The Barnsby Blog

Once again I address the Lords of the Press and ask them to reply to my criticisms. Jeremy Paxman seems these days to be looking like an exhausted volcano, very different from the man who wrote ‘The Political Animal’ that entertaining, informative, incisive and insightful book (the words of his mate Andrew Rawnsley) in 2002 who was not afraid of anyone, let alone the common person who is now addressing you for the sixteenth time.

Then there is Jon Snow who actually asked people to write to him, which I did, but have received no reply. Is this the man who wrote the excellent autobiography ‘Shooting History’ who obviously hated everything that New Labour has come to mean and was not afraid to say so. The man in the fancy ties and socks now seems to be an anachronism even though he  stated at a Guardian Conference that Citizen Journalism will help ‘professionalise professional journalism’, and why when confronted with just that in the shape of my BLOG does he refuse to reply to my BLOG?

If the top journalists fail to challenge Blair on his illegal and racist war in Iraq and also fail to contribute to the discussion necessary for eliminating the Blair-speak which dominates our TV and radio. At present the obvious solution is to adopt the objective methods of Al Jazeera, especially as it now has a London Office headed by Sir David Frost.

But if the leading journalists shirk their duty, where does this leave lesser lights? Take Huw Edwards who recently did an important feature on the life of Lloyd George and might well be thought by many Welsh people as a spokesman for Wales. What are his thoughts on the stuff that is put in front of him to read? Or George Alagiah the black man? Or Martha Kearney now taking a leading part in Newsnight and Newsnight Review. Has she any views and does she take any responsibility for the material she uses or is she nothing but a pleasant young person floating on froth and spin?

If one puts oneself forward as a public figure then the public is entitled quiz you and you must answer whether it be praise or criticism. That is called democracy, and we still have some of it in Britain.

So Jeremy Paxman, Jon Snow, Andrew Marr, Kirsty Wark and others mentioned, please reply.

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop
Web: www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

Dear David McKie

Reading you column in the Guardian today I reached for my copy of The Pursuit of the Millenium by Norman Cohn only to find I have temporarily mislaid it, an accident you will no doubt  be familiiar with.

However on the subject of Utopia I have uncovered the following works which seem particularly relevant to the subject.

The first is James Burney’s History of the Bucaneers of America published in
1902 by the Unit Library, Leicester Square, London. Burney was a captain in the Royal Navy and his book was first published in 1816 by Luke Hansard and Sons, near Lincoln Inn Fields, London for Payne & Foss, Pall Mall. It was issued as one of five quarto volumes of ‘his masterly work’ issued between the years 1803-1817 under the general title ‘A Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific.’

The second work is entitled The Communist Societies of the United States from Personal Observations by Charles Nordhoff published first in 1875 as the Dover edition in the USA and finally published by Constable in the UK in 1966. The introduction to the UK editions is by Mark Holloway who comments on the appearance of two books almost simultaneously, The History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes is largely concerned with Owenite and Fourierist societies whereas Nordhoff writes at length on German utopians, the Shakers and Icarians. This is confirmed by the contents page with Nordhoff writing in great detail not only of the Shakers, but the Separists of Zoar, The Amana Society, the Aurora and Bethel Communities and very many other American Utopian societies.

The third work is by Mark Holloway himself called ‘Heavens on Earth, Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880′ and published by Turnstile Press in 1951.
Mark is so knowledgeable that he not only deals with Utopian societies in the US, but provides  an introduction which talks of classical Legends of Golden Ages in classical and medieval times including Sparta, Republic of Plato and Zeno, Waldenses Lollards, Anabaptists, Thomas More, etc. Not content with that Holloway discusses the decline of Utopianism and its replacement by scientific Socialism and the alleged failure of the latter.
This brings us right up to date. Is capitalism the ‘highest form of civilisation the world has known’ or is there a higher form of Islamic society out there somewhere. This is now being fought out in the cradles of civilisations in Mesopotamia of Iraq and Iran.

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop
Web www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

Dear Tristram

Yesterday I sent you a collection of my free booklets Radical Wolverhampton, Radical Birmingham, Radical Dudley, Radical Walsall and Radical Bilston in response to your campaign for the celebration of Labour History. My purpose was to stress the importance of Birmingham and the  Black Country as areas not sufficiently celebrated in Labour History annals.

The purpose of this email is to show some of the sources of local history, including Labour history, active in Birmingham and the Black Country.

Probably the most important is Carl Chinn who writes a a weekly column for the Express and Star, does a weekly four hour slot on West Midlands radio each Sunday, makes himself available as the opening star of almost any historical event and was and is an opponent of the closure of the Rover car plant at Longbridge. This is an incredible work load to undertake.

Yet it is no more than the workload undertaken by the Editor of the Black Country Bugle, Robert Taylor. If anyone needs recommending for the honours list it is Robert and his predecessor as editor. The Bugle, calling itself the Voice of the Black Country, is a unique publication. It used to be a monthly, then fortnightly, but now it is a weekly publication from which pours forth every seven days the seemingly unending flow of memoirs, reminiscences, letters etc. of the ordinary people of the Black Country.

And as if a weekly were not sufficient there is the staid old quarterly publication, The Blackcountryman now in its 39th year under a series of editors who would not adopt my suggestion that its name should be changed to Black Country People or come to terms with the fact there are Communists such as me among their readership. But even with those failings it is one of the most important sources of labour history in the Black Country, particularly for the lives of those craftsmen before and after the Industrial Revolution who, deprived of education, made the Black Country one of the key centres of the Industrial Revolution. Now, of course, although we are educated our industry has disappeared under the New Labour ninnies who rule us.

The next source to be mentioned is Ned Williams, prolific historian of the Black Country, now a free lance full-time historian, but also a historian of the Walsall Co-operative movement in its most radical phase from 1829 of association with Robert Owens Utopian Socialist period when Co-ops were producer Co-ops with the aim of peacefully superceding capitalism.

Then there is Stan Newens ex-Essex Labour MP and MEP, but an honorary Black Countryman from being a Bevin Boy in the Cannock mines during World War II who associated with the Garner twins in the Labour youth organisation of the time. Both Alan and Ray became Wolverhampton Labour concillors after the war. One of Stan’s many contributions to Labour history has been his collection of radicals between 1850 and about 1900 with a picture/photograph of every one of them. Unique.

Then, we must mention the Black Country Living Museum which has avoided the fate of other museums and flourishes open seven days a week this summer and with its Mary MacArthur Institute taken down brick by brick and rebuilt at the Museum it deals worthily with its political and trade union past.

Talking of those working themselves to death I would mention the Express and Star which not only hosts Carl Chinn, but whose reporters efficiently research history and the paper serves the majority of its readers by opposing the war in Iraq. The reporter I refer to is Peter Rhodes, the only journalists I know who writes a  witty, satirical and anti-war column for six days a week. I have had my ups and downs with both the paper and Peter Rhodes, but we are now on the best of terms and only he and I appreciate the fact that the founder of the paper was the Scottish/USA steel monopolist and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, whose philosophy was that every penny of what he earned should be returned to those it was earned from. If Peter Rhodes were ever appointed to the editorship of the Express and Star I think he might well adopt the Carnegie approach to wealth. I would also mention their Sports Correspondents who dealt with the World Cup and the particular torments of Wolverhampton Wanderers deserted by their previous manager and waiting for another sugar daddy as Sir Jack Hayward, entrepreneur and patriot extraordinary refuses to continue in that role.

Then there are the current developments, both progressive and otherwise. The Wolverhampton Windrush Project, story of first generation West Indians in Wolverhampton and Britain, particularly suitable for showings at schools.
The Wolverhampton Special Needs Unit under the redoubtable Kal Dale, the Jenny Lee Professional Teachers’ Association led by Sedhev Bismal with its important library which I criticised when last I had occasion to visit it, as pandering to the prevailing ‘conservatism’ of the British public. Then there are the trade unions recently re-united and still a formidable force at 9m members; Anti-war and with contacts with the New World of Venezuala, Bolivia, Argentine etc. Add to this THE VOICE, most influential of the Afro-Caribbean weekly newspapers anti-war and with a mission to protect the Afro-Caribbean community.

I could go on, but will end with the working class history organisations of Socialist History Society, the newly independent Working Class Movement Library, various organs of Communist History in Britain, and the very latest History Society of the Communist Party of Britain advertised on the highly influential Saturday Listings of the Morning Star Progressive Web Sites of Graham Stevenson, historian and Transport & General Workers’ Union official with more than 100 biographies of of leading working class figures.

Unfortunately there are also reactionary tendencies, particularly in education, which prevent third generation ethnic minority children from naturally embracing the multicultural world in which most of them live. One is the lack of a role model for ethnic minority children in schools. Another is the phenomenon remarked on by Trevor Phillips chair of the Commission for Racial Equality of his famous statement Sleepwalking to Segregation. Then there is the totally unacceptable position of local schools calling themseves schools or colleges of Special distinction such as Sport, Music, Arts etc. which can thereby dodge the rules of acceptng children from their catchment area and accept donations from private sources, some of them from very seedy religious sources, which they need not disclose. Lastly there are those such as the Lords of the Fourth Estate such as Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow of Channel 4 and Kirsty Walk who think that in these days of BLOGs and people power that they can ignore critics by not replying to them.
They are mistaken.

So, Tristram, I have outlined the resources we have in the West Midlands to celebrate our Labour history. The next thing will be to use all these resources to further your grand project. Please keep in touch with us.

GEORGE BARNSBY.
GB Peoples Library and Free Communist Bookshop
Web: www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

The greatest scoundrel in the annals of the fair city of Wolverhampton was Jonathan Wild. His misdeeds as the greatest criminal of all times, is, however now beng eclipsed as the Court of the Blairs currently bids for that title.

Wild did not stay long in Wolverhampton. His undoubted gifts of card sharping, pickpocketing, highwayrobbery, bribery etc. were much more suited to the great metropolis of London.

Both Wild and the Blairs spoke volumes in defence of their own misdeeds and both of them had influential biographies written about them; the difference being that the one of Wild was written by a magistrate of the vital court of the Old Bailey in London, Henry Fielding, and is one of the great classics of English literature, satirising the villainies of Wild and comparing them with the equally villainous career of Robert Walpole the first statesman to take the title of Prime Minister who was then feathering his own nest and ruining thousands of his fellow citizens in what came to be called The South Sea Bubble, the disastrous stock market crash of the early 1700s. The biography of the Blairs by Francis Beckett, while not being able to compete with that of Henry Fielding, faithfully records the villainies of the Blairs.

Wild’s great ‘achievment’ was to monopolise crime and pose as a great ‘thief taker’ by ruining and then betraying his fellow thieves to the authorities.
He instructed his thieves what to steal, received the stolen goods from them, and then returned the goods stolen to their owners for a fee.

When Wild was deservedly arrested and sentenced to death on the gallows of Tyburn, he first played what he considered his trump card of publishing a list of 64 men and one woman who had been discovered, apprehended and convicted by him and subsequently hanged at Tyburn. But by that time people were fed up with his lies and it availed him nothing.

Fielding gives few details of the death of Wild and it is the account of Daniel Defoe which repairs that ommission. Wild was hanged on the 24th of May 1725. He was drugged with laudanum the previous day, but took so large a dose that he might well have expired from its effects before he reached to gallows. He was therefore in no state to make an heroic exit as his admirers would have wished, and it was to the wrath of those who had suffered from his villainies that he was delivered. Abhorring the very name of the man, they threw dirt and stones at every step of the cart conveying him and even at the place of execution. The other criminals being dispatched, Wild was allowed to continue to sit in the cart, the hangman giving him permission to take his time. The mob then were fearful that he would receive a reprieve and threatened to tear the hangman to pieces if he did not immediately dispatch Wild.

Such was the the death of Wolverhampton’s most notorious son. It is possible to conceive of the violent end of Tony Charles Lynton Blair, victim of the terrorists he did so much to create, and quiet satisfaction if not approval, of the majority of people at his fate.

To Trevor Phillips.

Dear Trevor,

I am disappointed that I have only received a formal acknowledgement of my letter to you of 15 June 2006.

I reiterate below my main reasons for believing that you cannot fairly represent either ethnic minority or poor people in your present position.

The main causes of difference are the illegal and racist war in Iraq. You have maintained that the question of the war ‘is not within your remit’.
Since this is now the main political question of the 21st Century and the majority of people of the world opppose the war, you cannot now ignore this question. Your refusal to treat with this question leaves doubts as to whether you support the war or not and you have made no clear statement of this matter.

Almost equally important was your inability to provide an ethnic breakdown of staff, beginning with your own, and going on to civil servants of government departments and the ethnic breakdown of all employers concerned with providing services to the public sector. You thus deprived yourself of vital weapons in the struggle against racism. Racism in the higher ranks of the civil service is widely regarded as a most important source of racism in Britain.

Then there is the question of Tony Blair’s decision to abolish the CRE in favour of an all-purposes discrimination organisation. This is seen by those with most experience of these matters to side-line the question of Racism.
It has taken the Afro-Caribbean newspaper The Voice to start a campaign to save the CRE. Again, your views on this matter are unknown.

Even worse was the unilateral decision of David Bell, then chief inspector of schools and head of OFSTED, to remove any mention of ethnicity of staff or any assessment of the race situation in schools and this was supported by the racist Further Education Funding Council and endorsed by the equally racist Learning and Skills Council. This contributes to the uncertain state of Race Relations in schools and Colleges and the possibility that black students might find it necessary to riot (as they did in Birminhgam recently) if they are to have any chance of having their grievances attended to.

Finally I raise the question of the two jewels in the crown of Wolverhampton, namely Bilston Community College, the first and only multicultural College with 30% of ethnic minority staff (never equalled before or since). This was closed by Blunkett and Blair and local institutional racists such as the then Vice-Chancellor of Wolverhampton University. Also the closure of Wolverhampton Race Equality Council, the oldest REC in the country to have been continuously controlled by the two main ethnic minority groups in the town Punjabis and Afro-Caribbeans.

I am sure you appreciate that in these days of BLOGS it is no longer possible for institutions and individuals to hypocritically proclaim their adherance to openness and democracy on the one hand, yet to ignore any criticism by not replying to it.

Yours sincerely,

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop.
141 Henwood Rd. Wolverhampton, W.Mids WV6 8PJ
Web: www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

Dear David Cameron

I address you for the last time pleading with you to seek the greatness that was within your grasp by opposing the war in Iraq.

Today you stand shoulder to shoulder with Bush, Blair and all your Tory imperialist predecessors in the Barbarian project of destroying not only the Iraqi people but also the monuments of the twin ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Iraq by its descent to disintegration by civil strife and Iran by its necessity to protect itself by developing nuclear weapons.

However daring, and indeed praiseworthy, be your other projects to remake the Tory party - your cuddling up to the hoodies,   the windmills your put on your roof or however many miles you pedal your bicycle, these are small beer compared with the issues of War and Racism where you are lined up with the reactionaires.

I would like to introduce you to a man you have probably never heard of, his work not being on the reading lists of Eton and Cambridge. This is WEB Du Bois the black scholar who in 1903 published The Souls of Black Folk. This stressed the fact that the most important question for the twentieth century was what he called ‘the color-line’. If this was true of the twentieth century it is even more true for the twentieth first century and anyone who neglects this truth does so at his peril.

Then there is the question of Islam. Muslims do not need Osama Bin Laden to tell them how they shall act. They are motivated by the UMMA which roughly translates to the duty of the self-acting Muslim world community to protect and support every one of its members. At its best, this is a noble message far superior to the global capitalist appeal to the selfishness of the individual. This and the ban on usury which means that capitalism cannot be supported points to a quite different, but superior development of Muslim Society.

Finally there is the appeal of the greatest of the secular visionaries - Karl Marx. Marx’ authority has recently been reinforced by his being voted the greatest philosopher in the world. Although his thought has been recently undermined by the villains and psychopaths who destroyed the Soviet Union, his principles of class struggle and necessity of replacing capitalism with Socialism remain valid.

Again, David Cameron, I plead that you join with us in searching for solutions to the problems of this New World instead of lining up with the doomed imperialist camp of Bush and Blair.

GEORGE BARNSBY
GB Working Class Library and Free Communist Bookshop
141 Henwood Rd. Wolverhampton, W.Mids. WV6 8PJ Tele & Fax 01902 751888
Web: www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

Dear Amy Lawrence

I re-read your masterful article in the Observer on the World Cup final immediately after the match. If there is an award for the best writing on the 2006 World Cup you should be nominated.

But what drama! Who would have imagined in the World Cup final that Thierry Henry would be withdrawn with the possibility of the match going to penalties, or that his substitute Wiltord would score one of France’s unavailing penalties. Who in his wildest imaginings would have  conceived that Zinedine Zidane with a wild rush of blood to the head would have behaved even worse than Rooney and head butt an opponent and be sent off to end a long and honourable career in disgrace. Or will it be disgrace?
Whether he reacted to racist comments cannot be determined at this point of time.

But as our good friend Max Hasting, the military historian, always points out, no battle ever goes according to plan and the World Cup final was no exception.

What are England’s present prospects of future glory? Already the jackals of some newspaper correspondents and radio programmes such as Talk Sport write us off as no-hopers, but our team contained players as good as those who contested the Final. Joe Cole, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham, Frank Lampard not to mention Michael Owen who suffered an horrendous injury at the start of the tournament.  Surely no other team in the tournament suffered such misfortunes. Was it not our greater misfortune in the match against Portugal that of these players mentioned Beckham was injured and Gerrard and Lampard suffered a catastrophic loss of form, yet still we managed to hold out against Scolari’s team through the second half and extra time with only ten men to eventually lose by not scoring enough penalties. Unfortunately at the knock-out stage there is no second chance. But is there not still the promise of those not taken to Germany such as Jermaine Defoe and Darren Bent, not to mention the promise of the seventeen year old, Theo Walcott, the boy wonder, who bore the fact that he did go to Germany but was not called on to play with good grace and humour.

Perhaps we should stop trying to manufacture a false Englishness and operate a British team of all the nations on these islands, both to cure our latent racisms and give ourselves a better chance of winning the World Cup.

Finally, only one country in the world can win the Cup and if we are to consider all other countries losers, it hardly seems worth while organising a tournament. Surely the World Cup should be seen as a life learning experience for players and spectators alike and the winner celebrated as just one of the participants in a multicultural world freed from the racism of the past which has come so close to destroying the world. Germany set a splendid example in this regard by entertaining visitors from all over the world with big screens to watch the matches and typical German hospitality.

GEORGE BARNSBY
70 Years an Arsenal fan, 50 years a Wolves supporter.

Dear David (Cameron)

I see that you are content to stay in the First Division battling through with other also rans rather than reach for greatness in the Premiership.

Greatness would mean opposing the war in Iraq which the majority of people in Britain oppose and these include very large numbers of Tories. Two of these I would particularly mention. Geoffrey Wheatcroft who uncovered from AJP Taylor, the historian, the philosophical roots of intervention in Iraq, namely the belief that Europe had achieved the highest form of civilisation that the world has yet known. Such imperialist snobbery carrries the corollary that we should attack any inferior nation at will.

My second Tory is Henry Porter who has unflinchingly laid bare the plans of Tony Bliar (not a misprint) to remove all civil liberties to satisfy his monumental self-delusion and megalomania.

Admittedly your atttempt to transform the Conservative Party has been a huge one, but you now remain stuck among such imperialist no-hopers as your predecessors William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

It could have been so different. You might have figured among the great Tory Prime Ministers of the past, of which I can only note two, Winston Curchill and Disraeli. Both of these were imperialists, however.

Yours might have attained the uniqueness of the first Tory Prime Minister to recognise that all nations are equal and wars, if ever, should be conducted with the agreement of the appropriate authority. in the case of Iraq, the United Nations.

Can your present imperialist position be retrieved? It is important that it should be, so please revert to you previous anti-war policy.

What the apologists of the slaughter on the Somme fail to mention (or do not know)is that all members of the 2nd Internationale including Britain and Germany were committed to opposing imperialist war. In 1914 when war did break out the Social Democratic leaders of most nations renaged and supported ‘their own’ Donkeys. This led to the discrediting of such leaders and the rise of Communism and the Soviet Union which ensured after the 2nd World War that countries demanding independence had a prop they could rely on to oppose USA, British, French etc colonising powers.

This continued until the collapse of the Soviet Unon when the US Neo-Cons wielding military power greater than all other nations combined invented the New American Century of rolling military invasion of each country in a so-called empire of evil; these would be totally destroyed, then reconstructed, largely by US construction monopolies, and all paid for with Middle East oil. Fortunately for humanity the first country they tried this doctrine on was Iraq whose people scotched this plan by their vigorous resistance, so that the US was forced to seek a ‘coalition’ of nations which leads us to the state we are now in  - committed indefinitely to a war we cannot win.

There were also other influences at work. On Christmas Day 1914 the Germans left their trenches and British soldiers joined in collaborating with them and playing the most significant football match ever in No-Man’s-Land. The consequences of this lasted long beyond the battle of the Somme in 1916 as generals and politicians wrestled with the impossible situation of shooting participants in this mutiny without being able to publicise the matter for fear of creating new mutinies. All this  in exercising their divine right to have Germans and British slaughter each other for the next four years.

Our very own Donkey,Tony Blair, responsible for the worst crime of the 21st century e.g. the war in Iraq, should take note.

What a brilliant idea of David Dimbleby to turn his programme, (Any Question 6 July) over to youth who chose the panel, chose one of their own as one of the panellists and chose the audience.

The young people gave their verdict on the war in Iraq by chosing George Galloway as their representative, although George did not appear on the ultimate panel. This was all-white in contrast to the audience which was distinctly multi-cultural.

The questions posed by the young people were pertinent and to the point, obliging the panellists to state and justify their attitudes to the war in Iraq.

I am sure that those in the audience who did not already know learned that unless one directly opposes the war on every occasion, all else is candyfloss, empty talk and spin. So that the representative on the panel of David Cameron’s new image Tory party who at one time opposed the war by agreeing to join the Liberal Democrats in the event of a hung parliament at the next general agreement, now find that the Tory Eton toff  supports the war and so is no better than his imperial predecessors. Even the supporter of Ming the Warrior did their leader no favours by underplaying the fact that the Social Democrats were the only party who opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning.

But youth won the day. Will David Dimbleby now consider turning his programme over to other sections of the population, for instance women, ex-service men and women, the trade unions, and all those who make up the majority of people in Britain who oppose the war in Iraq and want Tony Blair to go.