In the early 1960s, Britain first tried to join the Common Market. The British Labour Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party opposed this, arguing that it was creating a supranational capitalist entity that served no purpose for the British working class (or the other working classes of Western Europe). This can be seen in the literature on the Common Market by the Communist Party of Great Britain produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Australian labour movement and the Communist Party of Australia also opposed Britain’s entry into the Common Market. In the early 1960s, CPA journalist Rupert Lockwood wrote a pamphlet for the Sydney Branch of the Boilermakers’ Society that outlined the Communist-influenced trade unions’ position towards the Common Market.
As part of my endeavours to make some of the more hard-to-find resources on leftist history, I have scanned and uploaded a copy of this pamphlet. In the era of Brexit, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this pamphlet of an earlier era of ‘Euroscepticism’ on the international left.
History and Policy has published an opinion piece by Andrekos Varnava and I on our research into the controlling of Cypriot migration to the UK in the 1920s-30s. It is based on our article in English Historical Research last year and some of the research we have been doing as part of our ARC project on border control in Britain and Australia. You can read the piece here.
I am excited to let you all know that the Verso Books blog published a piece by Jon Piccini and I on the old left, new left and the ‘long 1968’ in Australia. It is based on the introduction to our new book (co-edited with Matthew Worley), The Far Left in Australia since 1945, which will be published by Routledge in July.
You can pre-order the paperback version here. We will hopefully having a book launch in Melbourne in late August. More details to follow!
Last week I debated Harvard University’s Lawrence Summers on free speech at universities and the tactic of no platform for The Economist. My opening statement was edited for word length, so I am posting the longer version below.
The principle of ‘no platform’ is that speakers or organisations that publicly espouse violent, racist or fundamentally anti-democratic ideas, as well as others forms of hate speech should be prevented from doing so. Although not limited to university campuses, student organisations across the global West have attempted to implement a policy of no platform to deny explicit racists and fascists from publicly speaking, organising or recruiting on campuses. As a defined policy, no platform began within the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK in the mid-1970s in reaction to appearances by the fascist and populist far right (particularly the National Front and the Monday Club) on British university campuses. The policy meant that invitations for far right and racist speakers would be withdrawn and prevented, venues would be off-limits to these speakers and that these organisations would not be allowed to have a physical presence on campus. This would often be enforced bureaucratically, but elements of the student movement also argued that physical confrontation might be necessary to prevent these speakers from speaking or assembling on university grounds.
Since the mid-to-late 1960s, the growing student movement in Britain, as well as across the world, had attempted to prevent certain people from speaking at universities, often representatives of the government or supporters of the Vietnam War or apartheid South Africa (as well as other controversial speakers like psychologist Hans Eysenck), but this was on a much more ad hoc basis. The policy of no platform was formulated in a period of crisis, when the forces of the far right were starting to mobilise more confidently.
Physically confronting fascists did not simply emerge as a tactic in the early 1970s, but was influenced by the anti-fascist traditions of the inter-war period. Militant anti-fascism existed across the global West in the 1920s and 1930s and although it was not as violent as in Italy or Germany, anti-fascism in Britain (and the United States) was indeed physical and confrontational. The anti-fascist movement of the 1970s, instrumental in developing the no platform policy, built upon the tactics fostered in the 1930s (and again in the late 1940s), primarily encouraging venues not to allow fascists to speak or organise in them and physically occupying public spaces where fascists attempted to congregate.
As it was originally devised, the principle of no platform meant preventing violent and organised racist groups and speakers from appearing on university campuses. It was not intended to apply to the Conservative Party and other socially conservative groups. The reasoning was that these fascist organisations were anti-democratic and sought to remove the democratic rights of others, so they could not rely upon the democratic principle of free speech if it was to be denied to people they demonised.
The widening of the scope for no platform has led to controversy within student and activist circles since the 1970s, but while many agree on applying the principle to explicitly racist and fascist organisations and speakers, it has been individual student unions or student groups that have sought to extend it. No platform is a tactic that needs to be negotiated with regard to its immediate context and requires democratic debate over it use in any given campaign. At the moment, the NUS only applies the policy of no platform at the national level to several openly racist or jihadist groups, such as the British National Party, National Action and Hizb-ut-Tahir. Individual student unions can apply the principle to other groups depending on the local situation. No platform is about preventing what is colloquially known as ‘hate speech’ rather than speech that is merely offensive. In many Western countries, unlike the United States, this opposition to hate speech is in line with broader human rights legislation that protects people from hateful or harmful speech (although these laws are often portrayed as against ‘free speech’).
The question as to whether universities should or should not host speakers who propound offensive ideas does not fully grasp the situation. Students and activists are not simply mobilising to prevent those propounding offensive ideas, but harmful speech that is often linked to harmful actions. As institutions, universities promote the notion that they are neutral venues where competing ideas are debated and for the most part, attempt to excuse themselves from taking any action that prevents people or organisations from publicising their ideas on campus (although critics point out that anti-extremism programs, such as Prevent in the UK, have been implemented to a degree that curtails freedom of speech). With the case of the UK, universities are not allowed to hinder free speech under the Education Act no. 2 1986. However this does not apply to student unions or individual student bodies that exist as separate legal entities to the university. It is predominantly a democratic decision by the student bodies at the grassroots level to allow or not allow speakers that may engage in harmful or hateful speech, rather than the university administration.
Free speech absolutism often proposes that, above all else, university are a marketplace of ideas where students should be intellectually challenged and while students are presented with a range of ideas on campus, students also have the right not to be subjected to hateful or harmful speech and can forcefully reject proponents of these ideas. These forms of hate speech call for taking away the rights of certain sections of society and are thoroughly anti-democratic, and cannot be tolerated as within the realm of democratic ‘debate’.
When figures of the fascist or populist far right are invited to speak on university campuses (and in other public venues), these speakers do not present their ideas into a vacuum and often a broader coterie of far right forces are mobilised to attend these events, which can lead to intimidation, harassment and violence. Many students are unwilling to allow this to happen and organise to prevent these forces from coalescing on campus. In the past few years, various ‘alt right’ figures and groups have attempted to hold public events, campaign or recruit on university campuses in the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada. As the far right forces gain notoriety in an era of populism, many people, including students and other younger activists, are worried about what these forces might lead to. The battle for the university campus is part of a wider resistance to what they see as the zombie march of a regressive and reactionary right that should have been left behind by now.
I am very excited that the ECR blog for the Australian Historical Association has featured an article by me on surviving in academia without tenure. Here is the first paragraph:
I have decided that the best way to write about being a non-tenured academic in Australia in the humanities/social sciences is to talk about surviving. But it is not about personal resilience in an attempt to overcome the problems of academia, but about recognising that working in academia on a casual, fixed-term or independent basis requires survival in the face of institutional pressures and pitfalls.
This is an extract from some work that I have doing with Jac St John, with assistance from the Special Branch Files project and via this project, journalist Solomon Hughes.
The community charge, better known as the ‘Poll Tax’, was introduced by the Thatcher Government as an ideological reform of local council rates, which led to a severe backlash in the final years of her Prime Ministership. First introduced in Scotland in 1989, the flat rate tax was then introduced in England and Wales in 1990, which led to massive backlash, from the Labour Party, but more significantly, from the grassroots.
Although the Labour Party had decided against a campaign of non-payment at its 1988 conference, a number of groups were created by activists on the left to support the non-payment of the tax and assist those who experienced legal troubles as a result of non-payment. The most important of these groups was the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation (ABAPTF), organised by Militant, which used the local trade unions to help build a campaign of non-payment. The Socialist Workers Party, the other major far left organisation in Britain at the time, had a much more ambivalent attitude towards non-payment and the ABAPTF, which allowed Militant to become the dominant group campaigning against the Poll Tax. Outside of the Trotskyist far left, several anarchist groups also supported non-payment, especially the Anarchist Communist Federation who produced a pamphlet called Beating the Poll Tax (ACF 1990). The role that these groups played in the anti-Poll Tax campaign led the authorities to identify these groups as particular threats and pre-empt ‘trouble’ when dealing with them, feeding into the ‘outside agitators’ thesis that has been explored above. This has come to light through Metropolitan Police files released via FOI to the journalist Solomon Hughes in 2005 (Hughes has written about these files here).
Prior to the national Anti-Poll Tax march in London at the end of March 1990, the Home Office’s F8 Division noted that there was ‘evidence of Militant and Socialist Workers Party involvement’ at several regional demonstrations, such as Bristol and Haringey, but this involvement was ‘not uniform’ (HO 1990a). The memo suggested that demonstrations were at their ‘most vociferous and active’ when these groups were involved, but also acknowledged that there was ‘no indication of national co-ordination of the demonstrations’ (HO 1990a). Another memo written the following day further implied that it was far left agitators that stirred up trouble with the police, writing:
It is hard to imagine defaulters and/or dissatisfied payers coming together spontaneously in sufficient numbers with intent to cause serious public disorder (HO 1990b).
With this anticipation of violence, the Metropolitan Police prepared for confrontation at the national Anti-Poll Tax demonstration that happened in central London on 31 March 1990. Over 200,000 attended the march from Kennington Park to Trafalgar Square, but as some marchers deviated towards protests at Downing Street and Whitehall, the massive police presence clashed with some protestors. Danny Burns (1992: 89) described the police attack upon those demonstrating at Downing Street:
300 people sat down, and then the police brought in the horses. Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd. The crowd, angered by this violent provocation retaliated throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles – anything they could find. Young people, armed only with placards fought hand to hand with police. Some demonstrators were batoned down with truncheons, others has riot shields thrust into their faces.
Addressing Parliament two days later, the Home Secretary stated that by the end of the day, 339 people were arrested (mainly for public order offences) and 86 people were injured. Out of 2,198 police officers on duty, Waddington announced that 374 of them had been injured, with 58 requiring hospital treatment. Materially, there were around 250 reports of property damage as well (Hansard, 2 April, 1990, col. 893). Despite the opposition, including Roy Hattersley, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn, calling for a public inquiry into the riot, the Conservative government were unwilling to allow this, with David Waddington stating that there would only be a criminal investigation into those protestors who broke the law and an internal inquiry ‘carried out by the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to see what lessons can be learnt’ (Hansard, 2 April, 1990, col. 895). In reply to people contacting the Home Office to assist with any potential inquiry, the Home Office explained:
The review which [the Metropolitan Police] undertake will be a thorough examination of the police handling of the event right through from the planning stages to the actions taken on the day. It will be very much concerned with operational matters. The Met will not call on the assistance of outside advisers during the course of the review. In the circumstances they suggest that correspondents should not be encouraged (HO 1990c).
Sir Peter Imbert, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told Thatcher that two inquiries were underway, the first being into ‘those who had conspired to organise the violence and those who perpetrated it’ and the second ‘to learn any lessons for future policing of such occasions’ (Letter from Andrew Turnbull to Colin Walters, 3 April 1990, PREM 19/3021, NA). Briefing the Prime Minister on this meeting with Imbert, her Private Secretary Andrew Turnbull stated that ‘[a]lthough the police were under great pressure and showed great courage, it cannot be said that their handling of the event was faultless’ (‘Meeting with Sir Peter Imbert’, 3 April, 1990, PREM 19/3021, NA).
Stott and Drury (2000: 257) have argued that because the police ‘treated the crowd as a single unit, regardless of any individuals’ prior activities or intentions’, when disorder did break out and a ‘small number of demonstrators actively engaged in conflict’, the police treated these individuals with the same ‘aggressive policing activity’ as those who did not engage in this conflict. For Stott and Drury, ‘the police had the ability to impose their perceptions of a uniformly dangerous crowd upon crowd members through their use of indiscriminate coercive force’. Reading the archival record, the police attempted to portray themselves as unprepared for this disorder. Imbert told Thatcher that they ‘expected around 1,500 trouble-makers’, but ‘[w]hat had been completely unexpected was the degree of violence used’, further claiming that ‘[s]ome of his officers came close to being murdered’ (Letter from Andrew Turnbull to Colin Walters, 3 April 1990, PREM 19/3021, NA). For Imbert, the ‘restraint shown was highly commendable’. In contrast to the police perceptions of the day’s events in its aftermath as revealed in these recently disclosed papers, Stott and Drury’s interviews with police officers involved in policing the march show that the police perceived the crowd ‘as a uniform danger’ and ‘chose to act against the crowd’ in combative manner (Stott and Drury 2000: 261).
In 1988, nearly three years after the riots in Handsworth and Broadwater Farm, the Home Secretary Douglas Hurd stated, ‘Public order training has been refined and improved throughout the 80s, and we have provided the police with better protective and other equipment’, meaning, in his eyes, that the police were ‘more skilled and better prepared, both individually and collectively, for tackling disorder and preventing its escalation’ (‘Public Order in the Inner Cities’, 21 June, 1988, PREM 19/3021, NA). However the policing of the Poll Tax riot just under two years later seem to demonstrate that while public order policing had become more efficient, it was still unable to prevent events from escalating to a episode of disorder.
References
ACF (1990) Beating the Poll Tax (London: ACF pamphlet).
Burns, D. (1992) Poll Tax Rebellion (Stirling: AK Press).
Home Office (1990a) Memo dated 7 March.
Home Office (1990b) Memo dated 8 March.
Home Office (1990c) Letter dated 10 April.
Stott, C. & Drury, J. (2000) ‘Crowds, Context and Identity: Dynamic Categorization Processes in the “Poll Tax Riot”’, Human Relations, 53/2, pp. 247-273.
*SORRY, THIS DEAL SEEMS TO HAVE ENDED ALREADY. APOLOGIES!*
This is just a quick plug that you can get the paperback version of Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 for under $US 10 via Amazon. I don’t how long the sale is for, but get it while you can!
