Suburban Tudor Postscript: Wolsey and 'Mrs" Wolsey's boy in Willesden

Before Cardinal Wolsey was a cardinal he was an 'almoner' and nominally should have been celibate. Instead he had what I didn't know is termed a 'non-canonical marriage'.  His wife/lover/mistress/partner was called Joan Larke. She was born in around 1490 in Yarmouth in Norfolk. Her father was either an innkeeper from Thetford or a 'gentleman' from Huntingdonshire.

Joan Larke lived with Wolsey in Bridewell and they had two children: Thomas Wynter and Dorothy Clancey.

Dorothy was adopted and then 'placed' in the Shaftesbury Nunnery, where she became a nun. She received a pension from Thomas Cromwell (see Hilary Mantel!) when her religious house was dissolved.

Thomas went to live with a family - I love this - in Willesden, which was then a village. It was a place of pilgrimage due to the presence of two ancient statues of the Virgin Mary at the Church of St Mary. One of these statues is thought to be a Black Madonna, which was insulted by the Lollards, taken to Thomas Cromwell's house and burnt in 1538 on a large bonfire of "notable images" including those of Walsingham, Worcester and Ipswich. There was also a "holy well" which was thought to possess miraculous qualities, particularly for blindness and other eye disorders.

(The Willesden I knew was an industrial suburb with a 'tech' (a technical college) which offered students  a way of getting 'technical' qualifications if they had been to a 'Sec Mod' or hadn't stayed on at grammar school to do their 'O-levels'. As a young person in the 1950s,  the most important thing about Willesden was Willesden Junction where British Rail trains co-existed with tube trains. There was a point at which that was exciting: hundreds of railway lines. Brilliant.

I'll pause for a moment and think about Wolsey's non-canonical wife, a young chap (their son) going off to the village of Willesden where there is a religious cult - or several, including a pagan one and let it merge with the railway lines of Willesden Junction. )

Sometime after Wolsey's arrest and death in November 1530, Thomas Wynter went to study at the University of Padua, at the King's expense. When he returned to England penniless in about 1535, he was financially assisted by Queen Anne Boleyn, Wolsey's former adversary.

As Wolsey continued to rise swiftly and prominently in the Church and government, eventually becoming Bishop of Lincoln, Archbishop of York, a cardinal, and Lord Chancellor of England, Joan became an embarrassment to him.

(I bet she did.)

In 1519, he arranged her marriage to George Legh, of Adlington Hall, Cheshire, (is that how it was done? Amazing.) and provided her dowry.

Wolsey would later assist the Leghs in a property dispute.

Together Joan and George had four children:
Thomas Legh (1527–1599), married Maria Grosvenor, by whom he had one son, Thomas (1547–1601)
Elizabeth Legh (1525–1583)
Mary Legh
Margaret/Ellen Legh

Sometime after Legh's death in 1529, Joan married secondly, George Paulet, brother of William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester.

Joan Larke died on an unknown date.

[Most of the info comes from wikipedia]

Tudor Plots on the Metropolitan Line

One of the ways we live is by not knowing the peculiarities and ironies of the history that unfolded in the places we live, work and walk through. In one sense, this really doesn't matter very much. It's not going on anymore. So, to take one example,  it's very easy to travel past places in London, which were the sites of public executions, displays of dead people's bodies, disembowellings, dismemberings and the like and not have an inkling of it. So easy that it doesn't matter.

Then again, there is a way in which it is important but probably just sounds rather worthy to state it: we are who we are by complex and subtle ways of intermingling the stresses and strains of now with the inherited ideas of the past. What's more, it's not as if 'history' is some kind of uncontested territory. When people tell us about 'the Tudors' or the 'Anglo-Saxons', why should we ever take this is as finished business? Why should we ever take these statements as all-encompassing ways of tidying up an era or a regime? Quite often - I won't say always - these localised events have a way of qualifying and challenging received wisdoms and certainties.

At the point at which I studied history at school, I had an overall sense that history happened 'somewhere else'.  I felt that personally I wasn't 'in' history, nor, it seemed, were my parents, nor indeed was the area I lived in, which was the suburbs of north-west London. To take that last aspect a little further, one of the features of living in the suburbs in the 1950s was to declare that it was a kind of desert in which nothing went on in the now, and very little had ever gone on there in the past. I'm not sure this was deliberate other than that the suburban dream was in part about a nothingness. The images created in order to attract new buyers of houses along the Metropolitan Line in the period just before and just after the First World War  are of people mowing lawns, sitting in deck chairs with nothing other than other houses and gardens in sight. The dream was of a permanent vacuum to which busy, well-off men could return to be waited on by aproned wives.

As I've been reading recently - as I often do - about the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, I come again and again up against the 'Babington Plot' and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. One part of this whole episode that mystifies is me is trying to get an understanding of quite why the small group around Elizabeth had such a firm adherence to an ideology which in realpolitik terms was so high-risk. That's to say they brooked no compromise with Rome and Catholicism - a position which endangered the regime that they ran and which, as a consequence,  led them into running a high-surveillance state, with the accompanying machine of torture, execution and persecution. They could justify this by pointing out that Catholic regimes, the Pope and individual Catholics were constantly trying to assassinate Elizabeth and/or invade and/or put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. All of which was true too.

Anyway, one moment in all this plotting, torture and terror was the plot that led to Mary's execution - the Babington Plot. I can't think how many times I dutifully wrote those two words in my suburban grammar school exercise books and exams as the Tudors were then - and probably still are -  a key way in which 'history' (ie the subject) , nationalism and schooling fuse. I think 'we' are supposed to learn that the reason 'we' are the way 'we' are is because of the Tudors. The Tudors were of course 'glorious' and all sorts of good things 'flourished' under the Tudors. For us to be given this overall sense of well-being about the Tudors, it was necessary to obscure or omit certain things about the dynasty, their regimes, their wars and the kinds of lives lived by the majority of people. To take one example, in order to revel in the benefits of a Protestant state whilst at the same time lauding the benefits of a dynastic and legitimate monarchy, it was necessary to manage an impossible juggling trick. It was impossible because whatever real or imagined benefits then or now there are of living in a Protestant country, they didn't result from some kind of universally recognised legitimacy. Elizabeth was the daughter of a divorcee and so, in one form of the religious code, she was a bastard. In a sense then, Elizabeth was the queen because she (and the regime's apparatus)  was Protestant. The people who thought that all this was wicked, illegitimate and ungodly plotted to alter the status quo by the ways already mentioned: assassination of Elizabeth, invasion, installing someone with a 'true' line to the throne. Thus: the Babington Plot - along with a host of others.

There are good accounts of this plot on the internet and one small part of it involved Babington  trying unsuccessfully to escape the Elizabethan spy, torture and execution machine.  The way he did this was to rush from London to...(I smile to think of it) to the very part of London I lived in, with its long rows of semi-detached houses, privet hedges and Metropolitan Line stations. At the time of the plot there was a place called Uxendon Manor, lived in by the Bellamy family. I haven't yet found the exact site of the manor house but it was somewhere just to the east of what is now the Jubilee Line running between Wembley Park and Kingsbury. I see that nearby there is a school called Uxendon Manor Primary School,  roads called Uxendon Crescent and Uxendon Hill and not all that far off a Babington Rise.

This was an area I knew either from staring out of trains and buses or from visiting friends, swimming pools or going to athletics meets. In the great run of things, this doesn't matter two hoots. It really doesn't. What's odd though is that the very nature of the kind of 'academic' education we got, meant that a genuine connection between the national narrative we were taught and the local lives we were leading was right there under our noses. I wonder how much more vital and alarming this moment in history would have been, had we been given the detail of Bellamy's manor, Babington himself and his pals, the capture, the trial and execution. This was the prelude and pretext for executing Mary Queen of Scots which in turn led to the Armada - an event which we were taught at least three times.

Part of me now is wishing that I could make a film in which Babington and pals in full Elizabethan costume, arrive in modern Wembley Park/Kingsbury, rush round the suburban streets looking for Uxendon Manor. Perhaps they arrive at a big detached house on Uxendon Hill lived in by the holy-minded Bellamy - is he in modern or Tudor clothes? - and all's well for a while. They don't realise they're under surveillance (radar, helicopters, heat sensors etc) until the cops bash the door down, grab them, take them off for routine modern torture, trial and execution...perhaps 'extraordinary rendition' is involved...anyway, you get the drift...

Shelley's Revolutionary Poem - hidden away, waiting for its numbers to come up

In July 2006, the scholar H.R.Woudhuysen was in a position to publish an article ("A Shelley pamphlet come to light") about a poem that had 'disappeared' for nearly 200 years but was at this moment (2006) 're-discovered'.  It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley under the title "A Poetical Essay". It was described as "On the Existing State of Things...for Assisting to Maintain in Prison Mr. Peter Finnerty, Imprisoned for a Libel".  Advertisements for the poem appeared in the press in March 1811.

Excuse now a mass of names and details but it will help give a context.

The historic moment was a point at which Europe was convulsed by wars. In the kind of British history I was taught, it was useful to talk of these as caused by Napoleon but it's more rational to talk of them as struggles for dominance in Europe and across the European powers' empires and dominions in the rest of the world.

The immediate wars and battles that gave rise to Shelley's poem were: 'The War of the Fifth Coalition' and the 'Walcheren Campaign'.

This is wikipedia's description of that war:

"The War of the Fifth Coalition, fought in the year 1809, pitted a coalition of the Austrian Empire and the United Kingdom against Napoleon's French Empire and Bavaria. Major engagements between France and Austria, the main participants, unfolded over much of Central Europe from April to July, with very high casualty rates. Britain, already involved on the European continent in the ongoing Peninsular War, sent another expedition, the Walcheren Campaign, to the Netherlands in order to relieve the Austrians, although this effort had little impact on the outcome of the conflict. After much campaigning in Bavaria and across the Danube valley, the war ended favourably for the French after the bloody struggle at Wagram in early July."

And this is wikipedia's description of the Walcheren Campaign:


"The Walcheren Campaign was an unsuccessful British expedition to the Netherlands in 1809 intended to open another front in the Austrian Empire's struggle with France during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Around 40,000 soldiers, 15,000 horses together with field artillery and two siege trains crossed the North Sea and landed at Walcheren [in present-day Holland] on 30 July. This was the largest British expedition of that year, larger than the army serving in the Peninsular War in Portugal. The Walcheren Campaign involved little fighting, but heavy losses from the sickness popularly dubbed "Walcheren Fever". Over 4,000 British troops died (only 106 in combat) and the rest withdrew on 9 December 1809.
[...]
 The British troops soon began to suffer from malaria; within a month of seizing the island, they had over 8,000 fever cases. The medical provisions for the expedition proved inadequate despite reports that an occupying French force had lost 80% of its numbers a few years earlier, also due to disease.
[...]
In all, the British government spent almost £8 million on the campaign. Along with the 4,000 men that had died during the campaign, almost 12,000 were still ill by February 1810 and many others remained permanently weakened. "

So, how do we get from here to Peter Finnerty - the person mentioned in the advertisement for Shelley's poem?

In 1809 the  naval officer Sir Home Popham had invited Finnerty, a radical Irish journalist and supporter of the United Irishmen, to join him on that expedition.


Woudhuysen takes up the story:

"Finnerty’s reports on these events in the Morning Chronicle led to his arrest and transportation back to England. In January 1810 he accused Lord Castlereagh of trying to silence him and compounded the offence by repeating accusations against the politician about the abuse of United Irish prisoners in 1798.


Finnerty was tried for libel in February 1811 and sentenced to eighteen months in Lincoln Gaol. It was not the first time he had gone to prison as a result of clashing with Castlereagh: he had previously spent two years in prison in Dublin for printing a seditious libel and had been made to stand in the pillory. This second libel case was reported in great detail and Finnerty’s plight attracted widespread support, prompting a debate during the summer in the House of Commons and a public subscription, initiated by Sir Francis Burdett, which reached Pounds 2,000 on his release. Among those who contributed to a fund to maintain the journalist while he was still in prison was Percy Bysshe Shelley, then an undergraduate at Oxford in his second term at University College. His name appears in a list of four subscribers, each pledging a guinea, printed in the Oxford University and City Herald on March 2, 1811"

So, this "Poetical Essay" was written as a fund-raiser for Peter Finnerty.


It appeared as a 20-page pamphlet, dedicated to "HARRIET W-B-K" who is Harriet Westbrook, the woman he 'eloped with' in August 1811.

If we lived in a rational and just society, what would now follow would be a full text of the poem and, if I was up to it, my thoughts on it. But this isn't possible because the poem is 'in private hands'. As that 'rediscovered' copy is the only known copy in existence, it is entirely up to the owners as to whether the rest of the world is allowed to see it. Because we live in a world where the laws of property prevail over everything, it's thought rational and just that we are not allowed to see the full text of the poem. So, what follows is a digest of the meagre fare that we, the public, have been allowed to see. In short, it's a digest of what Woudhuysen was allowed to give, or chose to give, in his article of 2006.

The pamphlet has a “Preface”, in which Shelley calls for “a total reform in the licentiousness, luxury, depravity, prejudice, which involve society”, not by warfare, which he denounces, but by “gradual, yet decided intellectual exertions”.

Then comes the poem which is made up of 172 lines of rhyming couplets.

The subject matter of the poem includes:  devastations of war, the fearless voice of Sir Francis Burdett, the iniquities of Castlereagh, the tyranny of Napoleon and the oppressions of colonial India.

"Rather than remaining focused on Finnerty and Ireland, Shelley is concerned with England and the war," Woudhuysen writes.

He quotes from the poem:

"Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . .

When legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory’s views the titled idiot guide."

It is the “cold advisers of yet colder kings” who have
“the power to breathe
O’er all the world the infectious blast of death”.

Burdett is the hero of the poem and Castlereagh, with his “Vices as glaring as the noon-day sun”, its principal but unnamed target. As former President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary, Castlereagh stands for the iniquities of British rule in India:

“The fainting Indian, on his native plains,
Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains”

while in Europe, Napoleon is like an “evil spirit brooding over gore”.

Shelley’s concluding vision is of the virtuous reign which the overthrow of monarchy will bring:

"Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things, which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day-"

[I, (MR) can't be 100% sure of the punctuation and layout here - nor whether there are some lines missing from within this extract.]

Even though these are just glimpses, we can feel Shelley's rage here and some nicely spat-out phrases emerge: 'legal murders', 'titled idiot', 'cold advisers of yet colder kings', 'unnumbered pains', 'a suffering world'. It's not the poetry of contemplative metaphor, subtle ambiguity, internal monologue. It's the poetry of agitation, urgency and anger. It's in that halfway house between drama, journalism, speechifying and verse. Far too often, in the books of criticism, this kind of poetry is dismissed as 'propaganda' or 'soap-box' and the like. This misses the point. Poetry can do many different things in different ways. It can move towards or borrow the voices of other areas of language-use (other forms of 'discourse', if you like). I am always bemused as to why people who object to this kind of poetry might well be quite happy to listen to a political speech or read a column in a newspaper which uses similar language similar to the language of this poem. This is poetry wearing these kinds of clothes for this particular outing. In the right place at the right time, this could and would do its job: support or engage our indignation over the matter of, say, arbitrary rule and wanton death.

I hope that people hearing Maxine Peake's reading of "The Masque of Anarchy" get a sense of that. As John Mullan explained in the Guardian the other day, that great revolutionary poem didn't see the light of day for a good few years after the Peterloo Massacre for which it was written. Interestingly and valuably, the "Poetical Essay" appeared in the eye of the storm. I haven't yet been able to piece together how successful it was in raising money for Finnerty. We might also ask how 'successful' it was in aiding such matters as the overthrow of the arbitrary rule of 'titled idiots', British rule in Ireland and India and the winning of a society based on peace, love, concord and virtue. In truth, we shall never know. The British had to leave India - not before causing devastation, famine and death. The British have left most of Ireland - not before embroiling themselves with many dirty wars. Titled idiots don't get power simply by being titled idiots but people like Jeremy Paxman have shown how some very old networks of power run through the British ruling class. Put it this way, if you were on hand at the dissolution of the monasteries you're probably still doing OK. The future society that Shelley was dreaming of? Only happened in that woolly Olympics sort of a way. When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, and there is, say the bankers' casino writing off of trillions, then 'concord' is replaced by 'austerity'. Obviously, poor people must pay for rich people's policies. Obviously.

Anyway, around the time of the publication of the poem, Shelley was expelled ('sent down') from University College, Oxford. It's been thought that this was largely or entirely for his writing of an essay, "The Necessity of Atheism". Scholars haven't yet decided whether this "Poetical Essay" was a contributing factor to his explosion.

 By reading this blog, you are reading the only words that we the public have so far been allowed to see. Since the publication of Woudhuysen's article, I've tried in various ways to cause a stink about the squirrelling away of the poem: two letters to the Times Literary Supplement trying to rouse the serried ranks of Eng Lit scholars to fight for the release of the Shelley One. Response: zilch. I've written several times to the Guardian who have printed the letters and an article on Comment is Free. Response: zilch. I've tried to get a radio programme and a TV film commissioned either as stand-alones or as part of a series looking at the long and absurd story of the ownership and privatisation of literature. Response: unsuccessful.

So where is the poem, who's got it and why?

As Woudhuysen explained in his article, the poem emerged from some kind of private collection or library to be sold by the antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch. I assumed that the first buyers would be the British Library, if not the Bodleian Library, if not - given its link to Ireland - the National Library of Ireland. Either these libraries weren't interested or they didn't have the dosh that Quaritch and/or the original owners wanted for it. You and I might guess what sort of price this might be - 20 grand? 50 grand? And secondarily, we might ask why would that be too much for one of these great national libraries to get hold of and make universally available a work by one of the country's foremost poets.

Needless to say, I find all this sickening and ironic. Any day of the week, we are regaled with self-congratulatory crap about how we live in a free country, ideas circulate freely, our politicians, our justice system and our press safeguard free speech, Britain has been at the forefront of the establishment of the rule of law, democracy and tolerance etc etc. As it happens, I'm someone who thinks that all these claims and statements are only partially true, usually contingent on such matters as 'well, it all depends on which part of Britain's rule you're living under" or 'well there's never been democracy and freedom when it comes to control over the resources of the earth or the products and services that spring from our hands and brains' or "there's hardly much freedom or democracy when it comes to the moment of declaring or justifying war"...and so on.

However, there are times - particularly tucked away in the corridors and rooms of universities you can kid yourself that these freedoms are absolute. With this episode, I do have to say it's a matter of 'kidding' myself. There is only one law that prevails here: "he who owns, hides". This isn't just a matter of crazy selfishness. We might imagine the owner in some kind of megalomaniac trance, poring over the pamphlet screaming, "All mine, all mine!" Tempted though I am by this gothic image, I have to concede it misses the point.

There is only one point. The owner of the pamphlet wants to make a buck. He's waiting for the value to go up. He's invested a few grand in it. He wants that pile to come back - with interest. For that to happen, he must not and cannot let us see the whole poem and circulate it.

Now, if this was a poem about the beauties of gold, the necessity of torture, the glories of mammon - it would all fit rather nicely. But - and I hardly need to say it - this is a poem about the cruelty of war, the arbitrary power of monarchy and a wish that a world could be ruled by peace, love, concord and virtue.  More specifically, Shelley puts himself as one of the tiny few poets in the history of English literature who opposed the setting up of what we now call the 'British Empire'. The great critic Edward Said was wont to complain that English Literature had no voices that opposed this Empire, opposed colonial rule in India or opposed the imposition of slavery and genocide on millions of people.  He wasn't 100% correct - even on the knowledge available to him in his own life: the Chartist poet Ernest Jones had words on the matter. Even so, we can see here that Shelley had strong words  - and in the true spirit of solidarity, campaigning and struggle put the poem at the service of a fight for - yes - the freedom of speech! Yet, we are not free to read the poem. We must wait till its value rises and one of our libraries finds the money to buy it.

The owner of the poem is in fact Bernard Quaritch. The booksellers bought the poem from the person or persons who so happened to find the pamphlet in their collection.

John Rose re SWP + my reply

My old friend John Rose has asked me to put this letter up on my blog. Here it is:


Mike,

You and I have been good friends for years - more or less since that great year of '68. You have not only been a trusted friend - but a trusted comrade as well, even if your disagreement with our 'Leninist' model of organising inhibited you from joining us. Your close and critical reading of all of the chapters before publication for my book The Myths of Zionism helped guarantee its success.We recently spoke together at the Bookmarks Holocaust Day event at Bookmarks, the Socialist Bookshop on the subject of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Bookmarks tell me that you have kindly offered to help promote the new 70th anniversary edition The Ghetto Fights by Marek Edelman which I/we launched at our Marxism Festival last week.
Over the last few months you and I have had furious e mail and text exchanges about the swp's internal developments. More recently in the light of important changes that are now underway in the organisation which address all the issues that you raise, I offered to meet you and discuss them. I pointed out to you that only a face to face discussion can clarify matters in a way that is simply not possible by relying on e mail and text exchanges, given the proper necessity of respecting principles of confidentiality.
For reasons best known to yourself, you have felt unable to do so, but I be obliged if you would let readers of your blog know that that my offer remains open.
Many thanks
John


My reply:

Hi John

Thanks for this.

The problem here is that I've become the story. I'm not the story. The story is a) the mishandling of a dispute b) the mishandling of the mishandling c) the lack of an open approach to your friends and allies in what we call the 'movement'.

As you've asked for this letter to be made public, I can only think that you feel that some part of it makes a point to the outside world. I'm guessing that this is the part where you ask me, in effect, why I haven't discussed this matter whilst 'respecting principles of confidentiality'.  Aha - surely this shows that Rosen has not been totally honest in his open letters...he could have heard the whole truth...he would then have not needed to go public about all this...etc etc.

I can explain. It is precisely because you wanted to have a 'confidential' talk about this that I found myself resisting your suggestion.  I'll be blunt, I don't want to be the recipient or owner of any confidences in this matter.  That's the last thing in the world I want.  The dispute has been played out in various kinds of public forums. The consequence is that many of us who've been involved in eg Marxism, LMHR, UAF, Respect, ANL, Stop the War etc etc feel that we are entitled to be told what's going on  - but not in terms of confidences - only in terms of why a proper procedure wasn't followed, why the SWP couldn't have admitted that it should have followed a proper procedure, why it couldn't have admitted that its committees were the inappropriate means by which this dispute was heard, why it hasn't hurried to put a proper procedure in place and why the person we call Delta went on being involved in LMHR and UAF long after the dispute was underway. And, I hasten to add, this is not because I am prejudging him as guilty. I repeat: I am not prejudging him as guilty. It is because this would have been the right way to proceed - for the benefit of all parties: the accusers, the accused, the SWP and the rest of us on the outside. I repeat, the SWP has set out its stall in relation to sexual oppression, liberation and equality. It can hardly complain if people on the outside ask how this dispute matches the principles and analysis that the SWP has put before us.

You mention 'The Ghetto Fights'.  In fact, my offer was more than the one you mention. I said to Bookmarks that if they wrote an appeal I would kick off some crowd-funding with a contribution.

My Reply to "SWP Party Loyalist"

For convenience sake, I'm repeating my reply to Nick Grant (on the end of previous blog) as a separate blog entry

Hello Nick.

You suggest I have been and am still being 'unhelpful'. Excuse me if a picture comes to mind here of you and others driving a coach over a cliff while some people on board and others - me included -  on the road side are shouting, "Stop!" To which, you are shouting, "You're being unhelpful!"

Then, a thought about your tone: you describe some people as: "assorted dishonest opportunists and deadbeats who've made their lives busy yelping at their keyboards for eight months ".  It's a nice phrase but it seems as if you're doing a bit of lumping and clumping here. All sorts of people with a range of views have come to the internet to express themselves on this matter. Some of them may be, as you suggest, being opportunistic about using this case as a means to beat down the SWP. The problem though is that if you shoot yourself in the foot, you can't accuse your enemy of doing it. Some of them have (I think) made the mistake of claiming to know what happened in this case. You imply that I've done that too. I don't think so. I'm not the most consistent of people so forgive me if I'm making a claim I can't substantiate but as far as I know I haven't stated anything about this case or how the SWP has behaved that isn't fully known and agreed.

However, you seem to be saying something else here: that I and others have no right to have spoken about this case in public. I tried to make clear in what I wrote yesterday that the reason why some of us who are not in the SWP feel we have a right is not because of an abstract (though valuable) notion about freedom of speech. The reason why is because throughout most of our adult lives we have been approached, coaxed and appealed to by the SWP to agree with views, actions and campaigns. You are not a private chess club. You are a public political organism staking claims to have a particular expertise in all politics, including this matter of sexual oppression, liberation and equality. Many of us have had direct and frequent dealings with Delta. He's written to us, spoken to us and, I for one, have spoken on platforms with him. The idea that we should not voice our concerns about what has emerged is not sustainable. Again, as far as I know and remember, I have only ever raised it as a matter of what I boringly keep calling 'procedure'. If I strayed from that at some point in a comments thread, I apologise.

As I've seen from the comments thread on facebook following my blog yesterday, no one is going to apologise to me or to anyone else on the left that organisations like Love Music Hate Racism and Unite Against Fascism have been compromised by the continuing presence of someone who the SWP should have "suspended without prejudice".

You and I clearly know of examples of cases analogous to this being handled in work situations. We seem to draw different conclusions from these experiences. The occasions I know of proceeded extremely promptly and though of course some confidentiality was compromised (ie the identity of the suspended person was known), when that person was reinstated it was assumed that it had been shown to all parties concerned that there was no case to be answered. End of. What I find staggering is that though you know of procedures like this a hundred times better than me - and presumably find them in the main the least worst option - you write here of committees and hearings and votes and reports. What? Are these better ways to handle matters like this? Is the SWP so full of right-on folks that they don't need to do things in the trade union way? Does the SWP live in some kind of utopian bubble where there is a 'real' justice that can be meted out which the rest of us can't get access to?

You raise all the old objections about police and an apparent sympathy with the wishes of the accuser that the case be heard by the SWP.  I repeat, in case you haven't read it: the procedure to have followed was
1. Suspend the accused on full pay with no prejudice, ask him to withdraw from all party activity including organisations he was actively involved in like LMHR and UAF.
2. Offer the accuser(s) help. If they wanted it, they could have it. If they didn't want it, they didn't have to have it.
3. You could have said clearly to the accuser that the SWP is not the appropriate forum for considering a matter like this. This is not only or simply because it is defined by the state as 'criminal'. It is actually for humane reasons that the procedures that you could or would put in place to 'hear' this case would be (and were) totally inappropriate. The SWP didn't do better than what people do in workplaces. It did worse.
4. Then the organisation could have waited. It is not possible to know what might have taken place next and I'm not making any presumptions about guilt or innocence, true or false accusations here. What  you and I could do, though, is draw up a flow chart of possible outcomes, all of which seem to me to be better than what has actually taken place! For example, the parties concerned might have chosen to go to mediation - yes - with people known and respected by both parties. Perhaps either or both parties might have chosen to go to people known and respected by both for 'help'. Perhaps either or both would enjoy having a private confidential space in which to say how or why they were in the situation they were in. This may or may not have resolved the issue. I'm not someone who thinks the talking cure  solves everything but who knows, on this occasion it might have helped. What do you think?

Instead, what the SWP has is surely by any account - sympathetic or not - a mess.  There is Delta's resignation without explanation. You don't need reminding but that's fast beginning to look like the rubbing out of Trotsky's face on the famous photograph. Delta has just disappeared. There have been mass resignations - some of whom are presumably the 'deadbeats' you refer to? If so, they were yesterday's 'comrades', weren't they? And there are the many people who are still in the organisation who are dissatisfied with how things have gone on. I suspect that you are going to have much more bother with them than with me. Perhaps your letter to me was intended more for them than for me. Certainly its slightly menacing tone is a bit of damp fart as far as I'm concerned. The last time I was on the receiving end of that kind of apparatchik stare was when I worked with Ewan MacColl in the early 1970s. I don't think you need to do that sort of thing, do you?

At some point, we could have a conversation about 'authority' and 'power'.  Something has happened in this case which leads me to think that in the heart of the left we haven't succeeded in distinguishing between respect for people's ideas and the power we then let them have. What seems to happen is that when we come to respect or admire someone's (or a group's) ideas and experience, we have a tendency to let them or encourage them to have an authority over us.

As for my 'Leninist doubts' - there are several ways of looking at that. Yes, you could represent them for your convenience as weaselly. Another way might be to see that I thought my critique of what you are calling 'Leninism' was a bit abstract. So, to test it, I told myself that I would operate on an issue by issue, campaign by campaign basis. If I could support, I would support. If this support outweighed my doubts then (I thought) I might prove myself wrong. I don't think I ever kept this secret, did I? On various occasions people asked me why I was not a member and I told them. Perhaps you forgot to ask. Funnily enough, no one seemed particularly bothered at the time. Quite the opposite: "Mike, please write this, please speak here, please do a turn at this event..." Now I've become 'transcendental' (that's a good gag by the way) it's become a bother. It's of course a very handy way to deflect what I've got to say. Neat.

Trenchant reply from SWP loyalist

In response to what I wrote in the previous blog, I received this on facebook from Nick Grant, someone I've known and worked with on and off for many years:

"Can I object to your continuing unhelpful contributions Michael? "It seems to me that throughout this whole affair I've seen aspects of this state of mind when reading what SWP loyalists have written. That's to say, 'if we concede that we've got something wrong with this Comrade Delta affair, this will only bring comfort to the enemy...so even though something's not right, loyalty comes first'. Or put another way: 'if the Daily Mail are saying that we got it wrong, we'll have to say that we're getting it right'." Now I presume this is not any kind of direct quote Michael, and if anyone has indeed said such words then they clearly are detached from revolutionary politics or reality in general, but I am sorry that for me you have not "typified it right". So, for example, my loyalty has indeed been to the honour and confidentiality of the complainant, the accused and the comrades who were given a no-win situation once the comrade insisted on a hearing taking place. One option, which in retrospect I think should have happened, was for the SWP DC to refuse to hear the case. The details were apparently a few years old and if true should have been reported to the police long ago. To do that however may well have opened similar floodgates of abuse. But has it crossed your mind that because I have no truck with the assorted dishonest opportunists and deadbeats who've made their lives busy yelping at their keyboards for eight months I do not, and should not, know any of the actual detailsof the infamous case. You seem to know far more "of the facts" than I do as an SWP national committee member, enough seemingly to expound yet again on the matter based on very partial information. I do a lot of work with teachers who are accused of safeguarding issues, including allegations of child abuse and harrassment of colleagues, and the core problem is one of confidentiality in order to allow due process. The cost of confidentiality is gossip, around staffrooms and in pubs, sometimes even on FB or blogs which results in further disciplinary cases! The SWP CC or DC or maybe some individuals could have blurted across the blogosphere some of the issues which lead to a female-dominated, highly-experienced group of comrades arriving at a certain decision. But didn't because we insisted on maintaining that confidentiality, until the only democratically accountable forum according to democratically elected bodies and rules- the SWP National Conference. And the report there from comrades was the one that I trust. Those comrades were re-elected unopposed and are now reviewing their procedures at the behest of a subsequent conference, which nobody has yet seen but which everyone including you presume will be a continuation of the same old same old. And do you really buy the idea that SWP comrades operate on the trade union but sentimental notion that you offer unconditional support whatever the circumstances to any comrade in trouble as was at the heart of the factionalista mischief making? Hope not. A true comrade will tell another if they have fucked up. A true comrade will not bend any facts or procedures and will tell it like it is. I am sorry to say that your insinuation along with so many others that we have leading women and rank and file sisters who are so beholden to some form of machismo spell that they are no better than a bunch of Stepford Wives, brain-washed into servitude and gross contradiction of core politics by charismatic men is just hogwash. Instead of hovering at a transcendental distance Michael and prolonging the toxicity maybe you could talk to some of them or us. It's a strange place that I find myself in because for decades I was treated as an Aunt Sally by successive CC members who found me too outspoken and irreverent for their liking, and jumped at the opportunity to contradict some observation or argument that I raised. My ego is not so vital that I needed their permission to continue as a revolutionary when all else - social democracy and Stalinism - was and is a dead-end. But I am still there when they are gone. It's such a pity you have never been there to do likewise, seemingly keeping schtum on the Leninist doubts you harboured all the time that Marxism or other events gave you a platform. I do not know why MS has resigned or now. But I do not think it was another conspiratorial step by the CC. But the vitriolic treatment he has had would have been as bad or worse had he resigned or been suspended much earlier. Obviously I cherish all the work you have done for the movement especially in education and will do again no doubt, and I do not want to antagonise you but you are not the only one to be sad - about how this recklessness persists and who fans its flames."

Underneath this on facebook 7 people have 'liked' this and then there are the following comments:


Char Lotte one option was not to hear the case because time had passed, Nick? Are you being serious?
6 hours ago via mobile · Like · 3

Marie Clare Do not try to bully Michael into silence Nick. Do not even DARE.
6 hours ago · Like · 4

Tim Nelson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fI7zm7RXHs

Magic Roundabout Theme
The Magic Roundabout theme tune. Best viewed in HD for best sound quality.
6 hours ago · Like · Remove Preview

Marie Clare "I do a lot of work with teachers who are accused of safeguarding issues, including allegations of child abuse and harrassment of colleagues" - SCARY. Do they know about you?
6 hours ago · Like · 4

Andy Lawson i hope this doesn't get deleted. people should know what a disgusting misogynist bully nick grant is. and i would fear for any child who reported abuse to him, especially as he would presumably tell them to get fucked if time had elapsed before it was reported (although it is of course worth pointing out that what with being both a line-manager, and having shedloads of facility time means he doesn't often actually teach a class).
6 hours ago · Edited · Like · 5

Marie Clare 'keyboard warrior' Nick Grant enjoys telling women discussing their experiences of rape and sexual abuse to 'get over it'. He shouldn't be anywhere near any such cases. He is a disgrace. And I have screenshots if anyone wants them.
6 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2

Tim Nelson Post them here Marie Clare
6 hours ago · Like · 1

Arnie Joahill "I have no truck with the assorted dishonest opportunists and deadbeats who've made their lives busy yelping at their keyboards for eight months I do not, and should not, know any of the actual detailsof the infamous case. You seem to know far more "of the facts" than I do as an SWP national committee member, enough seemingly to expound yet again on the matter based on very partial information. "

Thats really strange, because I remember your almost non-existent particpation in Ealing Branch for a long time, despite pleas for you to get involved, come dispute time you pop up with some informed views out of no where, continuing to forward them through the pre-conference aggregate period, YOU said the allegation was 'NOT RAPE', a LIE fed by the CC to the old cadre of the organisation and many organisers, including west london who went on to defend that the allegation was not 'rape' and hounded anyone who even mentioned or queried the topic... LATER to find out that the CC had lied to you. So don't play stupid nick

and in january conference you were factionalising and talking to as many fucking people as you could about how great martin was and that there was a "plot" going on.

the only deadbeat is unaccountable bureacratic lieing scum like yourself who need booting out of the party, purging out of the left and left to rot.
6 hours ago · Like · 7

Andy Lawson "It's a strange place that I find myself in because for decades I was treated as an Aunt Sally by successive CC members who found me too outspoken and irreverent for their liking"

strange indeed - cc members may or may not have thought that; the rest of us just saw you as a rich bureaucrat windbag
6 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1

Jennifer Izaakson Very little of this post makes sense. Isn't this bloke a teacher?
6 hours ago · Like

Tim Nelson He manages teachers
6 hours ago · Like

Jennifer Izaakson Ah. Makes sense.
6 hours ago · Like · 2

Andy Lawson " I do not know why MS has resigned or now. "

REALLY? you really can't think of any reason? come on now, everyone else has worked this one out
6 hours ago · Like · 7

Jennifer Izaakson "I do a lot of work with teachers who are accused of safeguarding issues, including allegations of child abuse and harrassment of colleagues" - And you make sure they're not heard properly cos they're probably making it up? Is that an admission?
6 hours ago · Edited · Like

Char Lotte "A true comrade will not bend any facts or procedures". On this point we agree, Nick. It's just a pity that your leadership body think facts that are not convenient can be thrown out. It's also a pity your leadership has lied, dissembles and smeared.

Maybe you'd like to raise your definition of a 'true comrade' with them.
6 hours ago via mobile · Like

Jennifer Izaakson For £20 I'll show Nick how to paragraph.
6 hours ago · Like · 7

Char Lotte Nick, didn't you kick Adam Marks out your band when he got expelled?
6 hours ago via mobile · Like · 4

Char Lotte Nick, didn't you say you hoped the person who robbed your house was *obviously* a junkie and should die?
6 hours ago via mobile · Like · 6

Char Lotte Nick, didn't you call us all opportunists and deadbeats who've done nothing but yelp at our keyboards... By using your keyboard?
5 hours ago via mobile · Like · 5

Marie Clare Tim due to privacy of others on screenshot, (particularly the female comrade who his 'get over it' was directed at) won't post up in public right now.
5 hours ago · Like · 2

Alex Snowdon This is wrong from start to finish, but the most troubling bit is when Nick argues that SWP oppositionists should have told the two women complainants that they had 'fucked up'. He writes: 'And do you really buy the idea that SWP comrades operate on th...See More
5 hours ago · Like

Luke Stobart The DC shouldn't have heard a rape case??!! Nobody should go on facebook but you Nick?! Not in my name Nick. An appalled SWP member.
5 hours ago · Like · 2

Nick Jonz I am really pleased that somebody with the stature of Michael Rosen has spoken out. This will influence how people see things and give reassurance to those who have thought like him and raised concerns. Nick Grant doe not have such stature and commands...See More
5 hours ago · Like · 1

Luke Stobart And the two women complainants should have been told they "fucked up"?!... These words are a disgrace to the party.
4 hours ago · Like · 2

Here follow my comments:

Hello Nick.

You suggest I have been and am still being 'unhelpful'. Excuse me if a picture comes to mind here of you and others driving a coach over a cliff while some people on board and others - me included -  on the road side are shouting, "Stop!" To which, you are shouting, "You're being unhelpful!"

Then, a thought about your tone: you describe some people as: "assorted dishonest opportunists and deadbeats who've made their lives busy yelping at their keyboards for eight months ".  It's a nice phrase but it seems as if you're doing a bit of lumping and clumping here. All sorts of people with a range of views have come to the internet to express themselves on this matter. Some of them may be, as you suggest, being opportunistic about using this case as a means to beat down the SWP. The problem though is that if you shoot yourself in the foot, you can't accuse your enemy of doing it. Some of them have (I think) made the mistake of claiming to know what happened in this case. You imply that I've done that too. I don't think so. I'm not the most consistent of people so forgive me if I'm making a claim I can't substantiate but as far as I know I haven't stated anything about this case or how the SWP has behaved that isn't fully known and agreed. 

However, you seem to be saying something else here: that I and others have no right to have spoken about this case in public. I tried to make clear in what I wrote yesterday that the reason why some of us who are not in the SWP feel we have a right is not because of an abstract (though valuable) notion about freedom of speech. The reason why is because throughout most of our adult lives we have been approached, coaxed and appealed to by the SWP to agree with views, actions and campaigns. You are not a private chess club. You are a public political organism staking claims to have a particular expertise in all politics, including this matter of sexual oppression, liberation and equality. Many of us have had direct and frequent dealings with Delta. He's written to us, spoken to us and, I for one, have spoken on platforms with him. The idea that we should not voice our concerns about what has emerged is not sustainable. Again, as far as I know and remember, I have only ever raised it as a matter of what I boringly keep calling 'procedure'. If I strayed from that at some point in a comments thread, I apologise. 

As I've seen from the comments thread on facebook following my blog yesterday, no one is going to apologise to me or to anyone else on the left that organisations like Love Music Hate Racism and Unite Against Fascism have been compromised by the continuing presence of someone who the SWP should have "suspended without prejudice". 

You and I clearly know of examples of cases analogous to this being handled in work situations. We seem to draw different conclusions from these experiences. The occasions I know of proceeded extremely promptly and though of course some confidentiality was compromised (ie the identity of the suspended person was known), when that person was reinstated it was assumed that it had been shown to all parties concerned that there was no case to be answered. End of. What I find staggering is that though you know of procedures like this a hundred times better than me - and presumably find them in the main the least worst option - you write here of committees and hearings and votes and reports. What? Are these better ways to handle matters like this? Is the SWP so full of right-on folks that they don't need to do things in the trade union way? Does the SWP live in some kind of utopian bubble where there is a 'real' justice that can be meted out which the rest of us can't get access to? 

You raise all the old objections about police and an apparent sympathy with the wishes of the accuser that the case be heard by the SWP.  I repeat, in case you haven't read it: the procedure to have followed was 

1. Suspend the accused on full pay with no prejudice, ask him to withdraw from all party activity including organisations he was actively involved in like LMHR and UAF. 

2. Offer the accuser(s) help. If they wanted it, they could have it. If they didn't want it, they didn't have to have it. 

3. You could have said clearly to the accuser that the SWP is not the appropriate forum for considering a matter like this. This is not only or simply because it is defined by the state as 'criminal'. It is actually for humane reasons that the procedures that you could or would put in place to 'hear' this case would be (and were) totally inappropriate. The SWP didn't do better than what people do in workplaces. It did worse. 

4. Then the organisation could have waited. It is not possible to know what might have taken place next and I'm not making any presumptions about guilt or innocence, true or false accusations here. What  you and I could do, though, is draw up a flow chart of possible outcomes, all of which seem to me to be better than what has actually taken place! For example, the parties concerned might have chosen to go to mediation - yes - with people known and respected by both parties. Perhaps either or both parties might have chosen to go to people known and respected by both for 'help'. Perhaps either or both would enjoy having a private confidential space in which to say how or why they were in the situation they were in. This may or may not have resolved the issue. I'm not someone who thinks the talking cure  solves everything but who knows, on this occasion it might have helped. What do you think?

Instead, what the SWP has is surely by any account - sympathetic or not - a mess.  There is Delta's resignation without explanation. You don't need reminding but that's fast beginning to look like the rubbing out of Trotsky's face on the famous photograph. Delta has just disappeared. There have been mass resignations - some of whom are presumably the 'deadbeats' you refer to? If so, they were yesterday's 'comrades', weren't they? And there are the many people who are still in the organisation who are dissatisfied with how things have gone on. I suspect that you are going to have much more bother with them than with me. Perhaps your letter to me was intended more for them than for me. Certainly its slightly menacing tone is a bit of damp fart as far as I'm concerned. The last time I was on the receiving end of that kind of apparatchik stare was when I worked with Ewan MacColl in the early 1970s. I don't think you need to do that sort of thing, do you? 

At some point, we could have a conversation about 'authority' and 'power'.  Something has happened in this case which leads me to think that in the heart of the left we haven't succeeded in distinguishing between respect for people's ideas and the power we then let them have. What seems to happen is that when we come to respect or admire someone's (or a group's) ideas and experience, we have a tendency to let them or encourage them to have an authority over us. 

As for my 'Leninist doubts' - there are several ways of looking at that. Yes, you could represent them for your convenience as weaselly. Another way might be to see that I thought my critique of what you are calling 'Leninism' was a bit abstract. So, to test it, I told myself that I would operate on an issue by issue, campaign by campaign basis. If I could support, I would support. If this support outweighed my doubts then (I thought) I might prove myself wrong. I don't think I ever kept this secret, did I? On various occasions people asked me why I was not a member and I told them. Perhaps you forgot to ask. Funnily enough, no one seemed particularly bothered at the time. Quite the opposite: "Mike, please write this, please speak here, please do a turn at this event..." Now I've become 'transcendental' (that's a good gag by the way) it's become a bother. It's of course a very handy way to deflect what I've got to say. Neat. 

Open letter to the SWP

It's no secret that for many years I was personally and politically close to the SWP and its forerunner the International Socialists. This meant that I read and sometimes wrote for your journals, I supported many of the campaigns you supported or initiated and over the years,  I have been personally friendly with several of your prominent members.

It's also no secret that I was appalled by the events that unfolded around "Comrade Delta". This is not because I have assumed that he was guilty of what he was accused of. I will repeat that: I have not assumed that he is guilty of what he was accused of. My disagreement is based entirely on a view of the absurd and inappropriate procedures you followed. Everything that I have read on this matter leads me to believe that you ended up putting the survival of the organisation ahead of the very principles that you advocate.

The moment the accusation was made, all you needed to have done was to have suspended Delta with 'no prejudice' on full pay. The right and proper thing for you to have done was to have interpreted that as suspension from all his activities for the SWP including organisations where the SWP works with others as with Love Music Hate Racism and United Against Fascism. You could and should have offered the accuser/accusers the best possible advice you could find - including legal advice. At that point, you didn't need to have conducted an inquiry or put into practice any kind of disputes procedure. All you needed to have done was wait. By doing these things you would have behaved ethically and entirely in line with how any of your members would behave in a work situation. There is no justification for the proposition that the SWP should behave in any way that is different from the kind of procedures that have been won by trade unions in workplaces in order to safeguard everyone involved in such situations.

Instead of this, those of us on the outside of the organisation have witnessed what looks like a mixture of incompetence and arrogance. I would list these - in no order of importance - like this:

1. Even though your whole direction as an organisation is to face outwards, you have avoided giving honest accounts of what has been going on. If you think this is irrelevant or unnecessary, I would reply to you that this is part of the problem. As you know better than me, you're hardly shy about presenting to the world a view on matters of sexual oppression, liberation and equality. As this case has unfolded, you have failed totally in overcoming the problem that what you say and how you have behaved don't match up. From my perspective - (I don't speak for anyone else) - this strikes me as disastrous.

2. While we on the outside can see that there have been mass resignations, suspensions and the formation and dissolution of factions, the face presented to the outside world is of an organisation soldiering on, sure of itself, sure of its stand on everything, and indeed sure that it is the right kind of organisation. Frankly speaking, this too has looked absurd. You have been in trouble. What is to be gained by pretending that you're not?

3. This leads me to the question of structure. I am quite clear in my mind  - perhaps clearer than I have ever been - that now is not the time for a socialist organisation to take the form that your organisation has. As it happens, when IS became the SWP, I thought at the time that this was a mistake. It seemed to me then that it was, if nothing else, presumptuous. That's to say, it seemed to be a way of trying to create a leadership role ('vanguard', if you like) with the wrong personnel and at the wrong historical moment.

4. Over the years,  I've been keen to co-operate with individuals, journals, events and campaigns, I have worked with Comrade Delta. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of other non-SWP people could say the same. If for no other reason than that this group of people have worked with him, you owe us at the very least an account of what has gone on. By not doing so, you treat us with arrogance and disrespect. So we learn by rumour and internet chat that Comrade Delta has resigned from the SWP. Don't you see that that has an impact on how we view the SWP, LMHR and the UAF? Put another way: if you thought that Delta's intervention and presence in these organisations was significant then surely his sudden non-presence is just as significant? And if so, you need to explain and account for all this. If you don't, how do you think or expect that you can approach the outside world in the future?

5. To be clear, it is not the alleged behaviour of Comrade Delta, it's not the accusers' behaviour, it's not the behaviour of resigners, expellees or factions that has 'infected' your dealings with non-members or affected your standing in the world.  It is solely your handling of an accusation that has caused your problems. In other words, all the time being spent by the SWP in rooting out dissent, giving long lectures on the virtues of leninism, giving detailed accounts of why this or that faction have got it wrong, is utterly misspent. From out here, it all looks like pissing in the wind - or worse - deliberate obfuscation or crap busywork, displacement activity.

6. Unlike some others on the left, I don't think that you are on the verge of imminent collapse. I suspect you will carry on as you've been carrying on. You seem to have boundless energy, producing documents and journals, running meetings and events, 'getting on' with taking part in campaigns. As you haven't dealt with this crucial matter, involving a key member of your organisation in an open and ethical way, I won't be supporting events that are presented as SWP events. Of course, we will bump into each other in campaigns, where of course your comments on eg sexual oppression, liberation and equality will be looked at in a particular light. Actually, now I come to think of it, your claims to be able to handle things with adeptness and insight will be up for scrutiny too. I suspect that plenty of people in the environment of campaigns will also raise an eyebrow about the nature of the organisation that asks for support but was unable to fulfil the basic minimum when it came to an affair like this. You'll hate the term, but this whole matter has raised questions about your 'core values' (!).

7. It's quite simple, once it became clear that the organisation had screwed up, all you needed to have done was say, 'the organisation has screwed up'. Then, you could and should have quickly put into place the procedures that people follow in workplaces and announced that that was what you have done. Then you could and should have set up a discussion process which examined why and how an organisation espousing your views on sexual oppression, liberation and equality could have got it so wrong. Then you could and should have continued that discussion on how to get it right in future.  We all make mistakes. There is absolutely no reason why the SWP shouldn't have made a mistake. That's not the issue. The issue is how you handle a mistake when you make it.

8. I know there's a lot of fear and suspicion around, so just to be clear: what I've written here doesn't come from this or that faction, this or that grouping, or this or that party. It was written partly because I've received notes from SWP members saying that they are saddened that I have taken this position. I can assure you, they are not the only people saddened by what's happened. It depresses me to think that people whose opinions I valued could have walked into this thorn-bush and went on entangling themselves with it in the most ludicrous ways and still can't find a way out of it, even though the key figure in it all has walked away from it.

9. I often used to ask my parents about why they stayed in the Communist Party for so long, why they left, what they considered valuable about having been part of it...and so on. In these long discussions, one aspect that is relevant here, I think, is the point my father made about why he went on defending the CP and the Soviet Union even when he ceased to believe that it was right to do so. He said that that was because he felt that there was only one interest involved in attacking the CP and the Soviet Union: the 'bourgeoisie' or, as he always called it, 'the buggers-are-we'. So, he said, even as he might sometimes have felt that the CP or the Soviet Union was in some way wrong, he couldn't admit it or do anything about it, because to do so would make it easier for the enemy (bourgeoisie, ruling class, the bosses, international capitalism, etc) to survive and win. So, he shamefully admitted, he and our mother supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary because otherwise the enemy would move into Hungary and take over.

I am not going to claim that this is your Hungary moment. The fate of millions of Hungarians - and indeed of the whole eastern bloc (as was) - is very different from a few thousand of us on the left in Britain being worried, concerned or fed up. However, I'm going to draw one analogy, no matter how inappropriate it appears at first. It concerns the state of mind my father described that went on justifying the CP and the Soviet Union even when he knew it was wrong. It seems to me that throughout this whole affair I've seen aspects of this state of mind when reading what SWP loyalists have written. That's to say, 'if we concede that we've got something wrong with this Comrade Delta affair, this will only bring comfort to the enemy...so even though something's not right, loyalty comes first'. Or put another way: 'if the Daily Mail are saying that we got it wrong, we'll have to say that we're getting it right'.

All  I can say is that there comes a point at which this kind of view - if indeed I've typified it right - is not only unhelpful, it becomes dangerous. No, I'll put it another way: it brings ideas and views that I think are valuable and necessary into disrepute. Yes, I think that international capitalism can only offer inequality and war. It can develop 'production', it can develop 'the economy' but only by enriching tiny minorities, while dividing and impoverishing millions of others. An inevitable part of that is a state of permanent war. Trying to move from this status quo has been a project that has so far failed. No single person, no single organisation, no single country has the solution to this. There is no point in pretending that any group does. To my mind, what follows from this is that it is less necessary to recruit people to this or that organisation and much more important to develop the ideas and actions which enable people to see that this status quo is not necessary or inevitable.  People are entitled to examine us and ask us if we can suggest anything better. If, at the heart of what we're doing, there are things going on that are indefensible or plain wrong, we have to say so, or we go backwards. I think this last year is a good example of going backwards. Am I saddened by that? You bet I am.

PETITION ABOUT RANKING

IF YOU AGREE WITH THE BELOW CAN YOU PLEASE CONTACT SARA TOMLINSON BELOW OR TWEET ME WITH YOUR PROPER NAME AND ORGANISATION OR DO THE SAME WHERE I'VE POSTED IT ON FACEBOOK


We are writing to express our concern over the announcement on Weds of an increase in primary school floor targets, an increase in the amount of testing for primary school pupils and the intention to place all pupils in a league table ranked on ability. Rather than a philosophy of every child matters, this is a world where only the person at the top counts. Any child struggling to pass tests due to a special educational need is automatically labelled a failure.

Last month we held a conference to launch the Primary Charter. This was a conference which brought together teachers, parents, governors and teacher educators. We have produced a 'manifesto' for primary schools, outlining how we think pupils learn best. This includes trusting the professional judgement of teachers, allowing children to learn at their own pace and through play, while taking account of their own experiences. It involves giving pupils an opportunity to develop a love of learning and nurturing their ability to interact with others. We have already seen the damage done to children in this country through over-testing. Research has shown that our children are unhappy and more worried about tests than in any other developed country. Crucially this does not lead to improved educational outcomes. There is no evidence to show that testing and ranking children improves their learning, but plenty that demonstrates the effect being labelled a failure has on their self-esteem and confidence. We prefer to look to the model of education we see in Finland where no inspections, no punitive lesson observations and minimal testing leads to consistently high standards, huge levels of teacher satisfaction, minimal social selection and an education sector that is lauded throughout the world.

Instead we see an announcement today that the attainment thresholds schools must reach is to be increased from 60% to 85%. The government want to test children earlier and force a more formal education, learning by rote and parroting facts driven right down into the early years. We suspect this is part of a move to hand publically owned education over to the private sector though an increase in the number of schools forced to become academies. The signatories of the charter reject this model of education and appeal to parents, teachers and support staff to engage in a dialogue with schools to reject Gove's vision. The primary charter can be found on primarycharter.wordpress.com



Sara Tomlinson
Lambeth NUT
Hambrook House
Porden Rd SW2 5RW

Ranking children at 11 - what a waste

The plans announced (leaked?) today about testing 11 year olds are about 'ranking' children. It seems as if the aim is to find the 'top' and 'bottom' 10 per cent.

The idea behind ranking is trying to put human beings, with all their many characteristics, talents and quirks into 'order'. Why? Ultimately, it is in order to serve people with power rather than the totality of those being ranked. That's to say, those in power say that they want or need to select people according to their abilities to work for them. Clearly, if the state (ie our money) pays for the cost of testing everyone, this relieves 'business' of having to do some of this work.

However, ranking ultimately tells a person very little about ability, capability and experience. By its own definition, it's about relative worth: how one person stands in relation to another. Even then, this relative worth has no quantitative measure as it is only 'place' that is recorded. The analogy is a football league where we know who is first, second, third and so on, but we don't know the points difference between. In other words the differences may sometimes be 'significant', at other times they may not. The absurd thing about government or anyone else putting any weight on ranking is that this crucial aspect of testing (in their terms, not mine) is submerged or downgraded.

Then, the key behind any ranking is the question of what is being ranked. We've been told that the focus will be on 'core' subjects - English and Maths. I'm not clear whether the scores in the two subjects are to be amalgamated but I suspect so because that's what this kind of yardstick testing has done time and time again. Clearly, the success rate of students in subjects outside the core when doing GCSEs has irritated the right wing lobby as if doing well in any subject should be something to lament and decry rather than celebrate!

So, what does it mean to focus on the core and amalgamate the results when talking of pupils aged 11? It's been known that one consequence is that it results in a slewing of the results when trying to use them as predictors. We should remember that the history of education is littered with the failure of trying to label pupils at 11 with a view to using their scores as predictors of outcomes at 16 or beyond. My own education - and that of my peers - was heavily disfigured and distorted by that - slotting children into different kinds of schools and fixing people's destinies for years afterwards. Only last week, we had the statistically challenged head of Ofsted misunderstanding what a stat to do with variations between 11 year olds' and 16 year olds' test scores actually signified. He seemed to think that there should be exact correspondence between these test scores whereas the evidence suggests that there is no reason to think that there should be.

One of the reasons why there is variation and non-correspondence is a fundamental misunderstanding about what a human being is. You don't have to go along with everything that Howard Gardner says about 'multiple intelligences' but as a basic sense of how human beings are different, how these differences tend to 'clump' around certain capabilities surely there is something important here. Of course, I would say (wouldn't I?) that the job of education is most certainly not to fix these characteristics as all-defining and permanent, and I would say (wouldn't I?) that we have got nowhere near regarding people's capabilities as having parity of esteem.

In fact, this ranking (and the ranking of secondary schools according to English, Maths and Science scores, is an effort to push education in precisely the opposite direction: downgrading students, teachers and schools in regard of their abilities to do anything well outside of English, Maths and Science.

So, at the heart of this matter of ranking - quite apart from the pernicious element of labelling - is an enforced focussing of education on certain specific capabilities. To tell the truth, I don't think that this is all coming directly from 'business'. Much of this is motivated by feeble-minded electoral opportunism. It sounds 'tough' and 'rigorous' unlike all that other wishy-washy stuff outside of English and Maths. I mean to say, who wants people who are strong on compassion, curiosity, interpretation, invention and co-operation? I mean, when has civilisation ever needed such useless qualities? No, civilisation has advanced through focussing on learning by rote and performing fixed procedures accurately ie doing what you're told. And that is precisely how the enforced emphasis of ranking - based on this particular core - will impact on education.

I'm looking forward to reading how Clegg and Gove are going to explain (in their terms)  how 'Britain'  or 'this country' (when they mean England) is going to progress with the emphasis on the 'core' distorting education so much.

More thoughts on 'stability' in history.

Further to my thoughts on 'stability'.
This comes for the 'Official' site for the 'British Monarchy'





"The Hanoverians came to power in difficult circumstances that looked set to undermine the stability of British society.

The first of their Kings, George I, was only 52nd in line to the throne, but the nearest Protestant according to the Act of Settlement. Two descendants of James II, the deposed Stuart king, threatened to take the throne, and were supported by a number of 'Jacobites' throughout the realm.

For all that, the Hanoverian period was remarkably stable, not least because of the longevity of its kings. From 1714 through to 1837, there were only five monarchs, one of whom, George III, remains the longest reigning king in British History.

The period was also one of political stability, and the development of constitutional monarchy. For vast tracts of the eighteenth century, great Whig families dominated politics, while the early nineteenth century saw Tory domination.

Britain's first 'Prime' Minister, Robert Walpole, dates from this period, and income tax was introduced. Towards the end of the Hanoverian period, the Great Reform Act was passed, which amongst other things widened the electorate.

It was also in this period that Britain came to acquire much of her overseas empire, despite the loss of the American colonies, largely through foreign conquest in the various wars of the century. By the end of the Hanoverian period, the British Empire covered a third of the globe.

The theme of longevity was set to continue, as the longest reigning monarch in British history, Queen Victoria, prepared to take the throne."

So, under 'political stability' it was possible to 'lose' the 'American colonies' and 'acquire' much of an 'overseas empire' 'largely through foreign conquest' 'in various wars'.

I'm not sure what 'stability' means in this context - apart from the mostly trivial fact that the same family passed the crown down through its immediate descendants. Even by this account, it was a period of the most extraordinary upheaval in an area described as the 'third of the globe'. As it happens, the process was one of  appalling exploitation and oppression involving slavery, mass death and terrible hardship.

BBC "Ancient Greeks" We do have slaves. Wrapped up in prog 1

I have now seen episode 1 of the Ancient Greeks and slavery is given its place in the final ten minutes. Kind of. As Scott says, the 'civilisation rested on the labour of the slaves' and in an excellent sequence he takes us to the silver mines and uses contemporary writing about the conditions. All fine. However, the problem is that this is presented as 'another thing'. Having said that the civilisation 'rested' on slavery, the programmes together aren't able to show the links between that notion of humanity, the very extraction of wealth that he describes to the 'contradictory' ideas and practices he talks about.

In a modern context, we could compare it, say, with the 'strivers and skivers' rhetoric (or whatever they call it). We might say, for example, that this division of working people in the minds and rhetoric of our rulers is always present but a) it has a function ie it's not arbitrary and b) the fervour with which it is expressed and taken up government-friendly media varies over time. In a time of acute crisis for those that rule and those that own and control the wealth, it is absolutely essential for them (not for us) that they keep the lid on dissent, revolt and rebellion. Part of this is punitive - clamping down on demonstrations, longer prison sentences, part of this is divide and rule - claiming that one set of the exploited are better off than another, nastier than another, acting against your interests etc etc. But however it happens, it's all related to a basic underlying structure whereby those in power, those in authority, those who own and control most of the wealth, extract wealth from the labour of those without wealth. If you were making a TV programme about that in 2500 years time, you could of course tuck this fact away in the last ten minutes of programme 1, showing the remains of a factory or call centre, you could show the fabulous wealth of bankers and then in episode 2 scratch your head with puzzlement about how such obviously civilised people as David Cameron or David Starkey could have found such startling inequalities tolerable; or why and how it was possible for the Hillsborough case to have taken so long to unravel, or how it was possible for News Inc. to carry out illegal practices for so long etc etc...

BBC "Ancient Greeks". What, no slaves?

I watched Michael Scott talking about the Ancient Greeks last night. Did I miss something? His theme revolved around an apparently mysterious contradiction between the glorious civilisation of Ancient Greece - which apparently 'gave us' pretty well everything that is good while at the same being cruel and occasionally barbaric eg at the Olympic Games and in the execution of Socrates.

I'll leave to one side the matter of whether the Greeks did or did not give us all that wonderful stuff or not for a moment. What was even more mysterious than the matter of the apparent contradiction that Scott talked about was the fact that he didn't mention the 's' word: slavery. This is not just a 'moral' question. Slavery involves a particular kind of attitude to the whole meaning of what it is to be human. Embedded within that is an idea of what it means to survive, reproduce oneself, reproduce society and produce wealth. That's to say, Greek wealth, society, culture, 'civilisation' (whatever that means), rested on the fact that at the heart of these processes of 'reproduction' of the self and society was the institution of seizing and holding the labour power and identity of other human beings.

This is a kind of extreme violence - even when it isn't violent. That's to say, it holds the person, his or her mind and body, in enforced service to other humans - the master, or the master's family.

So, when Scott scratches his head and wonders or muses on the apparent contradiction between the Greeks' great contributions to thought etc etc and their apparent cruelty, it isn't really a contradiction at all. At the heart of their civilisation was something that was largely invisible (though not to Socrates!): that they were conducting a form of extreme everyday violence on thousands of other humans. Of course what the Greeks' great intellectuals and artists said was extraordinary and amazing and wonderful but their ability to spend time strolling about wondering about the mysteries of life, death, love, hate - even cruelty! - rested on the fact that thousands of people produced enough wealth to enable them to have the time and leisure to speculate on such matters. The fact that it also rested on violence is crucial to what Scott was talking about.

I find increasingly when I watch TV or listen to the radio that commentators casually absorb and repeat what are in effect the views and attitudes of 'authority'. That's to say, at any moment in history or now, there is the 'prevailing' or 'dominant' view. This is the outlook expressed explicitly or implicitly of those with the power. So, to take one example, a monarch who 'brings stability' is described as 'good'. This might mean not much more than stabilising the means of exploitation, domination and foreign conquest.  The very notion of 'stability' is a 'prevailing' or 'dominant' view of what is 'good'. Extrapolate that attitude to now, we have a 'stable' government that has been 'good' at overcoming the potential schisms that might have occurred with a coalition. However, that stability has just made it easier for the coalition to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. There isn't anything 'good' about it at all.

Educational League Table Lies

Michael Gove is extremely fond of citing the international tables which supposedly compare educational achievement. You might have thought that the journalists who repeat what he says about 'slumping' down tables (BBC) would pause a moment and scrutinize a) the tables themselves and b) the purpose to which they're being put by Gove.

Here are some observations:

1. Statistically a league table can only tell you about relative positions. A supposed 'slump' might mean a huge difference in performance, or a minute one. Think football league tables: being 3rd or 10th could be a matter of 2 or 3 points difference or 20 points difference. One is an insignificant difference and the other is significant. We are not being told whether the differences are significant or not. Just that there is a 'slump'.

2. Different international tables show different positions. This would suggest that international comparisons made on this basis are not fixed or certain.

3. One of the rules of statistics is that you must compare 'like with like'. Do the tables compare like with like? It would be fair to say that this is impossible for many reasons: the social, economic and cultural make-up and needs of different countries are different; what is being tested for is not the same; how the tests are conducted is not the same; the tests do not take place in the different countries' students' educational calendar at the same time (the students tested might have as much as nine months more or less schooling); it is a statistical nonsense to aggregate educational performance - too many different kinds of progress are going on.

4. Gove is selective in what kind of educational structure and content he pulls from the 'competitors'. As everyone now knows, he rejects Finland and opts for what he thinks is the Singaporean model ie rejects an education which involves trusting teachers and localities and opts for an authoritarian model. The Secretary of State for Education in England now controls the curriculum in local authority schools, and controls the rest directly from the DfE.

5. The economic argument that lies behind the league tables is absurd. The implication being touted is that England (the educational authority that Gove controls)  is 'falling behind' because its students are poorly educated.
i) England is not a separate economic unit from the UK or indeed from the EU, so whatever is being administered for England can't be separated out.
ii) If England 'fell behind' that would be as a result of the people who ran the economy when England fell behind! Most of these people are in their fifties and sixties when - in one of the narratives peddled by the right - education was much better.
iii) the relative economic performance by countries (bearing in mind that the 'country' that Gove rules over is not a country) is hardly dependent on small differences in educational performance. The various kinds of economic mess that the UK is in were caused by decisions made about what kinds of economic activity were thought to be best for the UK to carry on. As we know, two key decisions were made:
a) to shift the balance of British capitalism from manufacture towards financial services
b) to deregulate those financial services.

Put less formally, it meant that the economy was geared to casino capitalism. This put the power of the British economy into the hands of a tiny group of gamblers. They gambled and lost. As a result there are stupendous debts hanging about in the financial sector alongside stupendous hoards of capital. This is causing the UK's difficulties more than anything else.

Meanwhile, the 'solution' cooked up by the Tories and largely reinforced by Labour is cutting the 'cost' of paying wages and supporting those in difficulty. (It isn't a 'cost' because this is the majority of people trying to earn a living and get what they need. It's only a 'cost' looked at from the point of view of capitalism.)

So, any failure by the UK to make its way in the world is wrapped up in this particular twist in the history of capitalism and not with whether students are studying Shakespeare or not, or whether five year olds are doing fractions.

6. So if this is all about different kinds of smokescreen and bs., what is really going on?
i) educational policy as presented by ministers is more about political propaganda than education. It's about being seen to be 'tough' or 'good on detail' or 'traditional' or some such.
Mostly this is about
a) playing to the narrative of decline ('everything has gone to the dogs') which chimes with a nasty anti-youth, anti-child agenda peddled by politicians
b) it panders to some older people's notions that they are better educated than their offspring
c) it panders to one idea that has run through northern European culture for three hundred years, that the best thing you can do with children and young people is to control, contain and discipline them.

ii) the economic mess that both governments have administered is, in truth, out of their control. They are trying to manage a whirlwind. They willingly carry out policies that were demanded by the economic masters of the City and big business and all it has brought is hardship to the majority. Gassing on about 'world-class education' sounds like busy-work: 'Look what we're doing to make things better.' This is a con. Even if they were creating a 'world-class education' the effects wouldn't be felt for at least another 20 years! Their crisis is now and they are trying to use that particular disaster as a way of levering in changes to education now.

iii) apologies for repeating myself, but the key structural change that has taken place in education is that the Secretary of State has been given almost total power over schools and curriculum. No other section of government has this kind of totalitarian power. Old systems of modifying and balancing that power (mostly through local authorities and big government 'Reports' like Bullock and Plowden) have been swept aside. The Secretary now directly controls the opening and closing of thousands of schools in the UK without any reference to that locality. He or she now controls the curriculum and the exam system without any need to refer to any profession-wide Report, any group of the professionals - teachers or academics. The Department is now run by a system of patronage and on the Secretary's whim. He or she will talk of consultation but this is positively Tudor: people are invited to offer their 'suits' to the monarch and he or she decides which are good or not. Clearly, the most important suits are those which chime with his or her prejudices or the loudest noises in his or her political party. I think it's particularly interesting that at a time of economic chaos and uncertainty, power in education has become much more centralised. To my mind this expresses a loss of nerve about the control of ideas ('ideology' if you prefer). Authoritarian government is mostly linked to moments of high economic stress. I don't think I'm overstating it, if I say that the way we have allowed education to be run is becoming - choose your adjective - totalitarian, Stalinist or fascistic. It is dominated by unchecked decisions made in one room by one person.

7. There are alternative ways of running education in a modern economy. There are alternative ways of running education which harness the best of what teachers can do within a fair and egalitarian context. That requires a different way of thinking about academics, professionals and locally elected bodies. It requires central government providing a means by which classroom activity can go on as a result of these different sectors being allowed and encouraged to talk to each other within a framework determined by a sense of equal entitlement. The last twenty years have become obsessed with notions of the 'great school', the 'great school leader'. Very little attention has been placed on the notion of the great locality (ie where all children and young people live and go to school) where all schools, all teachers and all children were progressing well. That's where real reform could and should happen in education ie where all children and young people are being educated - not just some.

"Austerity? I'm Loving It" by Lord Greed.

My Guide to Austerity

by Lord Greed


Some people are finding it difficult to understand what Austerity is all about, so I've written this as a guide.

1. Some people seem to think that the most important point about Austerity is that it should get the economy going. This is silly. There's no way that Austerity can "get the economy going". Let me explain: I try to sell things. That means that I need people to buy things. They need money to buy things. Austerity is about taking money away from most people. If most people haven't got money to buy things, people like me don't want to expand our businesses or open new businesses. We just haven't got anyone to sell to. That's OK for me. I don't need to expand. I'm doing extremely well standing still.

2. Some people seem to think that the next most important thing about Austerity is that getting the government to spend less is going to get the economy going too. What a strange idea. The government spending less money doesn't make sure there's more money going round. Our banks and our government can just create money anyway.  No, if you want to find money, the best place to look is in the banks. We're hoarding money. Billions of it. Hundreds of billions of it. And we're not lending it. Why not? you might ask. Simple, because we're still in a state of panic about all the debts we ran up before the crash. We're not telling you how much this debt all adds up to because we want you to keep going on about the 'public debt'. Of course, we managed to get some governments to back our debts but that hasn't been enough to stop us hoarding.

3. So, what is going on? Well, it's quite simple really and it's only history repeating itself. Whenever people like me get into trouble, none of us great company owners wants to take the hit. So we try to 'improve our margins'.  One way to do this is to raise our prices. Difficult to do that when people are earning less. The other way is to sack people - that's good, and we're doing that. The other way is to freeze wages or even cut them. That's good, and we're doing that. All with the help of governments. So people are getting poorer. If governments can help me get the same work out of my workers while I'm paying them less, that's a result for me. I get richer, they get poorer.  And it's working. That's exactly what's happening. Put another way, Austerity is about transferring money from people who work for wages (and their dependents) to people like me who get money from profits.

4. So, Austerity is about making me richer. I could bore you with all the statistics showing this. The amazing thing is that people in the news rooms all over the world have these statistics, but they keep droning on and on about how 'we must bring down the national deficit" or "our country's bankrupt" and then they keep going on about how "we have to cut this kindergarten" or "we have to cut this library because there's no money left..." blah di blah. Rubbish, of course there's money. The banks are hoarding it. I've got billions myself. Yum yum. The great thing about them going on about all that, is that it takes attention away from me and my massive wealth. So I say, keep droning on, guys. You're doing great.

5. People ask me if capitalism is the best system there is for making and distributing the things we need and the wealth we create. Yes of course it is, because it makes me extremely rich. I own and control vast, unimaginable chunks of wealth and I boss hundreds of thousands of people around. Luckily, I have governments who help me do this by telling people that there's something special about me, that I am specially clever, or I am worth paying enormous respect to. That's why I'm a Lord. Governments are also very good explaining why this is the only way to run things. I particularly like it when ministers go on TV and talk about 'us' and 'the country' as if everyone is in the same boat. You ought to see my boat. You don't think I go to my Caribbean island in someone else's boat, do you?

6.  Most of us in my position know what we have to do: is beat the next guy. Now we can try to do this in several ways: we can pay our people less, we can make them work harder for the same money, we can get in machines to make our stuff more cheaply, we can try pushing up prices, we can get governments to give us special deals, we can fiddle our taxes, we can produce brilliant ads, we can foist our stuff on to people and countries by getting governments to do what we say...and so on. In fact, we try to do all these things. Can I be clear? None of this is about making sure that what we make or lend is of top quality or that it is particularly useful or good for the majority of people. It's just about whether we flog it or not.

7. Of course, you might say that this is how we got into the mess in the first place: we flogged mortgages and debts to people. Yes, yes but that's why we invent 'Austerity' so that we can get out of these sticky situations. We just get poor people to pay. And I stay rich...or get richer. Yum yum. Austerity? I'm loving it.