The May Election
The election has come and gone and I voted Labour against the call I made that no one should vote for a Blairite or a candidate who voted for the war in Iraq. I was persuaded by our candidate, Rob Marris, stating that any loss of seats by Labour would weaken Blair’s position but not to give Labour their third term would let in either the Tories or the Lib Dems. This has since become the unofficial `line’ of the broad left from Robin Cook and his allies to that staunchest of anti-Blairites, Tony Benn. The most significant development in Wolverhampton has been the hijacking of the Wolverhampton SE constituency by a noted war mongering supporter of Blair and the apostasy of my good friend of 50 years, Dennis Turner who embraced New Labour, accepted a peerage and sold a left-wing career for a mess of pottage. We have also discovered that only one Labour councillor in Wolverhampton opposed the war in Iraq and all others, silently and shame faced, are prepared to accept the consequences of supporting the continuing mass murders sanctioned by the war criminal and serial killer, Tony Blair.
Why you can’t be without Blogger
Blogger is essential because it will summarise important issues. I am at the stage predicted some months ago of no longer being able take up every issue personally, so that I now raise issues and other people must take them up if they want. If not, I can do no more. Secondly Blogger analysis reaches the parts that others fail to reach. Example, Blair has led us into at least two sterile discussions which were almost pointless, the search for WMD, because even if Saddam had them he didn’t use them, also discussion on whether Blair was lying when the heart of the matter is that Blair is a religious fundamentalist and if he thinks he is doing the Lord’s work then, like Oliver Cromwell, there is no atrocity he will not commit.
Taking other local examples. If the Tories are serious about root and branch change they will have to renounce support of the war in Iraq, and at least some of the W’ton Tories are radical as they showed by selecting an Asian female to contest the election.
The latest Blog document is addressed to the four broadcasting icons, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Jonathon Dimbleby, and Jeremy Paxman all of whom have been principled opponents of the war in Iraq. To them we have outlined the foolishness of support of the election of a leading Blairite, McFadden, who will embroil Britain in Bush’s future wars, notably in Iran. It also raises the question that none of the teaching trade unions in Britain care a fig for the interests of multiracism and the new Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is of the same ilk. Finally it raises the question of freedom of speech and the problem of newscasters having no control over material they are given to read; it is suggested that a suitable base for news in place of the Blair-speak that at present passes for the news we receive should be the Arab news agency Al Jazeera. Again BLOG offers only a summary and for the documentation on which it is based you will have to consult the two web sites: pages.unisonfree.net/friendsofbilstoncollege or www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk
While on the subject of the sometimes original analyses of BLOG, we will deal with the case of Gordon Brown who we have characterised as one of the two most important economists of the twentieth century, the other being John Maynard Keynes. We believe that Gordon has blotted his copybook by associating himself with Blair as a supporter of the war in Iraq. However, this does not affect his mastery of economics and he is head and shoulders above any rival whether global capitalism leads us into slump or boom in the future.
Chartism
As many will know, the two loves of my life are books and working class history. My friend Owen Ashton presides over the Centre for the Study of Chartism at Staffordshire University. Every year he sends me details of its activities, the highlight of which is usually a visit to one of the Chartist Colonies set up both to provide a livelihood for working men and also to give them the vote. I had to report to Owen that my only foray into Chartist history this year has been in my Tribute to Dennis Turner in which I had stated that if Chartism had been as strong elsewhere as it had been in Bilston in 1843, the vote would have had to have been conceded to working men, with incalculable consequences for subsequent history.
Incidentally, I have not yet received an acknowledgment from Dennis for my piece A Tribute to Dennis Turner, Son of Bilston, on his Retirement from Parliament, but I am told by Ken Purchase that he said, `Only the first paragraph is about me the rest is about George Barnsby’. This in fact is only true in the sense that the remainder concerns the remarkable history of Bilston of which Dennis has so far been the true guardian and I have had the privilege of researching and writing. But alas poor Dennis he has now exchanged the values of the working class for the ermine gown and ample emoluments of the upper classes, so perhaps I never shall hear from him. I can assure him, however that I shall never hold the contempt for him that I hold for his war mongering successor.
I Love Arsene Wenger and the Baggies
Sport has hit the headlines of late. My piece on Wenger told the story of my 70 years as an Arsenal fan and 50 years as a Wolves fan also with Wenger’s role in changing the face of English football, in the era of globalisation not least his part in kicking racism out of football. This led to contacts with Thierry Henri, his initiation of the campaign Stand up Speak Up where footballers show their disgust of racism by wearing anti-racist slogans on their shirts. This led on to Henri’s appointment as Ambassador of Football by the chairman of FIFA and two centres of international football emerging, one in Brazil supported by Pele and another in-Argentine led by Maradona who declared that the person he reveres most after God is Fidel Castro and thus takes an openly political stance which involves large numbers of people, including Thierry Henri, wearing Che Guavaro shirts. The inescapable role of politics has resulted in Manchester United being taken over by Glazer and the inevitable discussion regarding the future of English football including the fact that Chelsea is now owned by a Russian tycoon.
In the meantime the English football season has turned up new sensations including the almost miraculous escape from relegation of West Bromwich Albion. One of the main claims to fame of West Bromwich Albion is that they were the first important club to employ black footballers and the saga of Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson who bore the brunt of the racism of English football supporters is the stuff of legends. When taking up the question of Kick Racism out of Football I wrote to the present WBA manager, Bryan Robson, who is a previous England captain, asking if the club had contact the with their former black players including the famous trio. I have not had a reply so far, but he has been very busy! What I was staggered to learn was that a whole book on C, C and B had been written with the peculiar title of Samba in the Smethwick End by Dave Bowler and Jas Bains . This was supplied to me by courtesy of W’ton home library service and of which the most avid of WBA fans know nothing. The publishers, Mainstream Publishing tell me that some copies of this book remain, but their distributors say that the book has been stopped. There the matter stands at the moment, but I have confused the name of Dave Bowler with that of a current radical writer, Tom Bower, blasting the rulers of the game for not preventing clubs being taken over by money men. There is now the widest support from both left and right that the current troubles of football originated with the take over of Sky TV followed by other money men including the takeover of Chelsea by the Russian oil oligarch Abramovitch. The idea that clubs should be owned by local communities is now gaining ground including solutions in Spain and elsewhere of forming co-operatives. This would be a good solution for Britain too, where the co-operative movement is proving both a successful business movement and also an ethical one. A further local celebrity black player, now the Wolves FC captain is Paul Ince who had the greatest distinction of being the first black captain of England.
The remaining advantage of the BLOGGER analysis is that it stresses that any American take-over will inevitably mean subservience to Bush politics and the neo-conservative ideas that the USA must conquer the world and the world will come to thank them for this.
Rover and the future of British Industry
The Rover crisis broke in the middle of the election when irresponsible parts manufacturers brought production to an end thus precipitating bankruptcy. But receivers are still negotiating to re-start production. The crisis brought the question of why the government made no attempt to save Rover and the failure to implement the Ryder Report of 1975 under the Wilson government. These questions brought two men in particular into prominence. The first was Tony Benn the minister responsible for implementing the Report and Derek Robinson (Red Robbo) who had been written off by conservatives as a mindless militant, but who continued to be elected chair of the joint stewards committee attempting to save the car industry from people like Michael Edwardes, whose only solution to crisis was to sack workers and close factories. Robinson’s first reaction to the closure of Longbridge was to blame the Phoenix Four for feathering their nests and failing either to produce new models at Rover, or update existing models. It is now clear, however, that the culprits should be extended to include the Chinese who appear to have reneged on promises and hijacked both essential intellectual properties and physical materials essential to the operation of the company. Wide sections of society are now asking why Britain, still the fourth largest economy in the world, loses its basic industries while countries such as Spain and France refuse to abide by decisions of the EU, World Bank etc. which would rob them of their car and other basic industries. It is clear that Blair and his foolish supporters are too wedded to systems of so-called free trade to rebuild Britain’s industrial base and it is likely that car production at Longbridge would be minimal, but the battle must be fought by the newly amalgamated trade unions and the same other patriotic left and right wing social forces now mobilising against the takeover of our football teams sanctioned by the essentially alien forces of New Labour.
Our Health Services
We gave a vote of confidence to W’ton’s health services in the BLOG of the third week of February, but suggested that the vast sites catering for all ailments were out dated and that services should be decentralised, especially in view of the danger of MRSA. But lo and behold the new administration at New Cross Hospital (the old one having been sacked) now comes up with the crack pot idea that Wolverhampton and Walsall health services should be merged. This will involve much pulling down of existing buildings on both sites and replacing them with new ones at vast cost. And all this, we are told, is in search of the Holy Grail of creating modern services `meeting the needs of the twenty first century.’ Now let it be said that Walsall administration, like Wolverhampton’s has been replaced thus moving the services even further from local authority and the ideal of local control. Secondly the proposals are Blair-speak identical with proposals in education for academies and every school a specialist one which are taking our schools not into the twenty first century but back to the nineteenth. The moral is remove Blair immediately and put all our services under the control of local people.
Bilston Community College (BCC)
At this point we return to the case of BCC. Closed in 1999 by the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) this is the issue that refuses to go away. BCC was the jewel in the Crown of the Wolverhampton education service. The first multicultural college in Britain with its 30% of ethnic minority staff (never equalled in Britain before or since), it provided open access to any student who presented themselves, black or white. But its main achievement was that it created a non-religious haven to both ethnic minority students and their families who were able to hold family functions safe in the knowledge that at BCC racism had been abolished. It became the first institution which racists had to close by means both legal and illegal because of the example it provided to other communities. Eventually Blunkett, then Education Secretary, and his unelected advisers and civil servants concocted the case that the college acted illegally, that it had vast debts and that the college was the most inefficient that the FEFC’s own inspectors had ever examined. The question of illegal activities was put to the test by a conservative councillor Mellor, bitter critic of the college and former police superintendent reporting BCC to the West Midland’s Police Fraud Squad. The enquiry lasted two and a half years after which the college was cleared of any illegalities. But meanwhile FEFC instead of waiting for the verdict of the Fraud Squad had hastened to open a new single College for Wolverhampton, the flea of Wulfrun College taking over the elephant of Bilston College.
The local closers of BCC included the then Vice-Chancellor of W’ton University and the maverick black Chief Executive of W’ton City Council. Instead of admitting that their case had been demolished (the other two charges had easily been shown to be false) and setting out a new or revised case the Closers resorted to the widely used device of not replying to the charges made against them. When the FEFC was finally wound up in disgrace, the even more monstrous quango the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) was set up which followed the same policy as its predecessor and not being able to make any charge against Bilston College stick (no one from BCC has even been interviewed, let alone charged) decided on the dangerous policy of charging the auditors who had sanctioned the alleged irregular programmes of work. But the auditors and LSC officials have come to a cosy arrangement which they had no intention of sharing with the public until the Liberal Democratic MP David Rendel member of the public accounts committee vowed to bring up in Parliament and Ngaio Crequer of the Times Educational Supplement 23 Jan 2004 argued that the details of the agreement between the LSC and the auditors, Deloitte and Touche, should be made public. Also the refusal of the National Audit Office to take up the Bilston case was questioned. This remains the situation as we prepare for the second year to charge the Learning and Skills with Racism and demand the restoration of Bilston Community College on its old site as an independent Community College.
But this was before the extraordinary events initiated by Sir Geoffrey Hampton, currently Dean of the School of Education at W’ton University who decided to canonise the saintly Ms Jane Williams the former principal of the Wolverhampton City College by awarding her an Honorary Degree of the University despite the knowledge that this would be opposed by many people, including the Friends of BCC, and raise the skeletons in his own cupboard. Sir Geoffrey had been a so-called super-head beloved by Blair and had `turned round’ Northicote School for which he was awarded, again by Blair, a title. This process had enraged heads in Wolverhampton schools claiming that Northicote had not been as bad as was said when it was put into `measures’, nor as good as it was claimed when Hampton left and in any case other heads could have made the same improvements if they had been showered with the same amount of money as Northicote had received. Hampton wrote a book in 2000 together with a person called Jeff Jones entitled Transforming Northicote School, The Reality of School Improvement. This seems to have sunk without trace almost from its date of publication.
As one of the few possessing a copy of the book, I wrote a review of it praising the fact that Hampton advocated Comprehensive Schools and his high regard for all pupils whatever their attainments, but I also collected statistics showing that the improvement at Northicote were rather less than Hampton claimed.
There was no case whatsoever for granting Jane Williams an Honorary Degree. She had been improperly appointed as principal of the new W’ton City College and she seems to have been the first to realise that the ship of Wolverhampton City College was sinking and she was welcomed by the Department of Education who gave her a responsible job. Jane Williams left behind her a series of complaints of racism and she has been protected from these complaints being heard ever since. This is yet another scandal of the improprieties, illegalities and dirty tricks which those who closed BBC resorted and which Hampton’s bungling have again brought to light. The next was the collusion between the University Clerk to the Governors, Lee, and the Vice-Chancellor, John Brookes, not to put complaints made by the Friends to the Board of Governors and led to the then Vice-Chancellor issuing threats to the spokesperson of the Friends which was one of several attempts to silence opposition to the closure of BCC. Ms Williams had the brass cheek to turn up to the ceremony which now can only be changed by the governors rescinding the award.
The State We Are In
Next, in this BLOG I want to return to the Race Issue. In 1900 W.E.B.du Bois, the greatest black scholar, intellectual and activist of that century, stated, `The problem of the twentieth century, is the problem of the color-line.’ If that was true of the twentieth it is even more true of the twenty first century. We have seen how this problem was not tackled, but avoided. It has long been held, for instance, that no progress towards equality has been made in the USA since emancipation in the 1860s. It is only very recently that such attitudes are now being revised. In Britain Churchill declared that he had not come to power to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire and although he was powerless to prevent much of this happening, his Labour successors to the renamed British Commonwealth have rarely made racism their main issue and racism remains alive and well in the armed services, the civil service, Parliament and in all public services. This creates the atmosphere in which hard core right-wing neo-fascist organisations such as the BNP can hope to develop.
One of the greatest achievements of du Bois was to write his The Souls of Black Folks in 1868. The theme of this great book was the ultimate impossibility of Black Folk reconciling their existence as citizens of the USA with the fact that they were black. Such a dichotomy applied also to Jews with equally devastating results.
Today the Prime Minister of Britain is a war criminal guilty of waging illegal war in Iraq and we are now being told by those foolish enough to follow him that we must support his racist policies in order to save the Labour Party.
Blair is indeed a remarkable figure to shore up the racism of the British establishment. He is such a nice guy, looking as if butter would not melt in his mouth, a man promising to mend his ways and listen to the people. In fact if he is really concerned for his place in history he only needs to apologise for illegally invading Iraq and bring our troops home. But this, of course, is the one thing he will never do and in place of the fantasy of his `niceness’ lies the reality of a non-repentant mass murderer, a hypocrite with no intention of listening to the views of other people and utterly ruthless in imposing an undemocratic programme on an unwilling people.
In noting an increase in racism in Britain we may well start with education. We have seen how the abandonment of ethnic monitoring in education has led inevitably to increased racism. It began with David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, refusal to make the ethnic composition of staff a key element of school inspection. This in spite of the fact that one of the most important developments, put into place by a Tory government, was the compulsory disclosure annually of the ethnic composition of pupils and staff in schools. If OFSTED could not be bothered then others would follow suite advertising their devotion to equal opportunities but in fact denying it until we have now reached the point where none of the teachers’ unions have racial equality as a basic principle of their policies. No models for blacks to follow here.
The theories and actions of WEB du Bois offer a more reliable guide. du Bois’s life straddled one hundred years from 1868 to 1968. He formed or participated in every important black organisation from the optimistic ones of post-slavery to the present day. He stormed Harvard from being a `junior’ (the status to which blacks were confined) to becoming the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. He welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917 and frequently visited the Soviet Union, especially praising the equality of blacks inherent within the philosophy of Communism. By 1933 he was beginning to lose faith in integration and criticises such policies of the NAACP the mass organisation the National Asssociation for the Advancement of Coloured People. During the McCarthy period of terror du Bois was considered a subversive and he refused to name his comrades when asked the infamous question `are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.’ Under the McCarthy regime du Bois worked closely with Paul Robeson who suffered similar victimisation. Robeson was the mightiest of black US fighters against racism. Almost the finest singer the world has known with his deep bass voice which he used to sing the songs, not only of blacks, but the whole world; with his marvellous body one of the greatest of US athletes; an actor of world renown famous not only for membership of the black company which featured Ol’ Man River, but for black roles hitherto played by white people, such as Othello. du Bois and Robeson were the two greatest black internationalists of their time. Both had their passports eventually restored, du Bois on his ninetieth birthday in 1958 when he promptly embarked on a world tour including Britain, France, East Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1962 he travelled to China. The following year he was invited to Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah to revive the project of the African Encyclopedia. he became a citizen of Ghana and died in Accra in August 1963 where he was given a state funeral. Before leaving the USA he had applied to join the Communist Party. It was also the eve of the Civil Rights March on Washington.
The Future
Today, as ever, the problem of the color-line predominates. The majority of whites tolerate the multicultural society, but scratch a little deeper and there is widespread resentment of travellers and asylum seekers. Many of those who call themselves anti-racist have little knowledge of what this implies. The impetus given to `institutional racism’ from the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence has been blunted or turned to their advantage by racists who blatantly declare themselves multiculturalists while continuing their racist ways.
And so we come to the most advanced present day statement of racial equality which is Ebony Towers, a BBC programme which raised the question of suitable role models for blacks in a world where black men remain at the bottom of our society whether in education or by the measure that there are twice as many black prisoners in British jails as there are black graduates. The two leading figures in the present controversy are Tony Sewell, the columnist of the black newspaper the Voice, who advocates returning British black youths to the discipline of Jamaican schools, and Trevor Phillips the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality who has become as disillusioned with present organisations as was du Bois with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1933 and is beginning to advocate segregation rather than integration. This is difficult terrain to negotiate. du Bois eventually returned to faith in the international working class movement and this still remains, in my view, the best hope for equality for all people.
The `No’ Vote in France
This represents the ultimate dissatisfaction with Party politics across much of the world. In Britain it now seems that there will be no referendum on the EU constitution. For broad left-wing people it is to be hoped that the Labour Party will survive, but the price of endorsing the views of war criminal Blair and his accomplices of New Labour is not one that should be paid, not even in the hope that Blair will be removed `some time soon.’
June 2005