British Politics Thread

Speaking of the "informal sector" stuff, did anyone see that documentary about illegal Chinese immigrants working as prostitutes the other day? Sex: My British Job I think it was called, will still be on 4OD for those interested in catchup. It was a horrible program, not because it was made badly but because of the awful conditions the workers were going through. A woman, using cameras hidden in her glasses, went undercover in a brothel and was subjected to horrific abuse that really hit hard. By the end, she was losing sight of the difference between her character and real identity and was feeling suicidal, thankfully escaping before she allowed herself to do any actual sex work.

There was a satisfying confrontation with the boss at the end, but no real answers and no certainty as to the future of any of those involved. Stark reality, then, and deeply disturbing.

BBC: UK Treasury in legal challenge to EU bonus cap

No, I'm sorry, I'm siding with Brussels on this one. Getting a seven-figure bonus for helping to navigate the economy into the tar pits is just absurd, but it still happens.

edited 25th Sep '13 3:31:17 PM by Deadbeatloser22

Watching the Mail trying to cogitate this one should be fun.

And presumably Mr and Mrs Taxpayer will be paying for this action from the Bankers' Union (formerly known as the government), saving the banks from spending a penny of their squillions on doing it themselves?

edited 25th Sep '13 4:12:00 PM by TheBatPencil

OK, time for that big ol’ SWP post. And boy, it is big.

First, let’s have some background. This is not the first time a scandal like this has hit a Trotskyite party. The predecessors of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, were effectively destroyed in 1985 when their leader and founder, Gerry Healy, was exposed as a serial rapist who’d abused his position to exploit over two dozen young, female recruits. Worse, the other WRP bigwigs had been covering for him, and some continued to do so after he was outed – most notoriously, Corin Redgrave of the Central Committee was asked whether he believed Healy was a rapist and replied by listing off the dude’s achievements and concluded with (I shit you not here) “If this is the work of a rapist, let’s hire more rapists.”

Another big scandal hit the American Socialist Workers’ Party (same structure, same ideology, no relation) in 1988, when its rapid transformation into a paranoid, insular cult via a string of purges was interrupted by the arrest of one Mark Curtis. Curtis, a mid-ranking SWP member, was convicted of sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old black girl in her own home. Her eleven-year-old brother had spotted him and called the cops, who literally caught him with his pants down. The SWP reacted to this in the most sensible, reasonable manner possible – by calling it a government conspiracy and mounting an enormous campaign for his release (before surreptitiously terminating his membership). So yeah, Trotskyite parties have a bit of a systematic problem with transparency, accountability, and teenagers getting raped.

Second, a bit of context on the SWP as an organisation. Long story short, it’s a hideously disorganised mess that can be (and has been) abused to hell and back. They have a ‘parliament’, the fifty-member National Committee, and a ‘cabinet’, the Central Committee, which consists of their most senior officers (in rank, not necessarily age), and currently has about eleven members. The National Committee meets every year, and theoretically supersedes the Central Committee, which handles the day-to-day running (or, more accurately, lumbering) of the party.

In practice, though, the Central Committee rules the party with an iron fist, presenting an eerily unified front even whilst they’re having screaming rows with each other behind closed doors (which apparently happens a lot). The other important bit is the Disputes Committee, a loose agglomeration of enforcers who deal with professional ethics within the party, have members of the Central Committee sent to join them when they’re adjudicating something serious. Everything else is a shapeless morass of temporary committees and tribal cliques who all hate each other’s guts.

Into this poisonous, volatile environment, the Comrade Delta incident was dropped like a hand grenade in a petrol tank.

The SWP membership first found out about this case in 2011, when they were told that a member of the Central Committee, called ‘Comrade Delta’ to preserve his privacy, had broken up with the woman he was having an affair with (another SWP member named ‘Comrade W’) and had got into trouble for harassing her afterwards. They were assured that the Disputes Committee – which is, as I mentioned, an extension of the Central Committee Delta belonged to – would deal with this, and then the allegations were quietly glossed over as Delta gave a speech about the virtues of the SWP to carefully-choreographed rapturous applause.

There were a few problems with this. First, ‘Comrade W’ had actually been seventeen years old when the fifty-year-old Delta started a relationship with her. Second, he hadn’t broken up with and stalked her two years later, he had raped her. Third, he wasn’t just a Central Committee member – he was Martin Smith, national secretary of the SWP.

Smith had a chequered history even before this incident. He had been arrested several times on antifascist marches, including for one incident of assaulting a police officer – though to be perfectly fair, the usual relationship between the police and left-wing protesters means that it’s unclear whether that assault was him being as thuggish in other fields as he reportedly is in the bedroom, or whether it was him recklessly and irresponsibly stopping a truncheon with his skull. More damningly, he had brought a lot of bad press to the party through his friendship with the rabidly anti-Semitic jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, which required him to break ties after a few years when the party started haemorrhaging money and members.

After the true extent of the allegations against Smith came to light, Atzmon ranted that it had all been a Jewish conspiracy to unseat the national secretary because of his love for jazz music. Bizarrely enough, this actually had some tenuous connection to reality. Several members of the Central Committee, including Smith, are big fans of jazz, to the point where failing to attend one of their scheduled jazz events, regardless of your musical tastes, will get you cautioned for disloyalty, which has had a predictable effect on party morale. Not only that, but getting rid of dissidents by expelling them on sexual harassment charges was actually a tactic taught to SWP organisers for a while (though it should be pointed out here that it was used by the party elite on low-level peons who dared to question their rightful rulers, and never the other way around).

As one might assume, the Disputes Committee ‘trial’ was a farce. Even ignoring the patent ridiculousness of trusting the adjudication of a crime as serious as rape to a team of ideologically-attuned amateurs who only had the power to expel people from the party at most, the DC hearing was held, in its majority, by friends and co-workers of Smith. The age gap was dismissed as not being a concern, and the national secretary was cleared of all charges. He ate a demotion, and was told to lay low for a bit before his triumphant return to party politics, but that was it. Unlike her rapist, Comrade W was refused a chance to speak in public and give her side of the story.

Of course, you know how rape charges tend to encourage other victims to come forward? That’s what happened here. ‘Comrade X’, another SWP member, reported that she had also been raped by Smith. This evidence was withheld from the W trial despite coming out at the same time, X was asked some very insulting questions by the DC (“you like a bit to drink, right?”), and then she lost her job with the party. Other women also came forward with tales of harassment and abuse. They were all ignored.

Doubters were reassured that the DC knew what they were doing – they had handled nine rape cases previously. This did not reassure anyone, especially after it was revealed that a district organiser had beaten and raped a subordinate a short time after the Smith trial. The DC had given him a two-year suspension from the party as punishment, the same that had been given to the ‘Facebook Four’ who had dared to criticise the party’s handling of the Smith case on the Internet. In contrast, one member had been expelled for life for suggesting the party set up a cultural magazine.

The consequence was open civil war. An attempt to reform the party at a special conference was only narrowly outvoted in a format that almost inevitably turns out unanimous decisions one way or the other despite every dirty trick the Central Committee tried to pull, including wheeling along the elderly wife of the party’s founder to a private faction meeting and explaining to her that the big bad rebels wouldn’t let her in.

Every seething resentment against the CC and DC bubbled up at once, from financial mismanagement to bullying to yet more incidents of sexual abuse, and mass resignations swiftly followed, resulting in the party losing a fifth of its two thousand members (perhaps a larger fraction, given the SWP’s habit of inflating its numbers) and three of the eleven CC officers. The CC’s complete failure to engage with or understand the Internet was a particular problem – every website they told members not to visit immediately encountered a massive traffic spike, and their desperate attempts to preserve their beloved secrecy (particularly in regards to Comrade Delta’s real name) were worse than useless.

Eventually, Smith resigned properly, and the DC agreed to hear Comrade X’s case, but the general consensus was that it was like rubbing disinfectant on a missing head. The damage had been done, and the reputation of them and their party had been irrevocably tainted.

Rape, cronyism, and party-mandated jazz. Welcome to the wonderful world of Trotskyite Communism.

edited 26th Sep '13 5:46:53 AM by Iaculus

Wow,I can't believe a political party could do any of those things.

edited 26th Sep '13 8:40:21 AM by woodywoo01

A fine post

I shall recount the saga of the SWP and Tommy Sheridan in the not-too-distant. I am marshaling my pen as we speak.

And this is just the one we know did it. I'm willing to bet that most parties have this sort of dirty laundry hiding in the closet under the skeletons.

I dunno, political corruption may be a widespread thing, but this particular combination of despotism, disorganisation, and isolationism seems endemic to Trotskyism.

More practically, the ability of a major party like the Tories or Labour to cover up a rape scandal seems rather doubtful.

Also, the rationale behind the collective decision not to inform the police is unique to the SWP, as they don't trust the "bourgeois courts".

edited 26th Sep '13 9:56:32 AM by Achaemenid

Well, when you're spinning being arrested in the act of raping a girl as a "government conspiracy" then there's something seriously wrong with you.

To be perfectly fair, it would not be the craziest thing the police have pulled on a left-wing activist, either there or in Britain - as local examples, see the recent revelations about undercover cops running false-flag operations in the UK, Thatcher's attempts to discredit the unions, and the death of Blair Peach. This is not to suggest that Curtis wasn't lying through his ass, because all available evidence indicates that he was, only to explain the culture of paranoia these groups dwell in, which is further compounded by their own leadership's habit of lying through their teeth to them (see the 'Delta had a bad breakup' and 'this comrade was evicted because of sexual abuse' stuff I mention above). After a few years of that, it's going to start eating into your brain.

@ Achaemenid: Yamato 2199, I see?

Anyway, I feel like asking a slightly off-topic question for the Scottish Tropers:

What is Ronnie Corbett's accent?

edited 26th Sep '13 3:01:57 PM by Greenmantle

Yep. Rather awesome, I thought. Also, I look like him, so, hey, it fits.

Ronnie Corbett has a kind of combination Edinburgh and English one. It seems to be a product of the slightly featureless Edinburgh accent, and his National Service.

So, would the thread like to hear the classic Scots tale of Tommy Sheridan, the Clubs of Ill-Repute, and the Hated Murdoch Empire™?

edited 26th Sep '13 3:11:45 PM by Achaemenid

And They Called Me Mad.

guy sounds like a real scrumbag but

edited 26th Sep '13 4:50:26 PM by joeyjojo

Oh, he was totally a scumbag - what I'm saying is why he was able to get away with being a scumbag through what seems like such a ridiculous, flimsy excuse.

Then again most left-wing extremists will try and spin anything that portrays them negatively, even if it's their own actions, as some sort of government smear. Right wing extremists will spin it as a smear perpetrated by whatever group they see as the enemy at that moment.

edited 27th Sep '13 2:27:52 AM by Deadbeatloser22

Ah, Tommy Sheridan...basically the dictionary definition of "Slimy obnoxious prick", and his party, the SSP, is almost an insult to left wing politics in this country. My mother shared an office with him and has first hand knowledge of his unpleasantess. But others can tell his tale more eloquently than I :P

I realise this is from the Record, but still, the fact that this shite can be published is awful. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/tam-cowan-fir-park-should-2314034

Basically it's Tam Cowan claiming Fir Park should be torched because a women's football match was played there and women shouldn't be playing football. It's apparently "satire", but the editor have had to (a) add Cowan's email address with a note saying to direct complaints there and (b) put a "from the Dark Ages" banner up as though it's clearly not serious. Neither were present in the initial version of the article.

This is the same Record that refused to publish a Frankie Boyle column for being too offensive, by the way. I'm emailing a complaint, though to the sports editor rather than Cowan himself, and I'm hoping a few more do too.

...

Yick.

Ha! http://twitpic.com/dfb3ki

He's been taken off the BBC and the story has hit the front page of a major newspaper. If he thought that this was going to be easily overlooked, he's clearly mistaken.

I did send a long email complaint to the Sports desk and copied Tam in. Won't get a reply, far less my request that the article be replaced by an apology by both Tam for writing it and the desk for posting it, but I feel good for having directly said something to them rather than just reacting indirectly on social media. Speaking of though, apparently Twitter has taken this and ran with it, which has presumably clued the BBC into the need to remove him.

Anyway, what's this about SSE Hydro?

Well done. Richly deserved. Today was a lovely day in Glasgow, incidentally - I had intended to watch the football in my local, but instead ended up in a deckchair outside.

Tomorrow, I shall tell the tale of Tommy Sheridan, if folk are still interested.

EDIT:

The SSE Hydro is a concert hall, or rather "entertainment venue", in Glasgow (Scotland's City of Culture™).

edited 28th Sep '13 3:08:08 PM by Achaemenid

Ah, I thought it was a Hydro-electric plant^note  Although it seems like there quite a few of them in Scotland.

I grew up in the old Southern Electric area...

edited 28th Sep '13 3:19:36 PM by Greenmantle

Oh snap, so did I.