… and why you can’t have one without the other
This is a contemplation of divides, the harm they do, and how they get fixed – please don’t worry whether you and I are on the same sides of all of them – we could still have this conversation…
I was sitting in a café talking to a friend about the state of the world and so on, and I happened to say that I’ve begun to think that party politics is a large part of our problem. Then an unusual thing happened. A chap on a nearby table leaned over and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that — do you mind if I join your conversation?’
Just how hot does a topic have to be, for that to happen — in England?
Afterwards, I found myself thinking about this: in the last two years, I’ve been to the funerals of two old friends who were expelled from the Labour Party – one for antisemitism (he was a Jewish socialist) the other one manoeuvered out of her membership by local officers and councillors, for being a nuisance (for which, read too lefty and too feminist). At both funerals, people spoke of their sadness that no apology or reconciliation had come in their lifetimes. Maybe it’s a small thing. Maybe we’re all supposed to get over it and get on and generally, we pretty much do – but what about the really big, global scale injustices…?
In the years following the fall of the apartheid state in South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up by, amongst others, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. A TRC report states: “The mandate of the commission was to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, as well as offering reparation and rehabilitation to the victims. A register of reconciliation was also established so that ordinary South Africans who wished to express regret for past failures could also express their remorse.”
Discussions about reparations for slavery are in the news again, too, because only slave owners were compensated at the time, and yet post-colonial states and people suffer deprivation to this day. I note that people in the ‘first world’ often panic when they hear about this, saying ‘after all this time, who’s going to pay’? … but then tend to be in favour of fair dos, so long as it doesn’t come out as ‘a bill for the taxpayer…’
That division, between ‘progressive justice warriors’ and the far right, with a startled, silent, centre looking on is mirrored in many of today’s contentious political issues.
How do you heal those divisions? If you’re a lefty, you’ll be well aware that the powerful use three ‘axes of oppression’ (for the rest of the world, that’s the plural of axis, not a set of choppers). Whether they’re conscious of it or not, the powerful (or would-be powerful) keep people under control by exploiting issues of sex, race and class, feeding on various sets of minor prejudices along the way. Both the examples above (apartheid South Africa and slavery) are about colonial powers that were using divisions of race to control peoples for economic gain.
Smaller organisations sometimes make the effort to set things right – here’s the RMT tackling one aspect of systemic racism…
…and one fire brigade, picking up on the fact that the Equality Act was supposed to include socio-economic (class) equality…
… but on a national and global scale, nations are mainly only interested in ‘reparations’ when they’ve won a war, and have the opportunity to bleed the losing country to pay for their war.
And at NGO level, organisations tend to gloss over their own faults and always position themselves as the ones ‘being reasonable’ (with hindsight). Below is an article about Stonewall trying to fix a division based on sex that they were using, but that is now causing them trouble. Here, the new CEO talks about the struggle of growing up gay…
Click here to read the Stonewall article in the Guardian
I wonder, what would he have thought of an organisation that’s supposed to support him telling everyone to ‘turn down the heat’ on homophobic violence, abuse and neglect, if it was the very organisation that had been feeding the flames?
But here’s the really big issue: he’s actually telling his story, aiming to empathise, not with the people Stonewall harmed, but with trans people. Personally, I think Stonewall has harmed trans people at least as much as they have harmed their main target – women and girls, and the feminist groups that aim to represent women’s and girls’ interests. For those who still don’t believe that, here is a copy of Stonewall’s representation to the government Equalities Committee, made some years ago now, that translated the ‘trans rights campaign’ into a war on women…
The result of that war is a mass off hurt, resentment, suspicion and division, the most obvious victims of which were women and girls, especially lesbians — but also trans people. Stonewall will not get away with this. There is a very famous response out there written by J K Rowling…
… and many others from socialist women who’ve been wronged over this issue by their socialist groups or trade unions. This is my favourite…
I particularly like the Dennis Kavanagh bit at the end, because I’ve often wondered in recent years whether Stonewall even remember they were supposed to be a support group for lesbians and gays.
And the other side of the coin is all the trans people who believed the nonsense Stonewall and Mermaids were telling them ten years ago, and are now hit by a Supreme Court ruling that came as a total shock instead of the talked-through, gradual changes that might have developed if Stonewall hadn’t started a war.
But none of the people in that situation are yet at a place where it makes sense to tell them to just ‘get over it’. And the same is true, to an exponential degree, with this one…
… the big one that’s boiling out there now, the #Free Palestine v Zionists one. This not only drove a wedge through mainstream society but also destroyed Corbyn’s Labour party and struck a near-fatal blow to the current feminist movement.
Many of our women’s groups and organisations set us up for this painful split by trying to two-sides their post-October 7th statements or worse, trying to skate over the plight of Palestinians since Israel’s genocidal revenge on Gaza and the West Bank without ever mentioning their own culpability. It is incredible how quickly those organisations leapt to protect themselves from charges of antisemitism, and how long it took them to realise that in our own country, what we were seeing was not a tide of antisemitism but a horrendous flare up of colonialist racism. Even now, as so many women – particularly Palestinian and Lebanese women living in the UK – still suffer the after-effects of the split, we see those groups busy trying to refurbish their ‘anti-racist’ status without addressing the on-going problem they caused.
Caitlin Johnstone makes an interesting distinction, when talking about Zionists…
However, she is one of the people who has studiously ignored what Stonewall et al tried to do to women. It struck me over and over again, when faced with people arguing passionately for the dismantling of women’s rights (cloaked as ‘inclusion’ for ‘gender identity’). I felt they knew they were talking garbage but they thought they had a marvellous opportunity to sound virtuous whilst attacking feminists.
In short, the Zionist campaign is fuelled by, and has hugely ramped up, the plague of racism in this country, in exactly the same way as the Stonewall campaign has used and inflamed the ever-present misogyny.
Which brings me to Zara Sultana and the SWP mob, who made Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt at a new party into a battle zone and, I think, utterly destroyed it in the process. ‘Trans rights’ was their main weapon of destruction and I do not believe for a moment they were doing it out of concern for trans people. This battle still rages in the Green Party but for now, they seem to have managed to stuff it under the radar whilst Zack Polanski is making his bid for power but it’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t advise moving into the Green Party, if you’re a socialist exile from Labour – that split will destroy them, if the battle with the Zionists doesn’t.
Professional splitters
It seems to me that some organisations that people think of as political parties or campaigns – particularly on the far left and far right fringes – exist purely to harvest membership money. It seems to me that we are all very familiar with one or two at each end of the spectrum that always move in on anything that’s becoming fractious (eg, the trans thing on the left, and immigration and climate crisis on the right). These parasitic organisations take the side of those whose arguments are nonsense — that is, those who can’t ultimately win, because the house of cards will fall. The parasites welcome them, shore up their crumbling belief systems, and keep the battle going until they can walk away from the scene of destruction with a hugely increased membership list – or a mailing list that they call a membership list, and extract subscription money from.
To go back to where I started, when I was in the Labour Party we saw the Corbyn years make a good start on healing the long-embedded alienation between Labour and the working classes, only to be thwarted by the highly abusive, middle class Remain campaign, the trans rights campaign and of course, Zionism. All three, in my opinion, were run by professional splitters. Yes, I know the Leave campaign leaders were extremely dodgy too but they did at least want what they said on the tin (for the UK to leave the EU) whereas the Starmer faction’s Remain campaign prompted a mob of stuffed shirts going around calling hard-pressed working people gammons, morons and racists — and in many cases, those are the people whose resentment Reform feeds off now, and the people groups like Stand Up to Racism encourage their followers to condemn as fools and dupes.
And here’s where it all runs together…
And you know what? The leaders of pretty much every one of those organisations that have been a target of parasites could fix whichever one of those splits is eating them by having a calm, honest, public debate in which they state the problems, acknowledge the harm they’ve done and weigh up the actual evidence for and against whatever it is that their memberships divided over. They probably won’t do that, most of them – but we could, those of us who’ve stepped out of party politics – we could do it in our myriad local meetings.
Getting along
Take a look around you, at the people you’re working with on local campaigns. Any one of them might be more than half de-energised by unresolved splits, and the lingering effects of cancellations and abuse — think about how lonely they must feel, if your group haven’t acknowledged what happened to them; perhaps even more importantly, think about the people who just don’t come any more – what unacknowledged slanders and sabotage put them off their activism?
We could take a hold of those (often silent) splits, sit down and talk about them, listen to those who lost jobs, trade union roles or friends through partisan bullying, and we should — because these things lose their power once they’re out in the open. Then, we’d have twice the energy, twice the strength, not only because we would then understand past splits, but we’d be less likely to fall for the next one. That is the big takeaway — no roomful of people need agree on absolutely everything — that’s very unlikely to ever happen — but they can agree to examine all sides of an issue, to learn about it together, and not to allow anyone to use abuse, sabotage, cancellation or ad hominem arguments instead of evidence.
The group could then move forward and apply a new energy to actually solving some real-world problems — but (or so our conversation in that café went) not if they’re a political party, seeking electoral success and/or a business/NGO seeking membership fees and donations, because such organisations are just as likely to feed on and encourage splits and resentments to disarm their rivals as they are to try and solve the grief and resentments in their own groups.
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