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SWP expulsions and squabbles

butchersapron said:
This person is precisely not on of them though - that why i'm calling them a dickhead. What sort of member thinks telling clegg that he's not a real liberal by postcard is a real member?
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it's a bunch of lawyers campaigning about legal aid so i suppose that must seem pretty radical to them. and it got in the guardian. and he got to work in a big up to his grandad. you too harsh.
 
discokermit said:
i know.
i don't know matt foot, never seen him before that article and i don't think i've read anything by him and don't know what role he's played in all this but to call him a dickhead based on that article seems a bit harsh.
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True enough I guess. Worth remembering that this is an article about him rather than one by him, and we all know what journalists can be like.
 
Whatever happened to Norah Carlin, btw? Was rereading her Roots of Gay Oppression the other day, n had forgotten how good it was.
 
belboid said:
Whatever happened to Norah Carlin, btw? Was rereading her Roots of Gay Oppression the other day, n had forgotten how good it was.
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We put her on for a talk down here last month (and a really interesting talk it was) - to say she is not pro-swp full stop would be unfair.
 
Karmickameleon said:
Those comments of hers that I've read on Facebook have been supportive of the opposition.
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A comment from Norah on Pat Stack's resignation letter:
"Best regards and maximum respect to Pat, and in general to all the comrades who have found it necessary to give up what had been a major and positive part of their lives for decades - as I did some years ago. It isn't easy, and it doesn't have to mean you were wrong to belong for so long. No regrets! Maybe it doesn't mean this time that there will be nothing to take its former place in your/our lives."​
 
Mustn't grumble said:
was it a SWP event, or some other forum that Norah Carlin spoke at?
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A Bristol Radical History event, she came down to give us an update on her current research into the question of Charles 1 as the 'man of blood'. We wnr for some food and drink afterwards and unsurprisingly the issue of the dispute came up - she was generally favourable to the oppositions attempts to reform the party if not entirely comfortable with all their political positions (she stood by the piece she wrote about 20 years back outlining and defending the classic SWP position on class/gender/sexism etc) but -and i have to try and be a bit delicate here - she would not have anything personally and politically to do with certain leading members of the then opposition. Also seemed to be a unaware of a lot of the specifics of the stuff discussed on this thread and elsewhere. A book is planned about the civil war stuff if i remember right.
 
Spanky Longhorn said:
They will certainly need good luck there doesn't seem to be much in their founding statement that recognises the date based part of their name.
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'At present, the basis for a genuine mass revolutionary party does not exist in the British working class movement' makes a pleasant change
 
Spanky Longhorn said:
There's never been a better time to be a socialist.
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Good point. I wonder did the SWP think that building a real revolutionary party (or a mass or semi mass revolutionary organisation in any form) was on the agenda during the whole "1930s in slow motion" period? The much quoted late period Cliff anecdote about what could be done with 40,000 members at the time of the pit closures also seems to imply a rather inflated view of the possibilities open. So perhaps the statement of the bleeding obvious that there isn't currently the basis for a "real" revolutionary party actually is a "breath of fresh air" for those in the post early 90s SWP?

On another note, I see from the Weekly Worker that the AWL's destructive "factional manipulation", approaching allegations of sexual assault etc primarily as a way to damage rival left groups, has predictably gone badly wrong, leaving them revealed as cynical hypocrites. Whoever could have predicted that?
 
redcogs said:
i used to like Ralph Millipede, but his sons are not socialists and are a couple of deadbeats.

In Matt Foot's case, we can't 'visit the sins of the father upon the son' around the Delta issue - Paul was long dead by then. And, generally speaking, he seemed ok to me, apart from being a minor aristo'.
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He stupidly and persistently defended Wakefield on the MMR vaccine (on a personal level as well as on the overall issue), which deserves some serious criticism.

That's not to say he didn't do some good stuff too of course.
 
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Nigel Irritable said:
On another note, I see from the Weekly Worker that the AWL's destructive "factional manipulation", approaching allegations of sexual assault etc primarily as a way to damage rival left groups, has predictably gone badly wrong, leaving them revealed as cynical hypocrites. Whoever could have predicted that?
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link?
 
I'm really tempted to turn up at awl events to rub it in in as sectarian and opportunistic a manner as possible offer principled opposition to their bureaucratic, anti-democratic antics and betrayal of the principles of womens liberation, like what they'd do but I really can't be arsed and it wouldn't be fair on the victims.
 
SpackleFrog said:
The article is bang on about the AWL's cynical sectarian fuckwittery but wildly inaccurate about lots of other stuff - handle with caution.
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This bit (the important bit IMO) is correct as far as we know though, right?

In September last year, a little-noticed post appeared on the NCAFC Facebook page. In it, a sexual abuse survivor asked why the organisation had not publicly commented on her case. It had, after all, resulted in the expulsion of the man involved from the NCAFC. She claimed that he is a known serial abuser and explained, absolutely correctly, that transparency about his expulsion was necessary to ensure the safety of other women. It emerged that she had turned up to “an event” at ULU only to find her alleged abuser casually socialising as if nothing untoward had happened. She indignantly protested to the organisers.

Although it was not mentioned in her post, that “event” was Ideas for Freedom, the AWL’s summer school. In the run-up she explained to the AWL’s executive that she would not attend Ideas for Freedom if her alleged abuser was going to be there too. Comrade Ismail reported that EC member Ed Maltby “negotiated an agreement”, so that both parties would “attend different bits” of the school. During one EC meeting, comrade Maltby noted that the man had “got wasted two times and felt people up.”

At least one AWL member has left the organisation after lodging a complaint over the incident. When the resignation letter was posted to the AWL’s internal email list, comrade Ismail attempted to change the subject, claiming that it came as no surprise, “given the new flurry of pressure on us generated by Pat S’s antics”. He was referring to the resignation and publication of internal AWL documents by former AWL member, Patrick Smith.
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