London Recruits: Please help fund doco on ‘secret war against Apartheid’

This is an appeal to help raise money to fund the completion of this documentary on the British activists who travelled to South Africa in the late 1960s to undertake secret missions to help the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Here’s a message from the film makers:

New documentary feature London Recruits tells the stories of the young women and men who undertook clandestine missions in the struggle to overthrow apartheid. Kept secret for decades, with your help, the nail-biting stories of those who risked all in taking on one of the 20th century’s most feared and brutal regimes will be told on the big screen for the first time.

The filmmakers behind London Recruits have launched a Kickstarter appeal to raise the final injection of funds needed to finish the project. Money raised with enable them to shoot reconstruction scenes, film remaining interviews, excavate further archives and build visual effects.

By backing London Recruits you will play and integral role in the project and help get the story of solidarity and internationalism to the big screen. Donate by October 1st. (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/londonrecruits/london-recruits) 

Keep up to date with the project on Twitter (https://twitter.com/LondonRecruits) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/londonrecruits/)

If you can, do donate to the film’s Kickstarter. A book recounting these stories of those who went on these secret missions was published in 2012 by Merlin Press. Do check that out as well!

I may post more on this next week, as I am just going through the papers of Ronnie Kasrils that were recently deposited at the Historical Papers Research Archive at Wits in Johannesburg.

Two forthcoming book chapters on history and television

I have two book chapters coming out in the next few months that explore the depiction of history through television comedy and drama.

Firstly Lauren Piko and I have a chapter titled, ‘“Thatcher’s Bloody Britain!”: Unemployment and Gender in Neoliberal Britain in The Young Ones and Men Behaving Badly’, in a collection edited by Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan. The collection is called Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television and will be out through IB Tauris at the end of October.

Secondly I have a chapter titled, “Brutalised” Veterans and Tragic Anti-Heroes: Masculinity, Crime and Post-War Trauma in Boardwalk Empire and Peaky Blinders’, in a collection put together by Michael Walsh and Andrekos Varnava. This collection, to be published in December by Routledge, is titled The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society.

Do pre-order these books for your institutional library. If you’re interested in specifically reading my chapters, do let me know via email.

New article published in TCBH on CPGB and gay rights

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that Daryl Leeworthy and I have just had an article published in Twentieth Century British History journal on the Communist Party of Great Britain and gay rights. The title of the article is ‘Before Pride: The Struggle for the Recognition of Gay Rights in the British Communist Movement, 1973-85′ and is available here.

Here’s the abstract:

This article examines the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), in the advancement of gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the CPGB was the first major organization of the British labour movement—and the British left—to advance a policy of gay rights, its participation in the gay liberation movement has tended to be neglected by scholars. In contrast to the general perception of the CPGB in the last decade (or so) of its existence as a party of declining influence and cohesion, easily ignored by the mainstream of the labour movement, we argue that the embrace of gay rights provided communists with a means of pushing for a diversification of labour politics. This coalesced in the mid-1980s with the co-founding of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) by the communist activist Mark Ashton. With the recent scholarly and public interest in the LGSM and its impact upon the Labour Party’s attitude to gay rights, this article aims to reveal that the ‘pre-history’ of the group is firmly rooted in the CPGB/YCL and the Eurocommunist section of the British communist movement.

If people cannot access the article, let me know and I can send a pdf.

Policing club culture in the UK and the neoliberal city

This week, famous London club Fabric was permanently closed down after its liquor license was taken revoked, allegedly after police raised concerns for the safety of clubgoers following the deaths of two people this year inside the club. Others have suggested that the Islington Council sought the closure of the club because it was too costly for the police to continue their harm minimisation operations within the club.

Fabric is not the only club to go close down in recent years, as costs for running clubs in the inner city become more and more expensive. Despite the GFC of 2007-08 and almost a decade of austerity in Britain, the rents for venues in London and other cities across the UK have continued to rise. No reports that I have seen so far have suggested that Fabric faced this particular problem and while many have alleged that the real reason for the closure was a desire by the Council for the venue to be turned into luxury flats or office space, the Council did not own the property and would not have made a direct financial gain from this conversion. The counter-argument to this is that in the neoliberal city, the nighttime economy that Fabric was part of was not as desired as that brought by increasing gentrification of London’s inner city boroughs.

A number have likened this to the closure of the Hacienda in 1997 and its eventual transformation into luxury flats in the early 2000s. The Hacienda had its license revoked in June 1997 after the death of a clubgoer earlier in the year, alleged organised criminals working inside the club and the refusal of the Greater Manchester Police to co-operate with the club’s management to conduct operations that would have kept the club open, citing that it was too costly. Before his death, Tony Wilson argued that the Greater Manchester Police conducted large scale operations every weekend to police football crowds, but were unwilling to do so to protect the club’s patrons. But while the Hacienda was eventually sold to developers, the neoliberalisation and gentrification of Manchester’s landscape did not arrive with the closure of the club – it lay dormant for 18 months and work to convert the building only began a few years later. This coincided with the ‘reimagining’ of Manchester’s city centre after a large section of it was destroyed by an IRA bomb in June 1996.

Adorned on the luxury flats that now occupy the space of the former club on Whitworth Street.

Club culture in the UK had emerged at the periphery of the neoliberal revolution and as I have argued elsewhere, sought to flourish in the spaces that Thatcherism had made vacant, but had not yet occupied. With this brought the attention of the police and the government and under the pretence of a ‘war on drugs’, club culture in the UK became heavily policed and moved into ‘manageable’ spaces, such as clubs like Fabric. But in the ongoing battle between the desires of the neoliberal and nighttime economies, those pushing for further gentrification of the inner city have won out and even these highly policed and contained venues are no longer desirable.

Since the closure of the Hacienda nearly twenty years ago, clubs like Fabric have attempted to work more closely with the police and there has been a shift towards harm minimisation inside these clubs. But while police practices may have changed, the pressures of austerity have discouraged this. So in the end, we may argue that club culture has ended up in the same wasteland after 20 years of trying to ‘regulate’ it and attempts to make it work within the boundaries of ‘the system’.