Not another meme…. influential lefties!

19 09 2010

Bob From Brockley has tagged me for this meme. The rules are to “present lists, one of good influences, one of people who have been too influential, and one of people I wish the left were more influenced by”

Tough one there Bob..especially as they have to be still alive….so I will try hard!! So here’s a personal list of the brilliant, bad and “wish people would take more notice of”….

Good influences

Lynne Segal - one of the first books I ever read on Socialist feminism as a teenager was, “Is the Future Female”… Damn fine text! She certainly has had a profound influence on my own feminism, the intertwining of capitalism and patriarchy, her exploration and analysis of women’s oppression and liberation. I have all her books on my bookshelf and long may she continue to write.

Angela Davis – another woman who has influenced my radicalism, activism and feminism especially her books on class, race and women. Her later work on the American prison system and racism is politically invaluable (and would really recomend people read it). But for me, this quote is imperative to the struggle “We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society”.

Katy Clark - fantastic Labour MP, feminist, pro-choice and trade unionist, member of the Labour Representation Committee. A committed and tireless Socialist, an impressive speaker too. A really exceptional woman who is such an activist hardworking MP.

Haifa Zangana – woman Iraqi activist who has stood up against Ba’thism and imperialist occupiers. Her book “City of Widows” is impressive and well recommended. She is consistently on the side of the oppressed. And I have heard her speak powerfully many times.

Marcia and Samantha Rigg – two sisters who are fighting for justice, an uphill struggle trying to hold the police to account for the death of their brother Sean. I knew both of them when I was a child as they went to the same school as I did. And it is such tragic circumstances in which to meet them both again. Sam and Marcia are dynamic in pursuing justice, I admire and respect them both deeply.

Bad influences

The so-called “decent” Left – Now this takes up my five. This lot are a left cover for imperialism, from the likes of Christopher Hitchens to Nick Cohen to David Aaronovitch to Norman Geras. Shame on them. Iraq has not been “liberated” by war and occupation it has been destroyed!

Not influential enough

Majority of women…well especially in the blogosphere as Cath Elliott excellently illustrates here in the “Great Ignored”. There are some wonderfully talented and inspiring political women in the blogosphere who get looked over, invisible and ignored. Wikio take note (and also the rest of the left white male dominated blogworld) feminism is political and is integral to building a vibrant Left.

Ok… that’s me done!


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Categories : Personal, Politics

Lazy Sunday afternoon in the park

19 09 2010


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Categories : Photography

Some thoughts on the Pope’s visit….

17 09 2010

I have been thinking about the Pope’s visit, mulling over its significance and implications including the protests against this visit, which I won’t be a part of.

Organised religion is reactionary. It carries the most socially conservative and backward ideas deep into the social structure and deep into people’s individual psychology. It does other things as well but it does these things all the time. In particular, organised religions are extravaganzas of homophobia and misogyny. They view your sexuality and your fertility as their property. God does need to exist to be useful in this regard. In fact all the better as their is no risk of divine dissent from the mortals claiming to be his messengers and enforcers.

Why then can it be wrong to protest against the Pope? Please notice that it can be wrong but not necessarily is wrong. Sorry to hair-spilt like this but criticism of religion can quickly turn from being on the side of rational enlightenment to being persecutors of the powerless and oppressed. Ask any liberal warmonger about the usefulness of criticising religion for muddying the waters over imperialist mass murder. Unknown numbers of nameless human beings have been crushed with the benediction of those pointing out the evils of “Islamofascism” and the justice of any amount of violence against the innocent in countering it.

The problem is that religion can act as an identifying agency for many people, in terms of the protest against the Pope, being a Catholic has been central in being part of dispossession and oppression. The oppressed should not be required to surrender their identity. To say this is not to indulge in identity politics but to allow people to understand their own history and to be able to identity with it.

The reactionaries who rule organised religions, including Joseph Ratzinger, understand and use the need for oppressed people to have an identity. The suggestion is made, and made powerfully that if (for instance) you are gay then you are implicated in the depredations of imperialism makes into your community/society.

People who are confronting the oppressions in their own religious communities (or in any other communities) need support and solidarity. Homophobia or attacks on women or the abuse of children need confronting but these forms of oppression are not the preserve of the religious or of any one religion. Homophobia, for instance, should be confronted as homophobia wherever it is found.  To single out one particular religion is starting down the road of condemning the followers of that religion.

People do not always follow a religion through being dupes. It may be fitting in, it may be a way of signalling defiance against oppression, it may be an emotional bond with your past and background or with the community that you come from. It may also or course be a means to bully and to dominate others.

The Protestant Truth Society’s website has a denunciation of “Romanism” that is broadened out to include anyone who does not submit to their particular line, whether religious of not. They are closer to the fundamentalists within Catholicism and all other religions than they would like to admit not to mention the atheist political committees of a whole number of democratic centralist organisations…if you depart from what we say you are numbered with the damned.

See as well:

Kevin’s great post here

Simon’s thought-provoking post here


Comments : 12 Comments »

Categories : Religion

United we stand, divided we fall

16 09 2010

Roll back 7 or 8 years, Britain was being swamped by asylum seekers if you were to believe the “mainstream” media. Over the last few years the scapegoating circus is now pointing the finger of blame for the economic woe of living under neoliberal capitalism at people forced to live on benefit. The only difference is that the media has not quite got the face to accuse benefit claimants of stealing jobs…

Even Mervyn King, at TUC Congress, admits that the blame for the economic crisis lies with the City. As the high priest of British capitalism King realises that he needs to try to protect the system from itself. However the message that has been pushed by New Labour and the Tories over the last five years has been an increasingly shrill attack on the benefit system. This is now a major witch-hunt against the least powerful in society.

The ConDems have upped the ante with their turbo-charged attacks on the poor aided and abetted by the right-wing press. “Benefit scroungers” is becoming a common feature in the lexicon of media language. It is pretty easy to scapegoat and blame the powerless in this society and point the finger at asylum seekers to welfare claimants as it is all a distraction from the real enemy. ConDems want to blame the poor. It is creating an oppressive climate that uses language to fan the flames of hate (‘benefit scroungers’, ‘workshy’). It is about vilification and scapegoating.

And ask yourself again, what kind of society are we creating when this happens?

What about the powerful who manipulate the economy that causes a massive crisis? What about companies that off-shore their profits? Scroungers, perchance? So I am waiting for programmes that emphasise tax avoidance and fraud. And all the other illegal shenanigans that big corporations get to, and the money lost to the state. Ah, but it is easier to target so-called benefit scroungers a very useful distraction from the real villains in this society…But no, the bosses are not to blame according to the ideology of the Con/Dems. Rather we are told repeatedly that it is the people atomised in this big messed-up society who should pay and will pay dearly. The relentless savage vicious divisive cold hearted shock doctrine attacks on working class people these deep wounds of poverty and deprivation will reverberate for generations.

Cameron harps on about the big society. The attacks on the welfare state will not allow a new movement of civil society to flourish no longer crowded out by an overlarge state. They will lead to further atomisation and alienation. It really will be a broken society.

Divide and rule are the watch word of the class enemy. Employed poor against even poorer unemployed. Private tenant against council tenant. Private sector worker against public sector worker. Baby boomer against the student loan generation. We must reject these divisions and look to give solidarity to anyone attacked by the bosses and their corrupting media.

Divided we will fall together. United we can win together.


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Categories : Con/Dem right-wing lash-up, Cuts

Autumn flowers

15 09 2010


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Categories : Photography

25 things….

15 09 2010
I should be writing about TUC Congress and the latest state racism from France which is utterly shameful!

First protest I photographed - Sept 2007 outside Burmese embassy

But at the moment can’t get my head around to write much… Anyway, Sam has tagged me to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. And well, because I have got a bit of blogger’s block at the moment this is a good distraction and well, I can also bore the readership about myself….

1. I joined the “Famous Five” fanclub when I was 8. I liked Blyton’s “Famous Five” and this was before I developed a political consciousness.
2. I was born on the 23rd December the due date was the 24th December.
3. Involved in the mental health user movement during most of the 1990s.
4. Been a vegetarian for around 28 years.
5. Spent much of my childhood in and out of B’ham Children’s Eye Hospital.
6. Don’t particularly like doctors (bad experiences in childhood).
7. Likes running (sprinting particularly represented school in that specific field… and won sometimes….)
8. Wanted to be an artist when at school specialising in painting.
9. My school art teacher exhibited some of my art work when I was around 14 to some dignitaries who were visiting school.
10. Brought up in the protestant faith. Though my mother was a devout catholic as a teenager yet decided to become a protestant in later years and brought me up in that faith. Don’t know why she rejected catholicism, she never explained.
11. Secular and an atheist from the age of 12
12. Went on the first anniversary protest at Wapping in early 1987. First time I ever personally witnessed police brutality and violence.
13. First demonstration I ever went on was at 15, anti-apartheid protest in B’ham.
14. Did my “O” Level History project on the General Strike in B’ham.
15. Joined the Labour Party at 15, along with YCND.
16. At that point in my life described myself as a Socialist feminist.
17. Prefer cats to dogs.
18. First union I ever joined was Nalgo
19. I once wrote a leaflet about mental distress, stigmatisation and the workplace (a kinda “what to do” for someone experiencing distress in the workplace). Later received a letter from someone who was feeling isolated and being bullied in the workplace due to their mental distress, they read my leaflet and it gave them the strength to find support/solidarity and to speak out. The letter was to thank me for helping them to overcome their isolation. I still kinda treasure that letter and reminded me why I am a Socialist and that I had an impact on someone’s experiences.
20. First experienced depression and anxiety when I was 8 years old (prescribed medication). Still experience mental distress.
21. My favourite women photographers are Nan Goldin and Jo Spence.
22. Read Communist Manifesto when I was 14.
23. Became a Trot at 16. Still call myself a Marxist. Still an activist and trade unionist.
24. Glad I took up photography (advice from a good GP)
25. Very pleased and flattered that one of my photos has achieved something positive.

Comments : 14 Comments »

Categories : Personal

There’s no need for cuts!

13 09 2010

Proposed cuts to housing benefit will result in higher levels of poverty, debt, rent arrears and homelessness and should be delayed, national charity Citizens Advice says today.

The warning comes in evidence submitted to the Department of Work and Pensions’ Social Security Advisory Committee, whose consultation on the changes ends today (Friday 10 September). The committee is expected to publish its recommendations to government in the late autumn.

Cuts announced by government include a cap on housing benefit payments from April next year.*

Citizens Advice strongly opposes the cuts, but says that if they do go ahead, the government must take steps to cushion the impact and smooth the transition for those households affected. It calls for a delay in introducing the new cap until October 2011, or at the very least only applying it to new claims from April, in order to ensure that people locked into existing tenancy agreements do not find themselves suddenly trapped with an unaffordable rent, and to give them time to find somewhere else to live.

And this ideological onslaught on the public sector and welfare doesn’t need to happen. To repeat, there doesn’t need to be any cuts whatsoever!

George Osborne is putting beggars back on the street in the same way that his hero, Thatcher, did. What a brave new society to look forward to, a very nasty and destructive one. The message people should take is organise and resist or be destroyed. The Con/Dems could have found the money to fill the deficit hole by cutting the £70bn for Trident. And the £4bn a year for futile imperialist wars. Around £130bn is lost through tax avoidance and evasion, how about the Con/Dems tackling that immense problem? Millions could be saved by ditching privatisation and consultants….Even better, tax the rich!

But somehow, as with the previous NL administration, the wealthy and corporate capitalism are exempt from the butchery of this draconian budget. But then this is an ideological attack that means every one else is being sacrificed instead.

See as well –

TUC Spending cuts will make Britain more unequal

Welfare to work contractors have universally failed ‘by considerable margin’ so says Public Accounts Committee


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Categories : Con/Dem right-wing lash-up, Cuts

Just a picture around the Southbank

11 09 2010


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Categories : Photography

The other 9/11

11 09 2010

September 11th 1973 ….

Pinochet’s coup d’état against the democratically elected Allende government. Let’s not forget this September 11 that gets ‘lost’ in the fog of the selective remembrance.

The day where a democratically elected government was overthrown by a military dictatorship headed by the monstrous General Pinochet with the backing and support of the US government. Henry Kissinger believed that America had a duty to intervene when a country ‘went Marxist’…So the bloodshed, carnage, state terrorism, assassinations, murders, detention centres, repression, the ‘missing’, torture..this monumental shock warfare to the collective psyche was acceptable to Kissinger because it served those ‘irresponsible people’ right for voting for Allende!

Thirty-seven years on and Henry Kissinger is still a fucking war criminal, no wonder he checks the extradition laws everytime he leaves the USA.


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Categories : War criminals

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”

10 09 2010

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” – “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.”
(Heinrich Heine – 1821)

It seems that Pastor Terry Jones’s plan to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an has been cancelled though there seems to be confusion about whether it has been cancelled or just put on hold. When I first heard about the plan to burn the Qur’an it certainly sent shivers down my spine, fanning the flames of hate. Jones is a vile bigot and racist.

Why burning, though, rather than some other kind of destruction? The symbolism of flames is plain. For Andrew Motion, former poet laureate and chair of this year’s Man Booker prize, “books are little encapsulations of human effort and wisdom and, I suppose, of our sense of history. So to burn one of any kind, and certainly one that is a representation of a culture and set of beliefs, is to appear to consign it to the flames of eternal damnation.” Book-burning, he says, is first and foremost a monumental “manifestation of intolerance. It’s the conflation of what ought to be nuanced views into one, hate-filled act.

And on the eve of September 11th where chaos, carnage, devastation and destruction happening in New York. And we know the rest in how the West dealt with the situation….”War on Terror”..more destruction and carnage in the name of “liberation”.

Christianity is not the opposite of Islam. They are variants of the monotheist belief system. Neo-conservatism is not the opposite of the intolerant fundamentalism that prevails in Saudi Arabia incubates reactionary religion based ideologies in the rest of the world. They are part of the mindset that says religion is a way of identifying your enemies whom you can destroy.

Both are the violent flailing around of reactionaries who have run out of political answers.

The opposite of the terrorism of that day would be the building of a mosque in the WTC area with the support of the wider community. It would be an expression that all are united and stand together at the end of the day whatever religious or other traditions that different groups or individuals identify with.


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Categories : War on terror

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