, I know of an IS/SWP district in the 1970s who colluded in silence and looked the other way when a leading industrial militant was raping his own step-daughter: the individual in question had previoulsy been in the IMG, who had also covered it up. When as a young 17 year old I confronted him at a party and asked him loudly if he was still fucking his duaghter, it was me cautioned by the SWP, while the truth of thse allegations was quietly ignored.’

Like all bureaucracies, the SWP’s has developed rhythms and modes of behaviour which it deems acceptable.  Preying on young women in the party seems acceptable to a certain leadership-friendship ‘fuck circuit’ as they have been called.
 
Where do we go from here
 
The SWP conference has taken place and some 71 of those who have resigned have posted a public statement as to why they did so. (see below)   A new International Socialist Network has also been formed  which does have the potential to bring about a party of the socialist left that is serious about building a new society.  The largest party in Britain today comprises ex-members of the SWP, notwithstanding the hundreds who have been expelled over the years,

But such a network and hopefully an organisation should not look back to the IS with rose-tinted glasses.  I was expelled from the IS in 1972, as the organisation moved from being a party of Luxembourgist to Leninist democracy (at least according to Cliff).  Many were the mistakes it made and to imagine that there was a golden era will be to eventually repeat the mistakes that were made on the way.  But the need for a new party of the socialist left, a party which is anti-capitalist but not sectarian, which prides itself on debate whilst at the same time being a party of activists (unlike the 5,000 missing members of the SWP) is something to aim for.

What is essential is that those who resign in disgust at the behaviour of the SWP are not lost to socialism.  Now is the time for all those who are resigning from the SWP, including those who have had a former association and been expelled, to come together.  As for the SWP itself, with its student organisation in ruins (members of the Brighton-Sussex SWSS have resigned en masse) its days are numbered as the leadership relies on the votes of the politically and in some cases physically dead.

Tony Greenstein