*** Long Read***

[It’s taken me a few weeks to get around to writing this. It’s one of the articles I drafted out when I was thinking about dropping my FB account. There was absolutely no doubt it was giving me problems but, as the horror that is the Israel / Palestine story dominated even more, the issues grew. On the one hand, FB is big among the media that manipulate thought and visibility, but on the other, we need access to any sources of information and idea-sharing we can grab when our governments are being so universally manipulative.]

Three big blockers

Perhaps it would be easier if, to start with, we don’t bother about what the political problems ARE, but just consider a situation where we need to come together to defend ourselves (or as many would put it, ‘to get the Tories out’) but there are at least three big things that people are angry, upset and divided over. Before we worry about the details, and which ones we agree or disagree over, let me say this, and ask for your toleration if you’re not with me on one or other of them…

In my attempts to write this, it got longer and more convoluted because I knew there are many people who get thing 1, but are angry and baffled by thing 2 and there are people who get thing 1 and thing 2 but are angry and baffled by thing 3 (even Dr Seus’s creatures only had 2 things to work out) … and then of course, I have to keep stopping and thinking am I on the right side of all this? Is there a thing 4 that I haven’t seen yet?

Then this morning, the perfect example turned up. The blog Skwawkbox got attacked by FB last week for its coverage of Israel’s deceits in Gaza (thing 3.) This week, Skwawkbox (with justification in my view) is jeering at Owen Jones, who’s in a whirl of righteous indignation over being shadow banned – where was he, asks Skwawkbox, when the rest of us were battling thing 2? I sat and stared at the Skwawkbox and thought, where were you when Jonesey was doing his best to get all the feminists banned from TwitX for thing 1?

Here therefore is my epic attempt to discuss things 1, 2 and 3 in one great spiral – after all, if you’ve been doing politics these last few years, you were swimming (or drowning) in all three of them at once.

Seven long years

It’s over two years now since I left the Labour Party and I’m only just at the point where I think I’ve mended my brain. I remember a meeting, not long after I joined, when I had the mic and was saying something about the range of opinions that existed in the party. I said the word ‘Blairite’ not vindictively, not as an accusation, but to describe a stance a section of the party took. There was an audible intake of breath across the room – just loud enough to make me do a quick rewind and check whether I’d inadvertently said something startlingly rude.

I found out soon afterwards that Labour Party members weren’t supposed to say ‘Blairite’. Because it upset the Blairites, the same way saying ‘Zionist’ upset the Zionists – and we weren’t allowed to use words that upset people. It took a while to find that out, because members also weren’t allowed to say why they weren’t allowed to say those words. That’s why it took so long to get the women’s rights movement going in Labour. Woman. Natal woman. Female. Biological female. Every time women thought of a new, safe way to describe themselves, it would be made clear that those words also upset trans people, so we weren’t to say them.

Conflation

There were so many things you weren’t allowed to say that I wouldn’t have thought of as offensive. What made it all so hard to understand was that there were two different things going on. A half of it was useful, educational stuff. The other half most definitely was not. If you’ve been a Labour Party member, you’ll probably have experienced one or both phenomena, depending on what kind of constituency you were a member of – but how do you tell the useful and the educational from the vexatious and the manipulative?

An unapologetic Zionist

It took me over a year after I left the party to realize I needed to unpick all the self-censoring I’d learned in order to figure out which was which. Learning how careless language can perpetuate outdated, destructive ideas is an important part of socialism. It’s useful and legitimate. For example, changing the way you use words to describe people can help get your head round the idea that race does not exist as a scientific category; that rather, people get ‘racialized’ by the perceptions of others, or that rather than there being a category of people who just ‘are disabled’, there are ways you can organize meetings and activities that disable — or enable — different kinds of people.

In the Labour Party, you would be more likely to come across that kind of thing in a lefty CLP like ours but there was something else as well – something that looked similar, but was actually the opposite. The demands made by powerful minorities in order to hold their position of privilege could come from the left or the right. The veto on the word ‘Blairite’ was a right-wing defensive move, which came into play when the left were in the ascendant and the right saw their former dominance threatened.

I notice that, since the Corbyn movement was flushed out, the Starmer tribe regularly use the word ‘Corbynite’ and most definitely use it abusively but also that now they’ve got ‘their’ party back, Starmer can stand up and declare that he’s an unapologetic Zionist.

When I heard him come right out and say that, I thought ‘Zionist’ must be one of those words that people can say about themselves – like some words Black people use amongst themselves, that are dodgy if used detrimentally by others. But now, TWO YEARS AND MORE after leaving the Party, I understand that ‘Zionist’ is a legitimate and useful word and I can use it when I want to talk about people who support the settler-colonialist project that is Israel. It would have been pretty hard to review this book if I couldn’t say it…

But which is which?

It’s all about who’s holding the cards. True socialism requires a constant awareness of the systemic stacking of society in terms of race, sex and class. At that level, understanding the consequences of words you do and don’t use, and adjusting your language to empower others is really helpful. What is not helpful is when those who do have power pick up those techniques and – there is no doubt about this now – use them as bully tactics. The Blairites and Zionists in the Labour Party who claimed they were being marginalized and/or abused included MPs, sitting councillors and paid staff. They held all the cards and they made the rules. Jeremy Corbyn’s worst fault was that he was an appeaser. He thought that if we were really, really polite and played by their rules, we could eventually win them over.

So how’s that going then, Jeremy?

DARVO

It stands for ‘deny, attack, reverse victim and offender’. It’s a term used in describing abusive relationships. I hate acronyms. I find it easier to talk about ‘cry-bullies’ — powerful people who wail and yell for help as though they’re being murdered if you do anything they don’t want you to do.

The trouble is, DARVO is a particularly effective way of disabling the most earnest socialists because if you say you’re a victim, if you say you’re being put down, people like Jeremy Corbyn feel deeply, politically obliged to defer to your ‘need’.

Politics is now absolutely rife with cry-bullies, those who have seen the advantage of presenting as oppressed minorities, as victims – Michelle Mone, the PPE billionaire has been doing a shameless demonstration of that on the TV in the last few weeks. Oh, how she has suffered from ruthless journalists investigating the harm she has done!

I first began to feel that something had gone wrong on the left in Labour when I was at an LRC meeting in Brighton. A happy lefty among lefties, at the height of the Corbyn era, I’d gone along to a trade union rally to hear all the glorious speakers and further my political education. They were glorious, and I learned a lot – it was great – until it got a bit weird. One of the speakers was a sex-worker. I had only just learned to say ‘sex-worker’. Apparently, women were disempowered by the word ‘prostitute’, and we were going to legitimize ‘the oldest profession’. We would re-empower them and unionize them by calling them ‘sex-workers’ instead.

This sex-worker was what we no doubt should not call a ‘madam’. She was running what we no doubt should not call a ‘house of ill repute’. She sounded very friendly. She sounded like a tough social worker, or like those women who run refuges and hostels. She kept saying ‘we’re not ashamed of what we do’. She spoke about how women are driven into prosti… sex work by poverty, by the horrendous gaps in Universal Credit and other ‘benefit’ payment systems. She was rescuing them. They were safer, working in a nice house like hers. ‘We’re not ashamed of what we do’.

She was running a business, profiting from those women driven to desperation trying to feed their kids. She spoke about how dangerous and devastating ‘sex work’ can be. ‘We’re not ashamed of what we do.’

Why wasn’t I screaming my head off? Because I was in the middle of a big, euphoric lefty rally and I was still learning. I was merely aware that something somewhere wasn’t sitting quite right. Cognitive dissonance, they call it.

Several years on, and having worked with the women’s movement, including the astonishingly irrepressible women of Brighton who’ve been fighting the two-pronged attack from corporate LGBTQIA+++ grant-farmers on the one hand, and young, woke ‘progressives’ on the other, to keep a genuine women’s refuge open…Now, I can see what was going wrong at that LRC rally.

Imagine

You’re in a position where you can open an institution ‘for women’. You have choices. You could set up a hostel to shelter and assist women escaping from addiction and/or abusive relationships and/or ‘sex work’. If you did, you’d have to fight like crazy for funding, for security, and for protection from the grant-farmers and the progressive kiddies who automatically read ‘for women’ as ‘anti-trans’…

…or you could open a brothel and start making money immediately. If you have an abusive partner, he’s far more likely to go with the latter idea. If you’ve a partner of the gangster persuasion, he’ll support you to the hilt. A brothel is a superb safe space for hiding illegalities of all kinds.

Trans men trans women trans kids

The sector who demanded that we avoid saying ‘Blairite’ or ‘Zionist’ were the nascent Starmer team. They are the establishment. Similarly, the sector who brought in the numerous, fragmented categories of ‘woke’ post-modernism, encouraging the rowdies who called feminists ‘terfs’ and anti-porn campaigners ‘swerfs’ — they are also the establishment. They are not the ones who are doing socialism, they are the ones who were more than happy to sit and watch the left tear itself apart over whether prostituted women were best empowered by being called ‘sex workers’ or by being helped to escape. They are the ones who chortled up their sleeves as earnest, well-meaning ‘woke’ young members turned on the older women who still valued their single sex spaces and courses, opening up a split that turned many lefty CLPs into helpless battlegrounds.

Stonewalling

Amongst other demographic gymnastics, ‘identity politics’ puts middle class, middle aged males who ‘self-identify’ as women centre stage, casting them as an oppressed minority who deserve every advantage we can give them. It’s hard for famous, wealthy, successful men to look like vulnerable victims but organizations like Stonewall came along and gave them a hand by parcelling them up with those genuinely vulnerable, unfortunate young women who think they have to somehow turn into men to escape all the downsides of growing up female in a sexist, abusive society.

‘Identity politics’ also brings in all the bright youngsters who’ve attempted to side-step sexism by declaring as ‘non-binary’. It brings them in, and encourages them to blame socialist feminists, instead of the neoliberal cesspit that actually caused them all those problems. At the same time in true neoliberal style, the ‘trans rights movement’ side-lines, often quite brutally, the people we used to call transsexuals, people who generally did all they could to ‘live as the opposite sex’ and then got on with it, without making any grand demands on the rest of the world.

Power bases

It took me quite a while, and quite a few feminist conferences, to see how all that pans out. At every step, the ‘trans rights movement’, apparently by sheer chance, pushes back against women’s rights, women’s confidence and women’s ability to talk about their own lives. Just like that movement in Labour that, completely by chance, made it very, very difficult to criticize Israel or right-wing Labour groups.

Now I do my politics among feminists, I’ve learned not to say ‘prostitute’ or ‘sex-worker’, and that’s important, because at feminist conferences, you get to meet women who have escaped from those ‘jobs’. Most of them are either impoverished women who’ve taken the last desperate steps to try and pay the rent and feed their kids, or the victims of international sex-trafficking (many ‘sex workers’ are immigrant women who barely know where in the world they’ve landed up) or they’re young women who’ve been trammelled by violence and abuse since early childhood, and see ‘sex work’ as the only way they can give themselves a bit of leverage in society.

To make what they do look like legitimate work, like a potential source of power, is a cruel trick, and makes it harder for them to see a way out for themselves. The sex industry is the only industry in the world that is countered by a range of charities (generally run by and for women) that help people ESCAPE from their ‘jobs’. Some career that must be, eh?

And now Stonewall has gone a step further and announced ‘aromantic’ as a minority category who need protection. Yes, those people who want sex but don’t want to bother getting to know anyone to get it. Yes, Stonewall has invited johns under their protective umbrella, and tasked their ‘champions’ in industry and government to think up workplace policies to look after them.

It looks a heck of a lot like a ‘men’s rights movement’ to me, and not one for principled, socialist men.

From the river to the sea

And now, the world is reeling in the face of the unbearable scenario unfolding in Israel / Palestine. Those who still wish to see Israel as the dreamed of safe-haven for Jewish people are in shock. They are screaming at the rest of us with all the volume the traumatized can muster, and lefty feminists keep saying to me that trying to talk to those frenetic Israel supporters is ever so much like trying to talk to ‘trans activists’ who’ve been persuaded that women talking about sex as though it matters is abusive to them.

The rest of us are screaming at our politicians, at the United Nations, at all the organizations that could and should prevent mass murder and human, social and environmental catastrophes. The people screaming back at us, the ones who were taught by those Labour right-wingers that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic — even that standing up for Palestinians is anti-Semitic, are in a panic because they can’t stop us any more, because most of us have left the Labour Party.

(Remember #ExpelMe night, when one Labour leadership hopeful after another signed the ‘Trans Rights Pledges’ that included the statement that Woman’s Place UK was an anti-trans hate group, and its supporters should be expelled? #ExpelMe trended on TwitX, and suddenly there were tens of thousands of socialist women out there, free at last from the censorious Labour Party, talking about the trans rights / women’s rights con, and suddenly, Stonewall’s anti-women campaign started to fall apart).

So, thing 3 — now we’re allowed to ask — Can whole countries go mad, and need sectioning? Does that idea make any kind of sense at all? Isn’t that what the United Nations and the ICC were set up for, to stop countries like that, like apartheid South Africa, like Nazi Germany, countries whose leadership go collectively insane, and become a danger to everyone?

Strangely, the activists who’ve been fighting older women over ‘trans rights’ for the last few years are all out fighting for a #FreePalestine. There’s an exciting, global stir around this campaign. Surely some of them are putting two and two together, and reminding themselves that the strategy of the establishment has always been divide and rule. There’s a reason why South Africa was the first country to call in the ICC over the genocide in Gaza. They know. They are survivors. Just like the women who, having escaped from the sex industry, or from abusive relationships, become some of our best feminist warriors.

And yet some people who think they’re socialists are yelling ‘anti-Semitism’ when we shout ‘from the river to the sea’ because they know what Israelis mean when they talk about a ‘one state solution’. Please try to lead them gently to an understanding that it’s only the Israeli PR monster who told them that freedom for Palestine means the death of Israelis. The rest of us believe it’s possible – in fact essential – to have a country in which the people of more than one race, and more than one religion, can live side-by-side and be free. This might help…

Splitter tactics

Here’s an excellent analysis from one of Graham Linehan’s associates of how the BBC have attempted to twist public awareness of the corporate LGBTQIA+++ empire (thing 1) here…

“Who says it’s nonsense?” Kate Osbourne snaps, when Kemi Badenoch says ‘inclusion’ trainers have been telling kids nonsense like ‘sex doesn’t exist’ – Kate, almost everyone thinks it’s nonsense. You have been duped. You are arguing for the nonsense purely because a right-winger (no doubt laughing up her sleeve) is calling it out.

That whistleblower analysis is brought to you via the wonderful Graham Linehan, who knew when to speak out about that nonsense. …If only Linehan and friends could see how the BBC blinded them to what happened when the US / Israel lobby turned on the Corbyn movement. And if only the Corbyn movement lot, who understand about Palestine, could see what the above article is explaining.

Well, there are more than a few of us who have a varied enough collection of news sources bookmarked that we can see all three of those tricks – the Blairite one, the Zionist one and the ‘trans rights’ one — and we stand a fairly good chance of spotting the next big splitter when it’s thrown at us.

So to get back to my social media dilemma, my experience of this latest #FreePalestine campaign has reminded me what social media is so useful for. My visibility – both of direct posts and blog links, went right down when this campaign started, just as it did when I became a Labour Party activist in Corbyn’s Labour. I didn’t give up then. I joined the Digital Army and Red Labour, and we learned to amplify and support each others’ campaigns by sharing and hash-tagging everyone’s efforts. The #FreePalestine movement is doing the same.

Please share blogs and posts about Palestine, not just on your page but to groups and other pages. I’m sure ‘pragmatic’ people will say we should wait, world opinion will come round — but we say yeah, but if we had managed to move the mountain sooner, 20 thousand Palestinian lives might have been saved. Similarly with the anti-austerity movement that, for a while, put its hopes in Corbyn. Similarly with the women’s campaign. Most people agree with us now, but we thought it was worth starting the fightback before the men’s rights aspect did all the harm it has done to kids, to women in prison, to lesbian culture and services, to women’s sport, politics and anything else you might (or for a while, weren’t allowed to) mention.

Please be a part of the fight against neoliberal barbarism. Please support independent blogs and news sites. Please like, share and add hashtag comments to Palestinian posts (and or to posts about thing 4, when it comes along). Right now, for Palestine, please do twice as much sharing and commenting as you normally do. Together we’ll squeeze as much benefit as we can from social media while the opportunity is still there, but please make sure you get out in the world and meet campaigners face to face as much as you are able, because you learn more, you’ll meet useful people, and because online opportunities won’t last forever.

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