Break the Chains of Empire: nationalism and independence

The British Empire lasted some 300 years; about the same length of time that the United Kingdom has existed. The British Empire has gone. It is time the remnants of colonialism within the UK were also relegated to the past.

Good morning, Scotland. What is it you want?

Please, sir, I want some more.

What! More!

Yes, sir. I want more.

There is disbelief all round.

You already have devolution. What more could you want?

Independence, sir. I want my independence.

Independence? What nonsense is this? Not everyone can be independent. If everyone was independent nobody would appreciate it.

That’s not fair, sir. I want to be independent.  

Want! Want! It’s not your place to want! You’ll take what you’re given. Who ever heard of such a thing! There are people who make the rules and people whose duty it is to follow our rules. You are the latter. People who want, don’t deserve independence. And that’s the end of it.

The meaning of empire

The British Empire began as the English Empire although it adopted the name British before the Act of Union. England’s imperial expansion began in the 1500s, enabled by its aggressive navy expanded to break into the slave trade. Union in 1707 was sought by England primarily to remove potential support by Scotland for England’s enemy, France – henceforth Edinburgh was denied decision-making powers over foreign affairs and so has that remained. That the Union gave England control over Scottish trade was an additional, if secondary benefit. The Union of 1707 was not set up to benefit Scotland but to protect England politically and economically. And there was no whiff of democracy anywhere about the agreement struck between a few monied interests in Scotland and England’s parliament.

The Union of 1707 colonised Scotland in much the same way England then the United Kingdom colonised other parts of the world over three hundred years. As with its other colonies the Union parliament never envisaged equality between its heart, in London, and authorities in the peripheral parts of its empire. Power lay with London and there it would remain. That was the intention and nothing changed over three hundred years. Devolution of powers has not altered the conception of hierarchy and subordination within the United Kingdom. Within the United Kingdom – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are subordinates which are not provided with the same levers of power provided to England.  

The idea the United Kingdom represents equality between the four nations is a chimera. Power lies with Westminster and in Westminster Scotland’s representatives are outnumbered 10:1. There has never been a time Scotland has been able to influence decisions in Westminster. And there never will be a time Scotland will be able to influence decisions made in Westminster, nor will Northern Ireland and Wales ever be placed on an equal footing with England.  

United does not mean equal

Like empires throughout history which have risen and declined so has the British Empire. Empires establish themselves when in a position to wield power against weaker nations and can crumble when their dictum of might is right is questioned by the powerless within their dominions.  

When under threat empires tighten their grip on the reins of power through brutality, corruption and threat. Opposition is condemned as treachery – anti-patriotic. In the case of the United Kingdom, loyalty means Britishness and Britishness has always been largely based on Englishness.

Not only does Scotland have no power whatsoever at the heart of England’s rump empire, the United Kingdom, for most of the past 300 years of its existence Scotland has scarcely been considered. Similarly with Wales and Northern Ireland – their representation at Westminster is as tokenistic as Scotland’s. Influence they have none. The populations in the three peripheral areas of the England’s rump empire are demeaned, patronised and the butt of humour as demonstrated in national ‘pet-names’- the equivalent of the racist term ‘boy’ in farther-flung parts of the empire – Scots are Jocks; Irish are Paddies; Welsh are Taffies. Jocks, Paddies and Taffies are invariably depicted as lacking sophistication, feckless, mean, chippy, grievance monkeys – ungrateful for the protection the ‘broad shoulders’ of the empire/UK affords them.  Empires evolve cultural myths. Given the hierarchical nature of empires it is the interests and culture of the dominant state that come to embody them.  Cultural values of the peripheries are defined as archaic curiosities and sources of derision and humour which tend to be abandoned in favour of those of the dominant power.  

Faced with ingratitude/challenge from within the peripheral nations the dominant power tends to act more aggressively. Troops might be sent in/ stationed in the troublesome periphery. We see this across the world and within the Union the population of Scotland was threatened and subdued by General Wade’s army in the 18^th century. Empires might impose control through more sophisticated means such as installing bureaucracies into peripheral areas for greater control in parts far away from the centre of power. A recent example of this type of imperious incursion is Queen Elizabeth House in Edinburgh, embedding Westminster-rule into the heart of Scotland in defiance of devolution and meant as a visible reminder to Scotland of who really is in charge; and it is not the Scottish people or their own parliament. 

It is an observation often made that the farther away populations are from the centre of power the less the centre represents their interests. Westminster’s Queen Elizabeth House may be a recognition of this but given that Scotland has never figured in its consideration of what is best for the Union as opposed to what suits south-east England it is more likely this hub is the equivalent of General Wade’s force – intimidation and reminder that authority rests with London.

Where threats to empire exist but are less threatening to the dominant power degrees of autonomy are sometimes used to diminish calls for independence. This gives an impression of a benevolent centre of power willingly sharing responsibilities but powers transferred are an illusion for the centre of empire retains the ability to withdraw those same powers whenever it decides. Remember the Union like any empire is a hierarchy in which ultimate authority is retained by the dominant nation; democracy is limited to partial self-government in peripheral areas. Democracy under the Union favours England’s needs and ambitions above those of other parts of the UK through the makeup of the Houses of Parliament and chain of command of government based in London.    

India was the British Empire’s greatest source of wealth. Britain’s ransacking of it began when England set up the East India Company in 1599 and by the 1700s Britain was imposing taxes on India. By stealth greater and greater controls were imposed until eventually Britain ruled India directly, governing it with a rod of iron and keeping the ‘peace’ through a policy of divide-and-rule in which divisions between Hindus and Muslims were encouraged.  A period known as the British Raj, notorious for luxury and moral decay lasted from 1858 to 1947. This was rule from London to benefit London, the heart of empire. Rarely were native authorities and peoples consulted on any matter. When the British prime minister declared war against Germany in 1939, the announcement was made without consultation with Indian ministers although India was expected to provide millions of troops and provisions for the war effort. High-handed, disrespectful, racist and xenophobic – qualities demonstrated by the British Empire.

Sick of centuries of exploitation by the racist empire, Indians demanded self-determination instead of being administered by London. In London this was regarded as outrageous ingratitude. Lord Linlithgow, the Empire’s man-in-charge in India at the time, a staunch British unionist, threatened India by further inflaming the very internal divisions that London had so adeptly used in the past to keep India in its place. He and London were implicated in the deaths of millions from famine in Bengal in 1943 because of Britain’s policy of destroying food supplies and requisitioning of boats and other means of transport that prevented the movement of goods and food within India. Ruthless and heartless government by Westminster encouraged support for the Quit India movement that demanded an end to British rule. It’s spokesman Mahatma Gandhi said,   

“I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.”

The Empire struck back. Gandhi and fellow Indian Congress members were arrested and imprisoned. Press censorship intended to silence the independence movement and the Empire’s human rights abuses could not happen now with social media but then lies spread about India’s independence movement were fed to a lackey press.  

There are different forms of nationalism just as there are different forms of democracy in the world. Empires exist to benefit a tiny portion of their populations. When people grow sick of being oppressed for the benefit of the few at the heart of empire they try to change the political structure to better reflect their interests and needs. Empires by their nature are parasitic, sucking the life-blood out of the peripheral areas they govern. So nationalist movements emerge offering hope in the shape of government that will take more cognisance of the desires of the affected people. John Maclean the great socialist advocated Scottish nationalism as the path to socialism and a better world for Scots.  

As more Indians saw through the desperate dirty tricks employed by the British Empire so the clamour for independence grew – for India to govern itself in its own interests, not those of the Empire/UK. The Empire/UK struck out – 1,000 Indians were killed during protests and movement leaders imprisoned (Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, died in jail.)  The Empire/UK lost the people’s respect. Once that has gone it is a matter of time before any empire falls. For 300 years India had been subjugated by the British Empire/UK. Soon, Pakistan, too became independent.

The British Empire was once the alpha power and London the alpha capital. This is no longer the case. The Empire created through violence and threat declined because of its arrogance, corruption, xenophobia and disrespect for its peripheral areas. Yes, it was Scots who largely ran the British Empire. It has been said this was because Scots were better educated than in other parts of the UK. Perhaps there is truth in that. It may also have been because educated ambitious Scots had few career opportunities available to them within Scotland because of how Scotland’s infrastructure was run down so that the majority of high-powered jobs were created/preserved for the centre of UK power, London, and Etonian Oxbridge friends of friends in the capital. That Scots participated to a high degree in the British Empire is neither here nor there. Scotland as a nation was as much a victim of the imperial motivations of London as other peripheral parts of the Empire. And while other colonies have won their independence, Scotland remains trapped in a Union founded on inequality.

The British Empire’s decline left behind a debtor United Kingdom, pressurised by the USA because of world war debt to open up access to its international markets. The rump of Empire/UK that remains – the union of the UK – still exhibits the predatory characteristics shared by all empires. They are ingrained in it. The alpha power lashes out whenever its authority is challenged. Whereas India and other former Empire nations were subjected to brutal repression in response to their demands for independence Scotland it is supposed will be subjected to a thrashing by propagandists for the UK. Threats of disaster and failure; of ingratitude have been and will increasingly be made.

Empires resist their loss of power. The mythical hand of friendship extended from the centre of empire to the peripheries is always in the end a fist. Threats escalate as an empire defends its authority. The UK built on violence and threats will die issuing still more threats meant to undermine confidence in the subordinate nation’s future success.

But as India proved, lying and threats, corruption and moral decay, far from saving a venal order leads to its demise. Once people stop believing the indoctrination; once they see it for what it is propaganda concocted to preserve inequalities of the Union/empire they have won – by realising they are the means of changing the world.

Year of the Plague in 2020 a far from average year – self-isolation diary Week 9

And here we are again. Week 9. Doesn’t seem too unlike week 8 although each week does have subtle and sometimes not so subtle variations mixed in. It struck me I don’t really say much or, indeed anything, about what I actually do through a week – and that’s not about to change. I’m not one of those let it all hang out types but here’s what I am prepared to tell you.

It won’t surprise you to know I’m still mouthing off at the politics of the Covid-19 pandemic. Machiavelli will be spinning in his grave at the sheer audacity of the lies being dished up daily by government which we are expected to take at face value. My main source of information about coronavirus is the Financial Times which has been unerringly informed and informative on the virus.

No 10 has been spinning like the proverbial top. Matt Hancock is as useless as he looks. No you haven’t ever reached 100,000 tests on any single day – my ref is the FT. And Boris Johnson is now in full Trumpian flow promising even more. It is quite, quite extraordinary that anyone retains any regard for Johnson. He is evidently a lazy, rather stupid man who hides behind other people – occasionally popping up for a photo opportunity such as hypocritically clapping NHS staff and carers and making ridiculous inflated promises.

Another family birthday this week. Mainly virtual but virtual can be good fun. We’re fairly getting into this singing online lark. Presents were actual and delivered as promised by the Aberdeen shop entrusted to do so.

The starlings are still living dangerously, nesting under the eye of jackdaws and rumours of them having given up on the hole in the ash tree have been greatly exaggerated as they are indeed installed there. With the beech next door to them coming into leaf it will become more difficult to see what they’re up to very soon.

The house martins have also being playing games with nest building. Came and seemed to go after a day or two. Then they came back again. We saw them mostly in the evenings for a start and surely they must have been constructing their classy nest under cover of darkness because suddenly it was up. Lots of activity now with them flying back and fore so suspect there are eggs there already or wee ones hatched out. I know why they build under eaves etc – as protection from rain. That probably sounds obvious but it’s a bit strange to build in the open given their nests are made out of regurgitated mud. Last year we had a lot of rain in late summer and the nest collapsed with young dropping to the ground. We tried to save them but couldn’t. The martins then quickly built a second nest, alongside with a late brood being produced. One little one was slow in flying and while the others were champing at the bit to fly away south it couldn’t leave the nest. Fairly sure it did eventually get away but it was late.

Young plants doing well in the greenhouse and the plug gherkins arrived looking in great shape. Those runner beans are now going at a jog. This week we launched our inter-generational radish growing competition. Doesn’t have many rules so far, not even an end date which we’ll have to fix although there seems plenty time since there’s three days after sowing my five seeds there’s no sign of germination. Meant to mention in earlier blogs that our carob tree is looking tip top. It’s kept in the greenhouse, grown from a seed for a bonsai carob, bought by a friend in Aberdeen at least 15 years ago. The carob is also known as the locust tree or St John’s bread and in its natural Mediterranean habitat produces large edible seed pods. Among its uses is as a chocolate substitute. They can grow to up to 50 feet but doubt our little bonsai in a greenhouse in Aberdeenshire will get anywhere near that – or else we’re moving. And I doubt there will ever be a Lenathehyena chocolate. Which is a pity.

Lots of wandering around the garden, in between weeding. Still very dry. The burn is getting lower and lower. Our water supply is, to some extent, reflected by the amount of water flowing downhill. Will be one to watch.

Many of the rhododendrons are passed but several still to come. We have lots of rhododendrons as this is a great area for growing these acid-loving plants. Some are real beauts.

My marsh marigolds have come on a treat. Can’t tell you how I got them but they’ve taken to their habitat in the old sink. I’ve got a soft spot for marsh marigolds since I was a child in the Black Isle and they grew along the burn at Rosemarkie. Here we’ve grown different varieties on the burn bank but one by one they’ve been washed away downstream during spates.

Got another delivery of all sorts of goodies from a wholefood company in England. Our spare bedroom aka pantry aka food quarantine area smells like an eastern bazaar. We’ve almost finished eating the madjool dates we bought from them last time. There is nothing that can compare with a medjool date from Palestine. Big, fat, soft and bursting with flavour.

Our two hours evening screen watch has moved into suck it and see mode since we finished Breaking Bad. What’s that Walt White like!! We’ve finished Outlander. Good last episode after one or two weak ones. Had to give up on the latest Bosch as it’s far too ‘bitty’ and the fast, clipped accents of some actors are too difficult to make out.

Bedtime reading has moved from fiction to the tragic events of the Bavarian uprising in 1919. Dreamers by Volker Weidermann gives an account of the chaotic attempt to establish a worker’s state in Bavaria on the back of the Great War and its horrific impact on the lives of ordinary people. Dreamers because behind the movement and influential in it were writers and poets whose hearts were in the right place but they lacked the ruthless selfish drive of politicians for their movement to succeed. They had some ideas but no roadmap, as today’s parlance goes. Contrary to the impression always presented in the press and by politicians of most stripes it is the right who tend to be most violent and this was true in Bavaria in 1919 when the extreme right started to shoot anyone suspected of siding with the revolution. The intellectuals and workers who supported a people’s revolution and survived the bullets during the rightwing crackdown were hauled off to concentration camps when the right achieved what the left couldn’t in Bavaria following Hitler’s rise to power. He has a bit part in Dreamers though always denying he was anywhere near there. Wouldn’t recognise truth if it slapped him on the face. A true politician. They’re the real storytellers.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 – Coronavirus and the Libertarian

Guest blog by Textor

Things, as they say, are sometimes liable to come back to bite you.

That is if you let your guard down.

And let’s face it many of us have in one way or another let our guards down.

Coronavirus aka Covid-19 has bought home to us that as content as we are in our privileged advanced (there’s a cultural joke) economies the world is other than it seems. Assuming we are not in the gig economy, not queuing at a food bank then things can only get better. We who have access to a fair number of the good things of life; we who thought the real world was little more than novelties in the digital market place – including the delights of Amazon Prime or Netflix – or ever more commodities; we have been brought up short in little over three months by the brute fact of Nature.  Bang! Nature has reared up and taken an almighty bite out of this hubris.

Yes, we are all more or less aware, all more or less concerned/unconcerned about climate change and the impact of the Anthropocene (the Age deemed to be when humankind’s effect upon the planet Earth has been sufficient to cause global, catastrophic change.) Regardless of the evident societal alterations required to alleviate a “far off” doom we – those lucky enough to avoid floods, devastating fires etc.- could in the short term just get on with it; recycle as if there were no tomorrow you might say. Waiting for the end of climate change.

But sometimes Nature does not allow us the luxury of waiting for the apocalypse: coronavirus is just such a time. For decades microbiologists have been predicting the coming of a pandemic. The so-called Spanish Flu provided a model of how devastating a modern microbiological disaster could be. Wikipedia gives figures as high as 100 million dying in the influenza pandemic of 1918-20; more than the man-made slaughter on the battlefields of the Great War. Science had the capacity to devise the most wonderful weapons of death but could not stop the ‘flu.

Evolution has “designed” a human organism capable of sophisticated speech with the capacity to adapt itself to wide variations of environmental conditions. At the same time, and perhaps a necessary part of being human, it put its stamp on Nature. Beavers might dam rivers and create lakes but humans could build the Grand Coulee Dam, produce electricity to power a so-called Second Industrial Revolution. Clever, even ambitious. But no matter how sophisticated is the vast commodity producing system that is industrial capitalism it is no match for the potential speed at which a micro-organism might evolve. Humans have brains big enough to predict outcomes and have the technical knowhow (probably) to design and manufacture anti-virals capable of slowing and even halting the spread of Covid-19 – yes humans could in the next few months do this. But for all this Nature remains unconquered. Natural selection continues without any mastermind operating behind the scenes. And we know, or should know, that this process of selection can be good for some species and bad for others.

And so, the long-predicted crisis has arrived. The pandemic is here and the search goes on for a solution. As with previous modern national and global health events the pharmaceutical industry play a crucial role. However, historically necessary component solutions come under the direction and control of local or national state apparatuses. In other words, individuals/institutions are first advised and then told what to do. Sanctions are threatened and sanctions are imposed.

Nothing new in this. Here in northeast Scotland as far back as the 15^th century Aberdeen’s magistrates fearful of plague had the bell rung through the medieval town proclaiming the city’s ports (gates) close, lokit with lokis and keis, at night to prevent strangers entering unobserved. A compact medieval town could very swiftly succumb to viral and bacterial threats. Medieval doctors and apothecaries knew little of the causes of infectious diseases but empirically they were aware that for all claims of God expending his wrath on a sinful community, contagion could be slowed by isolating infected families and potential carriers. Whether this would thwart Divine justice was maybe a theological point not to be dwelt upon. And, it’s worth noting that certainly by the 17^th century Aberdeen’s magistrates were also attempting to clean the city of middens, street filth and asking that households be kept clean. This lesson on the need for cleanliness was largely lost by the early 19^th century when poorer parts of Aberdeen where people living cheek-by-jowl and in slum conditions were condemned to the horrors of cholera and dysentery. This was industrialising capitalism; the poor were there to be exploited and maybe pitied.

As the centuries progressed even more controls were imposed. Vessels were prevented from entering the harbour, merchandise was left in ship holds. On the other hand, when the threat was seen to be coming from internal migration strangers were banned from entering the town. Town ports were watched and at one stage in 1606 dealers in timber were told to stay away under paine of death. Trade suffered as commodities ceased to flow between manufacturers, tradesmen and consumers. In 1647, again in the midst of plague, draconian measures were introduced with, for example, all ydle stranger beggars . . .  forthwith removed and banished. Any who returned were to be scourged, branded and driven out.

Authoritarian management is a basic mechanism for control of epidemic-pandemic events. Our current crisis has stark contrasts. On the one hand the relatively fast and severe imposition of lock-down in parts of China. With over seventy years of state control the Chinese Communist Party has an apparatus better adapted to widespread controls than liberal democracies. Compare the Chinese response to the bumbling worlds of the UK and USA brought stumbling towards closing doors and mass quarantine.

These manoeuvres will probably bring howls of anger from libertarians both right and left – those who don’t want to be told what to do by the state. Their individual rights, some might say entitlement, trumps (if you’ll pardon the expression) all else. Allowing for the nastiness of all three states mentioned (China, US and UK) this form of libertarianism smacks of, at best, infantile petulance and at worst disintegrative individualism which fails to recognise a larger vision of human community even one within a capitalist formation. Remember the outcry about seat belts and crash helmets – with cries of freedom from state tyranny? Of course the consequences of a libertarian freedom to roam in a time of a modern plague threatens not only the lives of the defence of freedom lobby but ultimately the well-being of global communities. 

And the bite of Nature? As much as humankind imagines itself master/mistress of the world the reality is otherwise. From small nibbles such as occasional volcanic eruption to the all-encompassing bite of climate change Nature exists, not dependent on human imagination, not caring one way or another what happens to humans or any other species. It, if that’s the correct word, does what it does.Humans although in Nature and of Nature are different insofar as this species can make choices. It can gather knowledge, can know history and can act. There lies the rub.

Jobs for the boys – trade unions for the few not the many in a caveman’s world

 

David Miliband’s obscenely large salary of £425,000 as president of International Rescue is never far from the headlines. Some people think it a bit rich that a former Labour Party politician who represented the working class constituency of South Shields should be milking it big time from a charity but according to Huffington Post UK, Miliband doesn’t just rely on his charity retainer but as a public speaker he commands up to £20,000 a pop. Oh, and in case you were feeling that poor David doesn’t get the remuneration he deserves this Labour man of the people has or has had several other roles with major organisations to boost that deep, deep pocket of his.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Miliband
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission

As usual I digress. This blog is not about lucky boy Miliband but high earners, mainly men, who represent people who can only enjoy such excessive remuneration in day dreams – oh, and are associated with the party which claims to represent the working class – the Labour Party. All of them lucky boys. Very lucky boys in a lucky boys’ world.

Trade unions might be seen as levers expected to iron out inequalities between men and women but they’ve been fiddling around, whistling, staring into the great blue yonder and rolling their eyes for around a hundred years. And are still at it.

In 2018 everyone was celebrating women winning the franchise a century before. Trade Unionists were saying – quite right, women deserve equality with us men. Saying. Not doing.

Women got the vote some innocents believe because of the sterling work they did filling in for men during the Great War (and not because the government was terrified of women returning to their militant activities that got under the skin of politicians before the war.) Certainly women had proved themselves to be useful as well as decorative. Well, strike me down guv’nor.

And once the war was over trade unions (male) demonstrated the extent of their support for working women by supporting the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, 1919 which ensured that so-called dilution of skilled labour – i.e. women and unskilled men who took over industrial production between 1914 and 1918 was rectified – by chucking women out of their jobs.

Men were in charge of trade unions. Women were expected to know their place.

An 1891 report on the increasing number of women workers concluded they were a threat to men’s employment – ‘an intolerable intrusion’ and ‘his (man’s) only chance of escape from the evil effects of their relentless sweep is to be found in directing and controlling them’ (women that is.)

Some men, perhaps understandably for there is no question male workers were cruelly exploited, spent not a little of their scandalously low earnings in bars –

‘Aberdeen factory workers toil on from morn till night for a beggarly wage of 6s and 7s a week, and in Dundee I found that mothers and their families went to the mills to earn equally miserable sums, while fathers compulsorily exercised their energies on the street and voluntarily in the public-house.’

Women were less inclined to put their drink habit before feeding their bairns and it did not go unnoticed that not a few of these men were in trade unions and ‘could have lifted a finger to help their wives and children by demanding better wages for women’ but didn’t.

Influential trade unionist Tom Mann in 1894 spoke of women workers as industrial slaves but despite such recognition trades unions largely ignored the plight of women workers. The excuse went something along the lines of men were too concerned with their own difficulties (to support the least protected of workers.) 

In 1919 Aberdeen Trades and Labour Council voted against equal pay for men and women teachers on grounds that women’s work was less valuable than men’s. And, anyhow, women needed less money than a man for invariably she only had herself to keep whereas a man had a family.

‘That was the only reason she received less wages,’ explained W. King.

I think King was, himself, a teacher. He went on to say that the 70% of women teachers were responsible for lowering the salaries of male teachers! It didn’t occur to the intellectually challenged Mr King that if he supported equal pay there would be no lowering of salaries.

Along with other Trades Councils, Aberdeen’s, failed women. In 1920 a well-attended meeting of Aberdeen women workers agreed women had no voice through the trade union movement.

Ten years later in 1930 women campaigned to be able to work in all aspects of boot and shoe manufacture and receive equal pay but they were beaten down by the union by 124 votes to 8. No ifs or buts in that vote.

Another decade on and Scottish women were still having to demand equal pay. In a classic case of shiftiness the unions said they weren’t able to establish the principle of equal pay for similar work but were directing their efforts towards that end. No hurry boys, take your time, won’t you.

Thirty years later —–in 1970 – 1970!! unions were still doggedly anti-women workers insisting that equal pay had to be negotiated between unions and employers. The pay gender pay gap meant around 25% lower incomes for women.

British women were among the lowest paid in western Europe but male-centred unions still regarded equality of pay for women as a threat to men’s (their own earnings.)

Another thirty years plus – nearer forty years later and women in Glasgow were still waiting redress for decades of under-payments. Other local authorities had paid up but the city controlled for decades by the Labour Party dragged its heels. Not just dragged its heels but spent millions of pounds of public money – I repeat £millions – fighting the women’s action through the courts.

When at long last Labour was kicked out of Glasgow by the SNP a great clamour was heard from Labour politicians up and down the UK in support of the underpaid women workers. Cynical and hypocritical? No question.

And most of today’s trade unions 100 plus years from their inception? – surely now women have found equality and opportunities to stick their fingers into the profitable pies of grossly outrageous salaries enjoyed by union leaders? Hardly at all, it seems. Well, what a surprise.

There are women union leaders. A few. The General Secretary of the TUC is a woman. Frances O’Grady enjoys a big Desperate Dan sized pie amounting to around £152,365. She is the TUC’s first female general secretary in 144 years. “We like to take our time,” she says. You can say that again.

Being in the national leadership of unions affiliated to the TUC has its perks. Below is a mere snapshot of a long list of General Secretaries, their pies and gender. 

Grahame Smith’s salary as General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress is not easy to find, impossible for me, but The Herald did have a piece that suggested he earned around £70,000 for his STUC stint plus remuneration from sitting on the boards of other government-linked organisations.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16599644.stuc-general-secretary-in-row-over-extra-three-jobs-on-top-of-union-role/

Accord: led by Ged Nichols, a bloke although its membership is over 71% female (2015 fig.) 98% of Accord shop floor reps are women but higher up the union ladder only 15% of its regional officers are and a mere 4% of its national officers. Man at the top Ged Nichols earns c. £140,000.

ASLEF: General Secretary Mick Whelan struggles on a paltry pie of c. £118,000.

The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union is led by another man, Ronnie Draper

Road Transport Union General Secretary is Robert Monks

Airline pilots union BALPA has Brian Strutton in the pilot seat earning c. £140,000.

77% women make up the membership of the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists but nailing the post of General Secretary is Mr Steve Jamieson.

The GMB union made up of 46% women is led by two blokes – Tim Roache and Paul Kenny who together earned £263,000 in 2016.

A whopping 78% of UNISON, the public Service Union, are women but two blessed men are in charge – Dave Prentis and President Gordon McKay. Prentis gets something in the region of £117,000. I tried to find McKay’s salary but UNISON’s website didn’t have that information. It did include a table of proposed salary structures for the plebs in the union with the highest as far as I could see around £42,000. Last year McKay spoke about the union’s success in raising the wages of members, ‘£33 a week makes a real difference in people’s lives,’ he said. It certainly does for those on the lowest pay grades. What’s £117,000 divided by 52? £200 a week is even better but that’s for the few not the many.

‘A Woman’s Place is in the CWU’ – Communications Workers Union (CWU) claims according to its leaflet which features lots and lots of pictures of women members. The CWU is led by a bloke, Dave Ward

USDAW, the union of shop, distributive and allied workers based in England and with a membership that includes 58% women, is led by, you guessed it another bloke, Paddy Lillis. Is it just luck men hold these top positions?

Christine Blower of the English teacher union NUT gets a canny £142,000. Christine is a woman. That’s a lot of money. Not many teachers get close to that amount over their careers.

Unite union General Secretary is Len McCluskey. No idea what he earns. Can imagine.

‘More than half the female officers in Britain’s biggest union claim to have been bullied or sexually harassed by fellow officials or members in their workplaces, a leaked internal study has found.

The report about the treatment and working conditions of female representatives at Unite also concluded that a quarter of employed officers believe allegations of bullying were not handled well by the union when they were reported.

Titled Women Officers in Unite, the report cited an official who said she felt increasingly isolated at work because of male officials talking among themselves. “I have to sit among colleagues who refer to our secretaries as the girls … [They] think it is correct to refer to black people as coloured, talk about chairmen, refer to women as a piece of skirt,’ one female officer said.

The old-boys network is alive and kicking unfortunately in Unite, where it is who you know and where they come from that matters.’
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/02/unite-union-female-officers-bullying-harassment-internal-report
(2 October 2016)

Misogyny has always been part and parcel of the trade union movement and evidently still is.

Most trade unions are based in England. Here’s a Scottish one – the teachers’ union the EIS whose president is A WOMAN, Alison Thornton, which is right and proper given over 77% of teachers are female but the EIS spokesman never off the telly is its General Secretary, Larry Flanagan. Flanagan earns just shy of £100,000.

The trade unions have proved to be nice little earners for many male members and a lucrative career structure.

Irrespective of whether a union represents a mainly female work force the tendency has been and remains for a man to lead it. Union leadership tends to be a boy’s perk. Women’s earnings and working conditions have always been of secondary concern to the unions they pay into.

Trade unions emerged to defend workers’ rights – to protect skills and standards and the delineation of work – for workers read male workers. Women’s skills were regarded as inferior to men’s even when they were comparable such as seamstress/tailor; domestic cook/chef. The skill involved in knitting garments is never seen as comparable to, say, joining two pieces of stick together to make a stool. During the world wars women proved their abilities were every bit as good as men’s but that made no difference to attitudes towards women and their earnings. Indeed the work carried out by women during the World Wars intensified male unionists suspicion of women in the workplace (they couldn’t really argue anymore that women diluted skills) and the male-dominated unions worked hand-in-glove with industry managements to ensure protection for male employees. For long women trade unionists were not exactly welcomed or taken seriously and isn’t that still the case according to the Guardian piece above?

In recent times it is claimed that whenever women enter what has been regarded as a male preserve pay levels tend to decline. Women have traditionally been equated with low pay – even when they stepped into ‘man’s work’ during the First World War munitions workers were paid less than promised and a century of trade unions has done little to eradicate this state of affairs. As far back as 1918 Gertrude Tuckwell, a trade unionist, said men’s and women’s interests are identical. Don’t think that message got across to many of her male comrades.

In 2013 the TUC sent out questionnaires on equality issues to all 54 TUC affiliated trade unions. Only 36 returned them such was their concern with equality. The TUC site that explained this had a link to further details on equality and unions but unfortunately the link doesn’t work.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/about-tuc/equality-issues/equality-audit/equality-audit-2014-improving-representation-and

Trade unions have been self-protective and paternalistic. They have been complicit in keeping women workers’ pay low and in creating jobs for the boys. Just like David Miliband with his eye-watering extravagant salary paid by a charity UK trade union leaders who talk about workers’ rights and negotiate pay claims for their members, the many, increasingly look like the few whose earnings are approaching stratospheric levels with most of them earning in excess of £100,000. And for trade union leaders read mainly male, mate.

Jobs for the boys. Surely is.

 

Me? I’ve always recommended joining a union and have been a member of the EIS and Unison (but I withdrew from paying the political levy to the Labour Party.)

https://lenathehyena.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/if-all-men-are-born-free-how-is-it-that-all-women-are-born-slaves-trade-unions-and-womens-inequality

Protest – as defined by the BBC.

More and more people claim to detect strong rightwing bias at the BBC. It isn’t clear how they get that idea.

Pretty sure it’s the first time these guys have been in a bookshop, they’ve no idea how to behave in one.

The ‘protest’ in the words of the BBC

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? – trade unions and women’s inequality

“Stand forward, sons of toil, and speak for the party out of which you may have taken, or may take, your partner for life” wrote a domestic servant from Aberdeen in 1854 in response to a meeting held the previous evening to discuss shortening of the working week by three hours through the introduction of a half-day holiday on Saturdays. The meeting had been arranged by men and the focus of their concern was working class men.

Letter to the Aberdeen Journal, 8 March 1854.

The Half-holiday movement – A word for females

Sir, I have read the report of the meeting held in the County-rooms on January 17th, on the subject of a Saturday half-holiday. It has often struck me that many speak of the working-classes as being only tradesmen, mechanics, carpenters, masons, and such like, and I am certainly quite of opinion that many such have great need for release from their toil, to breathe the air with freedom.

It was said by one who addressed the meeting that time was necessary for repose, for recreation, and enjoyment; but are these blessings needed only by tradesmen? There are others who have to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and I also term the working-classes. I for one belong to a class who have very long hours, and very long weeks — just from Monday morning till Monday morning.

I am unable to write logically on the subject, but I may be able to convey my ideas in such a plain way that they may be understood by those interested in the subject. It was stated at the meeting by a speaker that he did not think the sons of toil were ever intended for such long hours of toil by their Maker; and I would add, that I am of the same opinion with regard to the daughters of toil. Just look at their hours of toil. Rise with them on Monday, and go through all the duties of the day till they go to rest at night. Every day and every week has its own duties, and Saturday comes, but in place of a half-holiday, the hours are sometimes as long as decency will admit of, not to infringe on the Sabbath. Then Sabbath morn arrives, but with it very little release from toil, or opportunity to breathe the air. Say, then, should not their hours be shortened?

Then, when we consider how the education of the female part of the working-classes has been neglected in youth, I think one and all ought to consider if something cannot be done for them. If it could be felt how much of the well-being of society depended on the female part of it, every energy would be put forth in their behalf. It comes home to all in some respect or other. There are few of the sons of toil, but try to have a home of their own as soon as possible, and some fair one to make it comfortable to them, and manage the affairs of it. In the wife and mother is laid the foundation of character and education for the rising generation. How necessary then that it be a solid foundation! I did not think so much could be done by women in this respect, as I have seen within the last three years that I have been eye-witness to it, and you know seeing is believing. Stand forward, sons of toil, and speak for the party out of which you may have taken, or may take, your partner for life.

My idea is, that if masters and mistresses could do a little for the bettering of their female servants, they would suffer no loss by their work falling behind, and they would have less to do with Industrial Schools. There are many mistresses who cannot tell if their servants can read or repeat any part of the Shorter Catechism. Show them, by your way of treating them, that you wish to better them; and it must be a strange heart that love does not beget love in. Many servants, in place of going to church on Sabbath, go to see their friend, and acquaintances; and who can blame them for so doing, when they have no time allowed them for it, on week days or evenings? Give them a half-holiday, that all such visits may be made, and on Sabbath spend an hour in hearing them read and repeat the Shorter Catechism, and any such Sabbath like employment.

I may be blamed for bringing family matters before the public, but perhaps what I have said may be taken up more fully by some one who can say it better. But, here again, I am sorry to remark, that I find that the best public man is not always the best in the family circle. My creed is – if you wish any benevolent project to prospect in public, it must be begun in private, and carried out in your own family circle. I support this idea by my observation for years of those who, in public, say, Shut the Post-office, but whose letters go regularly thither on Saturday afternoon, to be carried forward by the Sabbath post. We have seen the length of the speakers at the meeting, now let us see their breadth, and whether they will come and help us. We cannot raise a public meeting to tell our grievances; yet I hope they will not leave the work half done. But I am encroaching on your space and time too much; so I remain, yours,

A HOUSEHOLD SERVANT

(The bold emphasis is mine.)

Sojournor Truth

 

About this same time in the USA women were involved in similar and different struggles, against sexism and racism –

“That little man…he says women can’t have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from: From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with Him.”

(Sojourner Truth, evangelist and reformer, at a Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, 1851.)

The anonymous domestic servant in Aberdeen wanted women in non-industrial occupations to benefit from a little time off so they could visit friends and family, go for a walk or simply read a little much like other people not constrained by long and exhausting hours labouring for their employers.

The movement to shorten Saturday work to a half-day – not really a half-day as work was to stop at two in the afternoon instead of five – had been gathering momentum. For the working classes then there were no happy Fridays. Working hours established by governments and laid down in legal frameworks for employment did not follow a trajectory of improvement necessarily as is only too clear today. When the working week ran over 6 days and before the introduction of a 10-hour day males and females were worked to death. In 1847 the maximum hours a woman could lawfully be employed for in a factory was 58 a week. Three years later this was increased to 60 hours.

With half-day Saturdays (2pm stop) the rest of the working week had to be squeezed into what remained of Monday to Saturday early afternoon. Of course for many domestic servants there was no clocking on and off; they were on duty around the clock seven days a week. It is against this background the letter-writer put pen to paper to record her frustration at the different attitudes between organised industrial labour and much women’s work. She is angry that consideration has all gone towards the interests of men with no recognition of the plight of domestic servants and women in particular. The very nature of domestic labour split up this huge workforce into individual households so there were not the opportunities to meet and organise to put pressure on employers and governments to act in their interests.

For those whose voices were heard the prevailing sentiment as demonstrated in press reports was of the generosity and kindness of employers in granting extra hours off on a Saturday instead of condemnation of practices which overworked employees to the detriment of their health and family life. Some who opposed a 2pm stop on Saturdays complained that working men would make bad use of their leisure time, as if that was any business of theirs.

It is incontestable that the emergence of trades unions led to improvements in working conditions and pay. The declining influence of unions is regrettable and the result has been a mushrooming of low wages, long hours, zero hours contracts and the rest where we’ve seen successive governments working in cahoots with greedy and unprincipled employers to drive ever-greater exploitation of the workforce.

However, Britain’s trades unions been equally culpable in the gross and unwavering exploitation of women workers. Too often they have been organised by self-serving cliques who enjoy practices of patronage that any Renaissance prince might be proud of. They emerged to protect and advance the interests of members and being mainly male continued to be defined through their advocacy of male interests and to that end were found to be opposed to what they regarded was the dilution of their crafts by women. We should not be surprised for union men did not live in a bubble of social democracy but were influenced by the mores of the time in which women were seen and treated as inferior beings. It was, therefore, a case of men putting obstacles in the way of women and of women’s skills being designated subordinate to men’s purely on grounds that if women carried them out they must be substandard.

Don’t pay attention to nonsense you read in books that suggest women hardly participated in ‘manual’ work over the centuries. They always have been whether from necessity or choice women could hammer, mould and chisel as well as any man given the opportunity but were denied such opportunities increasingly as male unions dominated protection of industries. And don’t confuse the lives of middle class and upper class women with the experiences of the poor and working classes – chalk and cheese.

Women have always been active in socially progressive movements alongside men although they haven’t always been welcomed. Within trades unions female membership increased through the 20th century but the unions remained in the hands of men, run by them for men. For lots of trade unionists they might talk a good talk but walk arm-in-arm with women – no. Women were always regarded as a threat to their status.

For a lot of people the adaptability of women to pick up traditional men’s jobs during the Great War and later during the Second World War was something of a revelation but most regarded this interregnum as a blip on the employment landscape and women were quickly hustled off to resume more domestic labour. And the unions were there to make sure they did.

In more recent times the unions pushed for and won equal pay legislation for women – of course the definition of what that meant in reality was a thorny one – with that ever-present anomaly of the definition of skilled work against unskilled aka women’s work.

A sheen of equality in the workplace: in 1965 the Trades Union Congress pushed for equal treatment of women workers in industry. But…but…it’s that old canard of you can take a horse to water or more relevant to women… you can agree policy/pass laws but you can’t make the men around you recognise and implement them.

In 1968 women workers at the Ford plant at Dagenham in London and later at Halewood famously went on strike for equal pay. The legislation was there but did that make any difference to their earning? Did it hell. The Labour Party was in government and its female Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, was sympathetic and the women were granted an increase – initially that was still 8% lower than men doing equivalent work.

Much foot shuffling and more horses led to a barricade of water troughs with courts, male unions and governments all resisting female equality. In 1970 the Equal Pay Act was passed. No rush boys…to be implemented five years later. Where’s that bloody horse when you need her or is it a him? It was the UK’s membership of the EU and equality legislation under the Treaty of Rome that moved things on a bit for women.

Equality for females in the workforce has been a sair fecht (hard struggle.)

You could be forgiven for thinking that into the 21st century women, at long last, were recognised for their contribution to the economy and their skills. But here comes horsey.

Among the most glaring examples of deliberate resistance to implementing equality practices trot up Glasgow City Council, run by the Labour Party- a party stocked and maintained by trades unions – for the best part of 80 years was exposed as under-paying women and not only that so determined were they to deny there was any wrong in their practices, they spent or rather squandered £2.5 million of public cash in an attempt to prevent women from getting compensated for years of underpay through a legal challenge in the courts. One hundred years and counting women were still being sidelined by the personification of the union movement in power with Glasgow’s Labour governing body still ‘at it.’

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15568711.Revealed__Labour_led_Glasgow_council_spent_millions_fighting_women_workers__39__equal_pay_claims/

As I write the current Labour leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard, agreed that the Labour run council had put ‘too much resistance’ to equal pay claims by women under their control.

“We have seen the length of the speakers at the meeting, now let us see their breadth, and whether they will come and help us” wrote our doughty Aberdonian over 160 years ago.

It took a woman and a new political party, the SNP, in Glasgow to clean out the equivalent of the Augean stables.

A sair fecht? It surely has been and one that isn’t over, not by a long chalk but it’s time that old horse was put out to grass.

The Scots who stopped Pinochet’s engines. NEW FEATURE DOCUMENTARY, NAE PASARAN

 

The Scots who stopped Pinochet’s engines.
NEW FEATURE DOCUMENTARY, NAE PASARAN

Award-winning director Felipe Bustos Sierra launches the final crowdfunding campaign to compete his feature-length documentary, Nae Pasaran. The project, which launched in 2014, set out to investigate the real impact of a four-year solidarity boycott by factory workers at Rolls-Royce East Kilbride. The research led to the discovery of the Chilean Air Force military engines which disappeared from the factory in 1978. One of the engines, the first engine caught in the boycott, has been returned to Scotland and will be unveiled in East Kilbride early next year.

1974, Scotland. Bob Fulton, a Rolls-Royce engine inspector, returns to his section, upset and anxious. He’s just told his colleagues that a Chilean Air Force jet engine has arrived in the factory for maintenance and he’s refusing to let it go through, in protest against the recent military coup of General Pinochet. He’s seen the images of people packed into football stadiums and the Chilean Air Force jets bombing Santiago, and now one of the engines from those very same planes is right there, waiting for inspection. He can see his supervisors approaching, he knows he’s about to be fired yet he feels a responsibility.

The Chilean coup, on the 11 September 1973, was a landmark of the Cold War. The first democratically-elected left-wing president in Latin America, Salvador Allende, was brutally overthrown by the Chilean Armed Forces, which surrounded and attacked the presidential palace where Allende and his staff refused to surrender. Allende died in the palace and the dictatorship that followed claimed thousands of lives, with many still disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans were sent into exile.

The images of the Hawker Hunter air raid, caught by documentary filmmakers, traveled the world. When the Scottish workers saw the images of tv, they recognised the planes and knew immediately they’d worked on the same engines. The Hawker Hunter was one of Britain’s most exported military aircrafts, with over 20 Air Forces flying them. All of them were powered by the same engine, the Rolls-Royce Avon.

By the 1970s, all Avon engines were repaired in the same factory… Rolls-Royce East Kilbride. With nowhere else to go for maintenance, the workers’ action could potentially be devastating for the Chilean Air Force.

The boycott of Chilean engines at the Rolls-Royce factory was a minor cause célèbre. The workers kept the boycott going for four years, leaving the engines to rust at the back of the factory, until one night… the engines mysteriously disappeared. The workers were told their actions had been meaningless.

The filmmaker, Felipe Bustos Sierra, son of a Chilean exile, grew up hearing rumours of the now-mythic tale of international solidarity. These accounts bring him to Bob’s door 40 years later. Was any of it true?

NAE PASARAN is the painstakingly documented and emotional account of the impact of their action, and for the very first time, the feature film tells the story of the many Chileans who crossed paths with the engines.

In 2015, following revelations of our research, the Chilean ambassador bestowed the highest honour given to foreigners by the Government of Chile upon the Scottish workers. In an unlikely twist of fate, the film chronicles how the pensioners from East Kilbride became Commanders of the Republic of Chile.

Earlier this year, after having discovered the lost engines in Chile, we were able to bring one back to Scotland with the support of Unite Scotland and assistance of Glasgow Museums. Next year, the engine will be returned to East Kilbride to resume its struggle against the Scottish weather and stand as a monument to the Scottish action for international solidarity.

The film is close to completion and Debasers is now seeking its final £50,000 in funding via Kickstarter. After a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2015 to begin filming, this final round of funding will push the film to completion ahead of its 2018 film festival deadlines.

Crowdfunding perks include Rolls-Royce Avon engine blades, invites to the premiere after-party in East Kilbride, personalised poems written by “The Glasgow Poet” Stuart Barrie (one of the Rolls-Royce workers), and postcards signed by the workers.

For any further information, photographs or interviews, please contact Nicola Balkind: nicola@nicolabalkind.com

Link to campaign: naepasaran.com

Screening times: To Be Announced.

The short film is available to watch at: https://vimeo.com/182246588

Felipe Bustos Sierra said:

It’s been a long project to research and our characters and their story have been an incredible buoy throughout: a true barometer to keep us going in the right direction. We’re asking that if international solidarity means anything to you, if you believe – like we do – that we are all connected trying to make a life for ourselves while treating each other like human beings before politics, class, language or borders muddle it up, this is a story for you and it has a painstakingly-documented happy ending. Please pledge to help us reach our funding goal ahead of our film festival deadlines in early 2018. If you can’t help financially, tell others about the “Scots who stopped Pinochet’s engines”. Tell them what we’re doing and please get them to our funding page at www.naepasaran.com

NOTES TO EDITORS

NAE PASARAN is directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra and produced by Debasers Filums.

Felipe Bustos Sierra is a Belgian-Chilean filmmaker based in Scotland. His second short film “Three-Legged Horses” was the first successful Kickstarter project in Scotland and has played since at over 40 international festivals over 5 continents. He’s the creative director at Debasers Filums and working on his first feature film, “Nae Pasaran”. He’s an alumni of the Berlinale Talent Campus and the Edinburgh International Film Festival Talent Lab.

Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality.

The title Nae Pasaran is the Scottish-accented ‘NO PASARAN’, the anti-fascist battlecry of the Spanish Civil War which saw thousands of men and women throughout the world travel to Spain to fight Franco’s troops. The stories of the Scottish International Brigades are legendary and have been a strong source of inspiration ever since, particularly for the Rolls-Royce workers who led the Chilean engine boycott. ‘No Pasaran’ is still often used today at anti-right-wing demonstrations across Scotland.

The crowdfunding page can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/debasers/nae-pasaran-the-scots-who-defied-pinochet-finishin or http://www.naepasaran.com

Follow Nae Pasaran online on Twitter: @naepasaran and on Facebook at http://facebook.com/naepasaran

 

********

 

The actions of the East Kilbride Rolls Royce workers were highlighted in the press in 1978 when it was reported that four aero-engines belonging to the Chilean government were removed in a secret operation from the Rolls Royce workshop with a call going out to all British workers to black all work for Chile.

A shop steward from Rolls Royce, Peter Lowe, was quoted saying, “There is nothing we can do now that the engines have left the factory. We can only hope that our fellow trade unionists everywhere else will take up the cudgels on behalf of the people of Chile.”

The engines which the men had refused to work on for four years were worth £3 million. They were taken from the factory by sheriff offers in an operation described as of military style precision and it was thought transported to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and from there flown to Chile.

The TUC condemned the actions of the government for supporting the rightwing junta in Chile responsible for the disappearance of 2000 political prisoners.  

***

And the Scottish national football team got caught up in the Chilean controversy when in 1977  the SFA insisted a pre-World Cup friendly be played against Chile in the very stadium the Pinochet junta used as a detention camp for those who opposed their illegal takeover of government – where workers, students, intellectuals, parents and even their children were horribly tortured, raped, humiliated and killed.

Mr Willie Allan of the SFA insisted the match go ahead. Opposition came from among others the committee of the Ross and Cromarty Constituency Labour Party who said, “We are disgusted that the SFA should want Scottish footballers to play in a country whose dictatorial regime used their main football stadium to rape, torture and murder opponents during the military coup.

But such opinions failed to influence the Scottish Football Association and the match went ahead in that blood-soaked pitch proving that to some footballers their game is more important than lives.

One of the best known people who died in the Santiago stadium was Chilean singer and guitarist Victor Jara who had his hands crushed and destroyed before a military officer played a game of Russian roulette with him. Victor Jara died at the third shot. And his popularity with the Chilean people was so infuriating to the rightwing military the singer his corpse was then machine gunned.

“Up Fittie down with the Hun”: 1920s xenophobia and trade

Guest post by Textor

On April 2nd as many as 3000 gathered at the fish market intent on stopping all landings. Fish was dumped, boats cast adrift and strike breakers intimidated. At one point police threw a cordon between Torry and the town in an attempt to stop fishermen moving en-masse to the centre. Baton charges were made. Not to be outdone the women of Torry gathered bowls, jars and stones to pelt the police. When police cleared the streets men and women took refuge in tenements reappearing as the waves of law and order moved on, all the better to attack from the rear. Meanwhile across on the north side of the harbour the families of Fittie gathered crying Up Fittie Down with the Hun. With creels and baskets full of stones they proceeded to pelt boats entering or leaving the harbour, forcing skippers to the south side of the channel where they were met by a barrage from the Torry men and women. The police were undone by this pincer movement.

At a time when the unpleasant whiff of xenophobia drifts over the stinking frame of crises ridden economies it’s worth recalling that there is nothing new in this. It’s what the class divided beast does; cling to backward-looking, mythologised national identity; to blame others for what are in fact consequences of the endemic conditions of international competition is so much easier than seeking out the social foundations of crises.

This is not to say that xenophobic opinion has no location in objective reality, that it is necessarily the manifestation of mad psychologies. No. The current spectre haunting Europe and beyond draws on ways in which the “free movement” of labour has increased competition between workers and helped keep wages down. In other words “foreign” workers are in a sense a threat to older labour markets. But it is the underpinning forces which mobilise them.

In the 1920s Aberdeen was hit by problems and disputes across two of the most important sectors of the local economy: trawling and granite. The foundation of both lay in intensification of international competition and the legacies of the Great War, and both centred on foreign labour undermining British industry.

 

Trawling

It was hardly surprising that when the German trawler Bremerhaven attempted to dock and land fish in Aberdeen in 1919 that there was a wave of revulsion. The war had just ended and Aberdonians, like so many others, had suffered deeply in the slaughter of 1914-18. Men gathered at the quayside to refuse the Germans the right to land. Following its search for a berth the trawler eventually grounded and its crew stoned with the demand the German flag be run down. The local paper described the skipper’s attempt to land as brazen insolence and sinister and making clear its animosity to German trade said it was an unfriendly act of a nation not penitent but revengeful. The editor went so far as to sneer at the country’s Kultur of dried raw fish as a delicacy. Bremerhaven was forced out of Aberdeen, eventually landing at its home port where the Social Democrat Party came to its fishermen’s defence and denounced the Aberdeen men as an English rabble claiming Aberdonian screamed Baby killers. Pigs. Shoot down the Huns.

Three years later the trawler Else Kunkel II steamed into Aberdeen hoping to land its fish; again there was opposition to former enemy, now called alien exploiters who were threatening the livelihoods of local families. Aberdeen’s fishermen were said to hold bitter hostility against their former enemy. However their fish was landed and so the trade was continued sporadically through the year. Skippers and mates appealed to the Government for enforcement of the Reparations [Recovery] Act and that it applied 26% duty on German fish. No help was forthcoming. Matters were made more difficult when the particular interests of buyers and fish processors opposed the embargo demanded by trawlermen; and there was local bitterness when Peterhead harbour offered to give room to German boats, not through internationalism but for the money to be made. The local newspaper acknowledged the need for Europe-wide trade in fish but realised with more powerful trawlers and crews able and willing to fish dangerous Icelandic waters the local industry faced a serious threat: A German monopoly of the fish trade of Aberdeen would leave the consumer in the grip of alien exploiters and would mean a disaster to a great local industry.

 

So matters simmered until February 1923 when skippers and mates voted to strike. Once again the rhetoric of wartime found a voice: you are fighting the Hun a second time for your rights. By the end of the first week of March 100 boats were tied up with hundreds of men out of work. Share fishermen, skippers and mates, led the dispute fearing for their livelihoods. Waged men, deckhands and engineers, were what you might call victims rather than being instrumental in this strike. Although local communists mobilised meetings around the notion of the internationalism of the working class as distinct from men such as skippers and mates there is no evidence that any significant animosity split the ranks nor that the waged men felt kinship with the German crews despite rumblings about some share men having avoided service in the war and making money out of wartime demand.

In fact solidarity within and across the fishing communities of Torry and Fittie was strong enough to draw them together to fight German landings, strike-breakers and police. When one local boat decided to scab hundreds turned out from Torry to confront the skipper and turn him back. Boats were sabotaged including the German trawler Senator Sache; while its crew slept the moorings were cut; eventually saved from grounding by the local pilot. Porters landing German fish were threatened with violence and police were defied. On April 2nd as many as 3000 gathered at the fish market intent on stopping all landings. Fish was dumped, boats cast adrift and strike breakers intimidated. At one point police threw a cordon between Torry and the town in an attempt to stop fishermen moving en-masse to the centre. Baton charges were made. Not to be outdone the women of Torry gathered bowls, jars and stones to pelt the police. When police cleared the streets men and women took refuge in tenements reappearing as the waves of law and order moved on, all the better to attack from the rear. Meanwhile across on the north side of the harbour the families of Fittie gathered crying Up Fittie Down with the Hun. With creels and baskets full of stones they proceeded to pelt boats entering or leaving the harbour, forcing skippers to the south side of the channel where they were met by a barrage from the Torry men and women. The police were undone by this pincer movement.

But so much conspired against the lcoal trawling industry, both men and forces of international trade. Trawl owners looked for compromise, buyers needed the Icelandic fish brought by Germans, the herring industry needed access to the German market and the British government was unwilling to hamper this sector of international trade. From the German side it made so much sense to continue coming to Aberdeen or failing this perhaps Peterhead. With the German Mark devalued, and the hyperinflation of 1923, the prices realised at British ports easily covered the costs of labour and coal. Stones and insults were little compared to the high explosives of the Great War.

 

Granite

Much less militant but driven by very similar forces Aberdeen’s granite industry also found itself in 1923 under threat from German competition. It is probably the case that much of the militancy of the fishermen and their families was born from the closeness of their communities with so many of them living together in the tenements of Torry and Fittie. Granite workers had a much more fragmented life style.

Granite like fish was as open to international competition. And like the owners of trawler Bremerhaven German manufacturers could and did take advantage of the opportunities afforded by devaluation. Selling in the British market was more profitable and vitally gave payment in Sterling, then an important international currency.

Just as the trawler dispute had at times adopted a stance of being anti-German as opposed to anti German competition so also did the dispute with foreign granite traders. Not that Aberdeen’s stone trade was against the import of foreign granite in fact since the later 19th century the trade had depended on imports to meet the fashion for greater variety of colour in memorials. What disturbed Aberdeen’s granite manufacturers was the threat of dressed stone being sold to British customers.

The first hint that there might be competition coming from Germany was reported in 1921when the defeated nation was found to be trading in France. Bad enough there being a competitor on the block but made worse by the belief that monuments made by the one-time enemy were to be erected over the graves of dead French soldiers. In the following year one Friederich Hagelauer of Fürth was said to have been offering memorial crosses for British graves.

By 1923 the “scandal” was being highlighted in Aberdeen’s Press & Journal with German’s accused of dumping fish and dumping granite. The Sunday Post took up the cry of an insult to our heroic dead the stones being erected where woman pray . . . and children weep. Aberdeen’s granite manufacturers sided with the newspapers and led the way in Scotland to enforcing an embargo on this foreign stone. However, it was one thing to achieve success in the home country it was another to get English dealers and customers to agree to a boycott. For customers there was the incentive of cheaper stone, if they were willing to turn a blind eye to origins; and for dealers there was the carrot of more profit. With the English market still accepting German imports Aberdeen’s trade with the south was threatened.

The difficulties Aberdeen’s stone trade faced were nothing compared to the chaos hitting Germany as it struggled to meet reparation demands of the Versailles Treaty. Its economy had all but collapsed, made worse when France occupied the Ruhr bringing its vast coal industry to a halt. Compared with the French the British state favoured a more conciliatory attitude to the defeated enemy, favoured international trade and stabilisation of the German economy.

Consequently when the granite traders approached the Government and asked for an increased tariff on German stone, like the trawlermen they met with refusal, indeed they faced the prospect that the existing tariff might be cut. The Press & Journal argued the local case, believing (and this sounds eerily like opinion in 2017) that by giving up free trade and enforcing tariffs the grave menace of foreign competition could be brought to heal. Regardless of the clout the local press had in the North East its opinion failed to sway the government and into 1926 imports continued.

Employers led the way in this dispute. There were no bands of granite-cutters and families guarding cemeteries, dinging doon German memorials; the nature of the trade simply did not lend itself to this form of action. But labour did have a voice which put itself behind the demands of the masters. George Murray, who lost a son in the Great War said it made his blood boil that German stone should even be offered as suitable material for British graves. Putting a stop to this, he said, was not only the correct thing to do but also good for the industry and what was good for business was good for workers: We in Belmont Street [offices of the Trades Council] are always favourable to the bosses . . . but of course we expect a good living wage from them in return.

 

 

Apart from the notable success in Scotland the best legislative advance made was to seek the protection of the Merchandise Marks Act, at one point speaking to Sidney Webb at the Board of Trade arguing that the granite imports should be marked “Made in Germany”. Eventually in 1929, after extensive evidence given including opposition from granite retailers, the Government decided that stone should be marked with its country of origin. Although important to local communities across Britain the Government had decided the granite industry was of no great significance in the national economy hence refusal to “safeguard” it from overseas competition. Marking stone was the most it would concede but even here it was niggardly in the eyes of merchants as only the slightest of marks-stencilled- was insisted on, not the heavily-cut lettering asked for by manufacturers.

The year after being given nominal protection the complaints continued. Germans were accused of stealing designs, appropriating the names of granites made famous by the Aberdeen industry and despite the legislation they palm off cheaply produced monuments . . . as British made.

British made; a rallying cry of the period as the United Kingdom hoped to engender patriotism in consumers and at the same time draw from the still important empire preferential treatment for manufacturers. But even here, with the cold wind of protectionism blowing across economies dealing with slump and the fall-out from the Crash of 1929, even here Aberdeen’s granite merchants struggled. Canada, for instance, did a curtsy to the “Mother Country” but refused to bow the knee. Canada gave some slight advantage to British granite but it still bore a tariff of 27% thus favouring Canadian manufacturers.

 

And so the Aberdeen granite industry, along with other British manufacturers, found the battle largely lost, found its markets shrinking and in an increasingly unstable world was forced to look to improving its competitive position by reorganising the use of labour and introducing new technology to raise productivity. And where in 1936 did Aberdonians go to see how granite could and should be handled? Germany.

Under the auspices of the British Institute of Quarrying a deputation representing the trade plus engineer Frank Cassie were content to take lessons from “the enemy”. At one site near Dresden they visited a quarry where 2000 men were said to be employed, where 250 men working at stone-splitting machines produced thousands of granite setts. Although Frank Cassie believed Aberdeen granite was unsuitable for mechanical sett-making overall the deputation was impressed by the thoroughness with which the German does the job, and the importance attached to organisation. Three years into Hitler’s rule the British deputation was envious of Germany’s road and bridge building – a policy they said the British government should put in hand. Whether the deputation witnessed other aspects of the young Nazi regime is not recorded.

 

The pressures of social disruption and global economic crises exposed the trawling and granite industries as poorly equipped to meet the threat of external competition. Trawl owners were content to fish middle-distance waters using an ageing fleet and granite merchants managed an industry characterised by a few large employers in a sea of small businesses, far from ideal when foreign competition became very keen.

British-American Project – grooming leaders

You will all be familiar with the British-American Project. No? Here’s a clue – it is a British/American networking organisation sponsored by several well-known businesses including Monsanto, Philip Morris (tobacco), Apple, British Airways, BP Coca-Cola, Unilever.

In the words of BAP:

“The British-American Project is a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders, rising stars and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds and political views. It is an extraordinarily diverse network of high-achievers on rising career paths in public, professional and business life.

BAP operates on a not-for-profit basis, funded through its membership and a small amount of support from corporate partners. We also receive support in kind from a number of bodies [see above] who share our values and objectives.”

 In 2007 the journalist John Pilger wrote that:

‘The BAP rarely gets publicity, which may have something to do with the high proportion of journalists who are alumni. Prominent BAP journalists are David Lipsey, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and assorted Murdochites. The BBC is well represented. On the Today programme, James Naughtie, whose broadcasting has long reflected his own transatlantic interests, has been an alumnus since 1989. Today’s newest voice, Evan Davis, formerly the BBC’s zealous economics editor, is a member. And at the top of the BAP website home page is a photograph of Jeremy Paxman and his endorsement. “A marvellous way of meeting a varied cross-section of transatlantic friends,” says he’^[21].

BAP has been described as a Trojan horse for American foreign policy/business/influence in the world – the Special Relationship grown large. I’ve read it has folded yet its website is still up and BAP’s annual conference is advertised for Newcastle later this year so it looks as though it is alive and kicking.

The Labour Party features largely, New Labour’s usual suspects, along with several Conservatives and assorted others. Tony Blair, not a member, described BAP as a wide-ranging pro-active organisation for “young leaders.”

Wendy Alexander, remember her? was one of those expected to take on a leadership role. Blink and you would have missed her leadership of Labour in Scotland but get there she did.

“BAP network …committed to “grooming leaders”

“Casual freemasonry” was Pilger’s description – and “by far the most influential transatlantic network of politicians, journalists and academics.”

It appears this self-selective organisation of like-minded people who saw themselves as movers and shakers able to influence all of our lives and mould attitudes relating to politics, culture, trade, defence, war and so on grew out of an idea of the late US president Ronald Reagan to develop a network of co-operation between the UK and America then developed by Sir Charles Villiers (Etonian banker and former member of Special Operations Executive) and Lewis Van Dusen. This was no peace organisation, very anti-CND.

“In the summer of 1997, a few weeks after New Labour won power, a striking article about the election appeared in a privately circulated newsletter. Under the cryptic headline Big Swing To BAP, the article began, “No less than four British-American Project fellows and one advisory board member have been appointed to ministerial posts in the new Labour government.” A list of the names of these five people and of other New Labour appointees who were members of BAP followed: “Mo Mowlam … Chris Smith … Peter Mandelson … Baroness Symons … George Robertson … Jonathan Powell … Geoff Mulgan … Matthew Taylor …” The article ended with a self-congratulatory flourish and the names of two more notable BAP members: “James Naughtie and Jeremy Paxman gave them all a hard time on BBC radio and television. Other fellows, too numerous to list, popped up throughout the national media commenting, criticising and celebrating.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/06/usa.politics1

In 2003 John Pilger noted that “Five members of Blair’s first cabinet, along with his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, were members of the British American Project for a Successor Generation, a masonry of chosen politicians and journalists, conceived by the far-right oil baron J. Howard Pew and launched by Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch.” 

In the beginning advisory boards were established in the US and Britain through the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC in the US and in Britain the rightwing Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London currently headed by Eliz Manningham-Buller, former DG of the Security Services. Former presidents include Douglas Hurd, George Robertson and Paddy Ashdown.  It describes itself as ‘independent’ and not funded by government-

“The institute receives no subsidy from the UK government or any other source.” although, curiously, among its funders, those who do not wish to remain anonymous, is the British Army, Ministry of Defence and the BBC.

The BBC? Explains why it uses is so much in its news reports. Isn’t there a question over BBC’s independence when it pays into this think tank? How many others does it help fund?

See more at:

https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/Fundingbands15-16A.pdf

Let’s cut to the chase – who are/were some of these anointed if not by predestination then something not dissimilar?

Apart from Wendy Alexander, sister of former Labour foreign and trade minister, Douglas Alexander, other alumni include – well, Douglas Alexander, Labour Party Foreign and Trade minister; Stephen Dorrell, former Conservative minister; Alan Sked founder of Ukip, David Miliband, Labour Party; Baron Mandelson, Labour Party, EU trade commissioner; Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, ex-Labour Party Minister, Adviser to BP, on Board of Equilibrium Gulf Ltd; Baroness Symons, Labour Party former Foreign Office minister; Jonathan Powell, Labour Party former chief of staff to Blair;  Baroness Scotland, Labour Home Office minister; Geoff Mulgan, former head of Downing Street’s policy and strategy unit; Sadiq Khan, Labour Party, Mayor of London; Matthew Taylor, Downing Street head of policy; David Willetts, Conservative minister; journalists Jeremy Paxman, BBC; Evan Davis, BBC; James Naughtie, BBC; William Crawley, BBC; Jane Hill, BBC; Ben Hammersley, BBC; Trevor Phillips, BBC; Isabel Hilton, BBC, the Independent, the Guardian; Margaret Hill, BBC producer of current affairs; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent, London Evening Standard; Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator; Rowan Pelling, Daily Telegraph and many, many more.

BAP was designed to be an active professional networking medium for young professionals so many in the list above will have dropped out to be replaced by the future. And on the subject of the future at a time when there is great concern at the erosion of the NHS and the prospect of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership aka TTIP I think there are reasons to be very worried indeed over this close and cagey liaison.

 http://powerbase.info/index.php/British_American_Project

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/06/usa.politics1

 http://www.britishamericanproject.org/

STOP PRESS: Russian Revolution 1917

It was almost incredible that it could be true. We stood together in the darkened street, half delirious with joy, while tears mingled with our laughter.

Guest post by Textor

Emotionally charged, with an echo of Wordsworth’s response to news of the French Revolution, these are the words Aberdonian John Paton on hearing that the Tsar had been overthrown. It was March 1917. It was the Russian Revolution. The thirty one year old socialist was leaving an election meeting where he’d supported the anti-war stance of Ramsay MacDonald. Since 1914 millions had been sucked into the bloody maelstrom of world war. For small bands of socialists across Europe the war was final proof of the bankruptcy of capitalism and as such had to be opposed despite lies in the press, willingly if not happily accepting threats of violence and imprisonment.

Anti-war socialists saw glimmers of hope in working class militancy which continued through these desperate years. Rent strikes, demands for 40 hour working week, the emergence of an unofficial shop steward movement all implicitly challenged political authority so much so that by 1917 “Red Clydesiders” were being harassed, sent to internal exile and gaoled. Socialists were buoyed but faced the fact that in Britain and across Europe, particularly in Germany, social democratic parties had taken up their respective national flags and helped drum men to the battle-fronts.

When John Paton left the election meeting on that fateful evening he met with a comrade who was almost choking with excitement at the news of the fall of the Tsar. Hardly surprising that local election politics were for the moment put into the shade. For John Paton events in Russia spurred him to greater political activity which eventually resulted in him becoming a leading figure in the Independent Labour Party.

In a similar fashion the cub reporter James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) was inspired by the later Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia so much so that he and a colleague could not sleep o’nights. We prowled Aberdeen . . . talking the moon into morning about jolly and heart-some and splendid things: life, death, the Revolution. Young Mitchell was then working for The Aberdeen Journal; the city’s most important newspaper. Since the 1740s the Journal had served Aberdeen with a generally conservative view of the world. In its time it had wagged a political and moral finger at the excessive demands of Chartists and seen off more radical newspaper rivals by accepting some of the liberal policies of the 19^th century. Basically the Journal wanted men to be politically sensible. Political militancy, whether it was votes for women or re-division of land, was unacceptable, at least in the parliamentary “democracy” that was Britain.

James Leslie Mitchell’s enthusiasm was not shared by the Journal nor by its stable-mate The Evening Express.   However, this is not to say that the earlier phase of the Russian Revolution which had so captivated John Paton was denounced by the Aberdeen newspapers. We must remember that the British state and its mouthpieces were concerned with the prosecution of the war. Where John had seen universal hope for an end to the slaughter and the building of a more just world the Aberdeen papers believed that far from doing this the fall of the Tsarist autocracy would mean a more rational organisation of Russia’s military forces, taking power from the hands of an incompetent regime, with what they called dark and mysterious forces behind the throne, and placing it with men in the Russian parliament, the Duma; in other words a new regime with some sort of political legitimacy, consequently better able to work with Britain and her allies by marshalling workers and peasants to fight the German enemy.     

In March 1917 Aberdeen Daily Journal welcomed the “Revolution” and confidently predicted that a more democratic empire could be built with the help of Grand Duke Michael and on this solid foundation the energetic prosecution of the war [would be] their first consideration. And at the same time that it praised Russia for holding fast to the European battlefields where millions were dying the newspaper congratulated Russia for not taking the bloody path of the 1905 revolution or that mapped out in France in 1789. As the Evening Express put it the simple-hearted, generous, hospitable Russians were following a course of common sense in showing a willingness to keep the slaughter going.

On the other hand there was an enemy in Britain, conspiring to defeat the just ends being pursued by the state, personified in the person of Ramsay MacDonald: Aberdeen wants no peace bargainers, no mischief makers, in a time of national crisis. Russia, said the Journal must also beware Socialists and fanatical Revolutionaries. Ramsay MacDonald is now one of the great villains of Labour history; the man who sold out to the National Government and Conservatism. But this is to forget he and others had the courage and we might say the decency to stand against the bloodletting of 1914-18 even if this was from a pacifist stance rather than, as the young John Paton would have demanded, a revolutionary overthrow of the property owning class. 

It just so happened that Aberdeen played its own small part in ensuring the pacifist MacDonald with his M.P. colleague Fred Jowett of Bradford were prevented in June 1917 from attending an anti-war socialist meeting in Petrograd. Aberdeen was the “certain port” from which these two men attempted to sail only to be stopped by organised labour under the leadership of Captain Edward Tupper of the seamen’s union. Pickets at the harbour threw their luggage ashore and followed them to their lodgings to keep them from sailing. Needless to say the local press was enchanted by this show of militancy, displaying a support for picketing which tended to be conspicuous by its absence in earlier industrial strikes.

When the Bolshevik Lenin was given safe passage by the Germans to the Finland Station in April unsurprisingly he was said to be an agent of the Kaiser, the editor of the Evening Express advised the Russian state now is the time for a supreme effort to trample down the internal enemy before hurling back the invader. Equally unsurprising the newspapers also saw MacDonald and his ILP comrades as doing the Kaiser’s work not to mention men and women going on strike threatening to disrupt munitions production.

Regardless of all the political guidance being given and the moral exhortations made it still looked as if the events in Russia had a dynamic beyond the control of any of the states involved in mutual destruction. The “moderate”, pro-war, Russian leader Kerensky seemed unable to guide things to the desired end. In Aberdeen’s Mither Kirk (Parish Church) on the third anniversary of the outbreak of war Colonel the Rev. James Smith preached asking God to intercede on the side of Britain: he prayed to God that a better day might speedily dawn upon distracted Russia and that the men of patriotic spirit and invincible courage be forthcoming to lead one of the greatest and most ancient of Empires to the destiny that awaited her. That destiny turned out to be not the one desired by the Rev. Smith or the local editors. Perhaps the call for God to intercede had not been heard or God (some Hegelian might say History) had set course for a future beyond their imaginations.

Come October-November 1917 and pro-war elements had their worst fear was realised: in Petrograd and beyond workers and peasants organised in councils sought peace and began to imagine a world which might be other than the one they now lived in. This was, however, more than a mental act. The councils, packed with voices from all parts of the political spectrum, were organised around degrees of holding power, making decisions which carried force and when necessary using armed militias to achieve their ends. This is what the British and other voices of “reason and common sense” could neither comprehend nor accept.   The Bolsheviks were wiser, their political programme, as much as it might have been made on the hoof at times, recognised the dynamics of class action and were able to place themselves at the head of this deeply revolutionary situation. Where revolutionaries saw liberation and new found freedoms the status-quo perceived only anarchy, an upsetting of the natural order and more immediately the loss of privilege and power. 

One of the local editors wrote: It is incredible that the Russian people would long tolerate a system which aims at undermining the foundations of the whole fabric of society . . . But undermine it they did. The exploited across Russia and many beyond its frontiers recognised that the “foundations of the whole fabric of society” included systematic exploitation of workers and peasants, imperial adventures and colonisation which had given the world the blood drenched trenches across Europe. Who held power, and to what ends, this was one of the keys to explaining 1917 and indeed equally important to understanding the future of what became Soviet Russia and the emergence of a regime which eventually needed no lessons in how to repress and control civil society.

But this was in the future. Socialists might at times be star-gazers but they are not clairvoyants. The emergence of workers and peasant councils pointed to new social forms around which a new world might be built. One hundred years on John Paton’s words hint at how it must have been:

 Every day brought its fresh excitements and new hopes that even now something of lasting good for Socialists in Britain was to come out of the war.