Being offensive on the net

In Britain there are an increasing number of arrests and convictions of people who have expressed “offensive” opinions on the net.

At a moral level it is utterly impossible to defend people who gratuitously insult others on-line. For that reason many otherwise right-thinking people will remain silent in Britain when idiots who scribble illiterate insults end up in police stations, courts and prisons.

Yet we should stop and raise two issues: one a matter of principle, the other of policy.

As a matter of principle, no-one should face legal sanction merely because s/he has said something offensive. If you harass people, threaten them, blackmail them etc., then, yes, you do something everybody would recognise as a crime. But merely expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, should not in itself be a crime. That is an essential ingredient of free speech.

Let us ask a question about state policy. Why is the state so pro-active in clamping down on Twitter insults, when it cares so little about the economic well-being or political liberties of ordinary people in general? The answer seems to be that what motivates these prosecutions and the consequent imposition of disproportionate punishment is a state strategy of intimidating free expression on the net.

Twitter and similar technologies are highly effective means of communication for ordinary people, but they are also excellently tailored for state surveillance and state intimidation of all who use them.


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UKIP on the rise?

UKIP is raising its profile as Britain’s fourth largest political party.

The growth of UKIP is an aspect of the increasing fragmentation of political identity among voters that has been taking place in the last half century.

What seems to be happening on the right is that the Tory Party, as an alliance of business interests and nationalistic/chauvinistic prejudices, is coming apart, with the Union Jack wavers now gravitating to UKIP.

The left, too, might fragment, if the Green Party moves out of its current niche.

If political fragmentation proceeds apace – boosted by PR in the EU elections – we might wonder at what point the current first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons becomes utterly dysfunctional.


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A Personal Journey to Marxism

Marxism is a powerful explanatory system; and the moment in life when one acknowledges that is seldom forgotten.

It was in an autumn evening in 1978, some time after dark and sitting alone at my desk, that I became a Marxist. It was not a consequence of an act of class struggle, nor of any concrete event in the political sphere, but purely the result of an intellectual decision. The books in front of me were Peter Worsely’s Introducing Sociology and the decidedly non-Marxist writer Raymond Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought. As I read I had been throwing up objections to Marxist theory and then at one point I stopped resisting and accepted the general thesis, as in all probability, correct.

The next five or six years, which saw me through my A-levels and a politics degree at Exeter University, were years of fervent exploration in the secular faith. I don’t propose in this essay to proceed methodically through my personal intellectual progression, but rather to answer the following questions. Why did I become a Marxist? What are the fundamental tenets of that belief system which became programmed into my brain? And briefly, what remains today?

My childhood was one of confused and conflicting class consciousness. I grew up in Surrey, a rich part of England. We had our own house, but otherwise my family was relatively poor for the 1970s. Mother (born 1928), whether more out of principle or necessity, stayed at home and my father (born 1908) retired when I was eleven. We had no car, no washing machine, no central heating and we only acquired a TV and telephone in my later teenage years. Yet, we were considered middle class on the grounds that my father had never done a manual job, we did not live on a council estate and my sister and I were brought up to speak BBC English.

From an early age I developed an insight into social class and experienced a dislocation from my peers. My infant and junior schools, which I attended 1967-73, were within the catchment area of a council estate. Most of my early friends were working class kids whose families, unlike mine, had lived in the town for generations. These were the southern skilled working class people, mostly richer than my own family, who would turn so decisively to Mrs Thatcher in 1979. Already alienated from much of the popular culture with no television at home, I was reminded of the class issue every time the council estate kids mocked the pronunciation my mother had instilled me, or whenever in the playground the kids talked about the goings-on at the youth club which I was not allowed to attend.

Yet if the working class did not see me as one of their own, nor did the middle class kids who went on foreign holidays and to barbeques – and at this stage performed so much better than I did at school. Later in my secondary school, when academically I had pulled ahead, I was accepted into the group, but was always made to feel different and grateful for their company. When I out-performed them academically, they felt the injustice because their foreign holiday hadn’t boosted their French test result, and because it was I not they who was going to the ‘better university’ In the ‘now open now hidden’ class struggle that Marx wrote about, my experience was of the concealed and hushed class stratification of England, not of strikes and confrontation on the street. Yet, these experiences and perceptions helped me along the path to Marxism.

My father played his part. Aged seventy when I was sixteen, he was in many ways more like a grandfather. He was someone to talk to, not a father to play football or even go walking with. His interest in politics was not intellectual, but practical. Nominally a Liberal, but with a penchant for history’s strong men, he had been elected onto the town council in 1968 and ten years later was ceremonial mayor of the town. Though kind and gentle at home, he was a manipulative loner for whom intellectual honesty meant nothing. About his first sixty years of life before I could meaningfully talk to him, I knew very little. But those years had instilled in him a dislike of Toryism and the arrogance of the English haut bourgeoisie. Much to my mother’s irritation, my father and I talked politics endlessly, but his lack of reading and his recourse to false ‘facts’ meant that we seldom advanced. Yet I did grow up in a family in which politics was the common currency of conversation, even with my poor mother who hated it.

Religion was only important in my early life in that I came to reject it. Both my parents were nominally Protestants who had attended Catholic schools. Until I was ten, I believed religion was like the story of Santa Claus: not believed by adults, but told to children. Though church goers, my parents displayed little piety: mother felt praying ‘all rather silly,’ and father always presented religion as something that existed rather than something that was true. My metaphysical views of the universe have always been religion-free.

Studying was neither a family tradition, nor did it come early in my life. Mother left school at fourteen and equated academic success with correct elocution and neat handwriting; father, though university educated, had little sympathy for intellectuals. Until secondary school, my association with the lads from the council estate had kept me in remedial classes. But on entering secondary school at eleven in 1973, I joined the upper stream and by the time I was sixteen I was near the top in most subjects. Obviously, the change to the middle class peer group was a factor, but so was a change at home. Now freer of my mother’s psychological control (but without much opportunity to mix independently with my peers), I separated myself to my room with my radio and books as my main companions. Left largely alone by my elderly parents, I discovered the town library and started to read.

From my father’s attitude and my experiences of class division at school, I tended to be anti-Tory, but not specifically socialist. My reading of pop-psychology and politics generally reinforced notions of liberalism and individual freedom. At this stage I had made no sociological analysis of society, but merely made a shopping list of demands against it. In particular, I saw young people unfairly constrained in their lives: parental control, school uniform, corporal punishment, but most of all with regard to their sexual expression.

The summer of 1978 was a roller coaster year for me. My love affair with a classmate, which had started the previous autumn, deepened and unbalanced my teenage brain. I became more estranged from my parents, particularly my mother. I left school in June after my O Level examinations and worked throughout July and August in a factory where, apart from my paper delivery round, I earned my first real money. By the end of August my love affair was in tatters, but my studying was not. And in the more academic environment of the college, which I started in September, I was able to start devoting myself seriously to my sociology, economics and history courses.

I could make not claim to be particularly learned at that time, but I wanted to study the society around me. The summer had seen me in love and in depression, taking every opportunity I could day and night to get near one girl. In the two years at college before I went to university I attended one drunken teenage party, and once on a sociology excursion to Birmingham I took a girl to my hotel bedroom. Otherwise those two years were devoted to the discovery of Marxism, getting good A-level results and little else.

It would be quite wrong to only consider personal factors and not look to wider social and political context in Britain in which I living. I don’t want to present in this essay a retrospective political analysis of the late 1970s, but rather paint a picture of how the politics of the 1970s filtered through into my Surrey town.

The crisis that enveloped Britain in the 1970s was multi-dimensional. The main economic effect hitting the working class, rising unemployment, had not yet arrived in Surrey, but the increasing number of strikes, double digit inflation and the consequent deepening economic pessimism had undermined faith in the economic and political system. By 1978 Britain had seen three general elections in the decade and was about to see another. Uncertainty and crisis was the order of the day, so it was not an idle question whether the future would herald in greater social equality, democracy and industrial planning, or whether, as actually did happen, capitalist power, inequality and discipline would be fully restored. For me, from as early as 1977 when I was fifteen years old there was no doubt that I was on the ‘left’ side of the debate to the extent that I understood it, though of course I lacked any kind of sociological analysis of the issues.

The crisis of political authority ran parallel with debates surrounding the so-called ‘permissive’ society. The decade or so before 1978 had produced many meaningful reforms in Britain: abolition of the death penalty, the legalisation of abortion, the pill and homosexuality, relaxation in censorship, the lowering of the age of majority to eighteen. All this had been accompanied by cultural changes: in fashion long hair for men, musical innovation; e.g. punk. Nowhere was this wave of freedom more a battlefield than in schools: school uniform or not, caning or no corporal punishment, girls doing metalwork or not, Latin or sociology. The cohort of ex-military teachers and their wives in secondary schools was giving way to a more liberal breed. At fifteen I remember the rant of our retiring headmaster in an assembly lashing out at striking pickets and pop stars and informing us that our generation would never have won the Second World War. Two years later I was sitting in my jeans and drinking coffee in my sociology class discussing Marxist perspectives, while the teacher interrupted to tell tales of his hitch-hiking experiences.

The question really was a simple one: were you on the side of Mrs Whitehouse and Mrs Thatcher’s reaction or were you a progressive. I was a progressive, but in the autumn of 1978 I lacked the sociology to explain the society which was throwing up these issues, and on that autumn evening sitting at my desk (which actually is the desk I am typing this essay on now twenty-nine years later) I thought I had found the answer in Marxism.

Today, three decades later and in a totally changed political situation, I still judge Marxist theory to be largely correct. True, there are aspects of classical Marxism which I’ve rejected; and today I allow many non-Marxist explanatory systems to co-exist in my understanding of society. Of course the fact that my personal and social circumstances put me in a position of discover Marxism in no way diminishes the accuracy or otherwise of Marxist explanations of society.

The core of my understanding then as now was the theory of historical materialism. In essence the theory holds that human society has the characteristics that it does on account of the way human beings throughout history have made it that way through their collective but largely uncooperative and unintentional activities. The economic base of society frames and co-exists with the superstructure of institutions and ideas; and the way human beings relate to the economy through ownership, possession and control establishes social classes and many of the divisions within social classes. These simple observations provide the basis for a rich and powerful explanatory methodology, but sadly, as this is not an essay on Marxist theory, I will have to move on.

The next half decade of my life at university and for a period afterwards was dedicated, sometimes successfully but often not, to further understanding and elaborating Marxism. I frantically believed that all legitimate politics had to be based on full understanding of Marxism and class struggle. I set out as best I could as a student and then as an unemployed man to recruit others and to fight the Thatcherite reaction. Even when I largely gave up at the end of the 1980s, the precepts have remained engraved in my mind rather like one remembers one’s multiplication tables. Though I made mistakes, I do not regret my main decisions; and even today it on my ‘to do list’ to attempt to update historical materialism for the present age.

So who was responsible for my attachment to Marxism? My mother who instilled no religious belief in me; my father who talked politics instead of football; my schoolmates who ridiculed my accent; the middle class kids who snubbed me; my primary school teacher who made sure I got into the top stream at secondary school; my liberal minded sociology teacher; or perhaps my girlfriend who left me? Or was it the spirit of the age: those years in the late seventies when the stability of the post war consensus was coming to an end? Could one element have changed, and if so would I have become a born again Christian instead? I don’t know and in the end it doesn’t really matter.


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Why study Marx?

Marxism is the key to understanding the society we live in today

Marxism is first and foremost a mode of analysis of capitalist society; its aim is to tell us why society is how it is. In my view Marxism is broadly correct and is worth studying in depth; but that is something that each person must do for him or herself.

The crisis which erupted in the late 2000s is not just economic; it is systemic, and it sledge-hammered the claims and assumption of the neo-liberalism which gripped the ruling elites from Thatcher to Blair. As insecurity pain and poverty mushroom, it is understandable that people, particularly the young who are the worst affected, need to analyse the society in which they live.

Understanding the cage you are in does not give you the key to the door. Marx died in 1883 and his sketch-map solutions can only be a starting point for thinking about the way forward.


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Supressing more than protest in Britain

Civic and political freedom in Britain is declining. More and more political activity is considered a nuisance or a threat and something to be controlled.

Many have argued that the state is attempting to suffocate dissent and protest, but what is worse, the suppression political activity.

Police, government and state action is indeed directed at suppressing protest (i.e. people who shout or hold placards to emphasise their point), but state surveillance is also more widely deployed against people who engage in political activity more generally.

For instance, people fall victims to police FIT photographing, not only because they demonstrate, but because they attend meetings. Police informers infiltrate not only street protests, but attend the most sedate of meetings to gather information. Teachers and youth workers are encouraged to report ‘anything of interest’ said by their students or charges to the police.

Little comes to light of the probably extensive police surveillance of the internet and telephone communication, because, unlike the monitoring of demonstrations and meetings, the victims have no means of finding out about it. For the most part, people-on-line are merely exchanging opinions; yet many of them will now have police records.

Almost certainly the vast majority of people on police records, not only have never committed a crime, but have never or have rarely engaged in street protest. What they have done, like me now, is sought to communicate politically and so have been branded as domestic extremists worthy of police surveillance.

Sadly the only protection people have is that the large numbers of people now on record as domestic extremists make the active surveillance of everyone a logistic impossibility.


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Bonfire of Illusions by Alex Callinicos

In 2008 the world changed both economically and politically.

In the autumn of 2008 Alex Callinicos saw the world going through a major transformation with the three decade long era of neoliberal consensus coming apart. His book is a succinct analysis of, and intervention in, that situation. The book contains two theses (the so-called twin crises) plus a conclusion.

The first thesis, the economic argument, is that 2008 saw not merely an unsolvable rupture in neoliberalism, but the opening up of a fundamental fault-line in capitalism itself. Callinicos sketches the now familiar contours of the crisis: a credit-fuelled boom across the world which came to a sudden halt when the assets constituting bank securities, such as the now infamous sub-prime mortgages, nosedived in value. After the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008, further banking insolvency was prevented only by a wide-ranging nationalisation of losses and the provision of state subsidies to banks, all of which led in turn to burgeoning state deficits, requiring tax rises and government expenditure cuts. These measures, in tandem with diminishing credit to business and consumers have led to sustained recession across the world.

While the features of the immediate financial crisis are well known, Callinicos wishes to stress the crisis of capitalism itself. In short, he argues that the rising organic composition of capital in the last half century has pushed down the average rate of profit. In conjunction with that, he argues that the increase in the power and independence of finance capital has made the world economic system less stable with ever more frequent credit booms and crashes.

Turning to his second thesis, the political argument, the year 2008 also saw a symbolic event which ended the neoliberal “end of history” myth, namely that only those states adopting the Washington consensus could succeed in the modern world. In the summer Russia used its military superiority to reverse and humiliate Georgia’s own military attempt to re-establish rule from Tbilisi in the two breakaway Russian speaking regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Despite Georgia’s sycophantic pro-Americanism, the Bush administration shied away from a confrontation with Russia in the bear’s own backyard. The US might be the most powerful state in the world, but the continuing vitality of authoritarian state capitalism - principally in Russia and China - proved the future not to be entirely American.

The financial implosion of 2008 plus the growing power of states not committed to neoliberalism all signalled the rebirth of the the proactive political state. Neoliberalism had sought a state that would only enforce contracts and suppress militant opponents of capital, but otherwise the market would rule. Yet, in 2008 the capitalist financial system could only be saved by the state, in the US, but particularly in Britain.

The rise in the proactive state in both West and East has proved the weakness of the world’s other form of state formation, the confederal system of the European Union. The financial crisis has shown that it is the state, not pan-European structures, that has the power to decide and intervene; thus the future of Europe will be more determined in Berlin than in Brussels.

For me, the weakest part of the book is the conclusion where Callinicos argues that the solution to the world's woes is the complete abolition of the market in favour of planning directed through workers’ councils, even if he does admit, citing Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, of some gradualism after the working-class has seized political power. In such a slender volume Callinicos does not have the space to back-up his argument and his conclusion appears more like a piece of propaganda. And while I don’t in principle oppose the outcome Callinicos wants, I think his binary choice - crisis capitalism or rule by workers’ councils - simplistic and unrealistic for people today.

That said, I think the book is well worth reading and learning from.

CALLINICOS, Alex, Bonfire of Illusions, Polity Press 2009.


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Exeter Labour Briefing 1983-84

Exeter Labour Briefing, a magazine published by a group of mainly young people in the mid 1980s, was the first step in a socialist project in the south-west of England.

The evenings were already drawing in when in September 1981 two second-year university students huddled around a cheap radio set in their room in a shared house. Both were anxious to hear the outcome of the first item of business of the Labour Party Conference of that year: namely the election of the deputy leader of the Labour Party. For the first time in Labour Party history, instead of Labour MPs alone electing the leader and deputy, the newly created electoral college, which opened the vote to the constituency parties and trade unions, would decide the outcome. The result was read out by a party official: the right-winger, Denis Healey, had defeated Tony Benn for the position by a whisker of less than one percent of the votes. I felt the pain like a punch in the face.


Joining the Labour Party

I had joined the University Labour Club the year before and found it politically ineffective. Unusually for the early 1980s, the club was led by Labour right-wingers who harboured a bitter knee-jerk dislike of everything vaguely progressive from CND to public ownership. Their idea of student political activity was skittle matches with the Liberals and afternoon tea with the Tories. They, and there were only two or three of them, retained control of the club solely because they were unchallenged. Taking power away from this small clique proved as easy as cutting through warm butter with a knife: four or five of us organised a motion of no-confidence; they were out; and we were in. I became the club secretary.

Student politics itself was of little interest to me. However that did not mean students were of no importance: they could become political activists and articulate socialist ideas both among and outside the student body. In the autumn of 1981, the target of my interest became the Labour Party itself. Inside the University Labour Club little was known about its politics, though we knew the Exeter Party had supported Benn against Healey in the deputy leadership contest.

Joining the Party proved technically more difficult than I had imagined. From a leaflet I found the address of the HQ and went off in search of 26 Clifton Hill. Unfortunately, there was also a Clifton Road nearby to distract me and number 26 turned out to be an ordinary terraced house. In the end I wrote a letter to the address on the leaflet, and a month or so later the membership secretary of the Pennsylvania/St. Davids branch turned up at my student house. After a further wait while my membership was approved by the branch and the Exeter GMC (General Management Committee) I was given my first party card which in those days still carried a red flag rather than a red rose.

The university itself, plus much of the student and staff residential quarter of Exeter, was in the Pennsylvania/St. Davids ward of the town. For this reason the branch was one of the largest and most vocal in Exeter, although its Labour vote was amongst the lowest. The SDP faction had already left, and the branch, consisting disproportionally of university employees, was in the process of moving its meetings from the houses of a clique of middle class party members to the party headquarters in Clifton Hill. The view of the leadership of the branch was clear: the movement to the left in the past had been justified, but now it was time to stabilise and if necessary move to the right tactically, if not in principle.

My second or third branch meeting was held in the faded grandeur of the Mardon Hall of residence at the university. It was here that I made my first intervention in Labour Party politics. I agreed to second a motion calling for Labour, in the event of no party having overall control in the May 1984 municipal elections, not to form a coalition with the Liberals. The right-wing moved a successful amendment to replace the words “will not form a coalition” with “has no intention of...” And of course when the council was hung, they did indeed form not a coalition but a working arrangement with the Liberals.

As a Labour Party member, I was now able to occupy one of the two places on the GMC allotted to the University Labour Club; hitherto these seats had gone unfilled. Strangely, I had entertained the idea that the members of the GMC would sit around a table, debate matters of political importance and listen to one another. I expected local and administrative matters to be discussed, but that these issues would be tied into national political narratives. I was in for a shock: delegates sat slumped around the inside of a Nissan hut, several the worse for drink. The meeting consisted mainly of endless unstructured and often incoherent reports of what had been said at city and county council meetings and what had been going on in the branches and in the executive committee. Exchanges between delegates were mindlessly aggressive, particularly so given that it was often hard to discern any coherent political differences between the speakers. Within minutes of watching this shambles I saw the limitations of trying to promote left-wing politics there and of course I largely lost respect for Exeter Labour Party as an institution.

Nonetheless this configuration of people and of attitudes was the reality of the Labour Party in Exeter, and I was there to learn how it worked. Though there were a number of miscellaneous characters and people who straddled both sides in their sympathies, it was not hard to discern two factions. One was what we would refer to today as ‘old Labour;’ local working-class people, often connected to the trains and buses, for whom the Labour Party meant advancing the well-being and status of just that group. And second, middle class people, usually connected to education and the public sector, who were either associated with various causes (e.g. nuclear disarmament) or just saw themselves as charity workers for the less well-off. The number of people who could be classified as left-wing socialists could be counted on the fingers of one hand.


My political thinking in the early 1980s

I should now pause and sketch in the political analysis which I held in the early 1980s, which then seemed reasonable, but was later shown by events to be in part mistaken. Like everybody else at the time, and rightly so, I saw the coming into office of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Party in 1979 as marking a profound shift in the direction of British society. Thatcherism, heralding in an age of market fundamentalism and re-consolidation of capitalist power, signalled the end of the years of political consensus which had prevailed in Britain since the Second World War. Monetarist policies, cuts in public expenditure, attacks on the trade unions and local councils were leading to increasing social inequality, poverty, mass unemployment and a sharpening of class conflict.

I was mistaken in believing that two, and only two, alternatives lay ahead. One possibility was that the socio-economic conditions of the early eighties would be a permanent fixture of British society, with ever increasing class and political polarisation. Or, in the alternative, the Labour Party would change itself into an instrument of socialist transformation, win office and then in a mass popular struggle abolish capitalism. Obviously, I hoped for the latter over the former and wanted to be part of the new socialist politics. But if recession Thatcherism were to be a permanent feature of life, then I would play my part in working class politics and the counter culture of the age. It never occurred to me at the time that an upswing in capitalism was possible, and that neo-liberal capitalist development would transform the working class and then propel Labour Party politics away from socialism.

The consequence of holding these views was that I regarded the majority of the existing currents of opinion in the Labour Party as irrelevant anachronisms and impediments to progress. The working-class trade union Labourites, symbolised in Exeter by Chester Long leader of railwayman’s trade union, harked back to an era when the working man was treated with privileged indulgence. Market fundamentalism and political Thatcherism would throw him and his ilk off their high horses as indeed they actually did. Equally irrelevant in this period of intensified class struggle were the middle-class social ameliorators who saw Labour as a polite pressure group for good causes. That was how I saw things at the time; and being in possession of this analysis, of course, led to the inevitability of conflict within Exeter Labour Party. And being twenty years old I was not prepared to soft peddle.


The birth of Exeter Labour Briefing

The origin of Exeter Labour Briefing came out of a very simple event which proved to me that the struggle within the Labour Party had to conducted at least in part outside its official organs. The new chairman of the branch was an affable politics lecturer from the right of the party who was regarded as somewhat politically naive. His proposal on taking the chair was the establishment of a branch newsletter, a suggestion which was unanimously adopted. Without any complaint form him, I put in a small piece arguing that the party should move leftwards. What I hadn’t predicted was the censorious reaction.

Freedom of debate was not appreciated. The reaction against my piece at the next branch meeting threw up two pseudo-arguments which would be repeated again and again by Exeter Labour Party throughout the whole Briefing saga: first, that people, in this case party members, might confuse my arguments for Labour Party policy; and second, that the existence of differences of opinion would divide and confuse. Since restrictive and illiberal policies such as this made any internal opposition in the Exeter Labour Party impossible, the only option was to establish a journal outside the Party structures. That this journal would run into problems with the Exeter Labour Party leadership was of course inevitable, however much some of the founders of Briefing wanted to avoid this outcome. Yet, the situation in Exeter was a strange one. Admittedly, throughout Britain in 1982-83 the march to the left was being halted and made to retreat, but publication bans on party members, particularly when the people involved were unassociated with Trotskyist groups, was rare, if not unknown.

In the early summer of 1983 my last university examination was behind me and I was a free man with time on my hands. In July the first issue of Exeter Labour Briefing appeared. Initially we were four: myself, a university friend, the membership secretary from our local Labour Party branch who worked as software developer and finally a teacher from the technical college. Within a few months, the other three had left Exeter, but it is worthwhile looking at the politics behind the first issue which appeared in July 1983.

Several issues had to be sorted out early on. First, it was decided that we were setting up, not a political faction, but a discussion magazine for which any Labour Party member could write. In practice, that meant little: we didn’t expect contributions from our opponents and the distinction between acting as a faction and as producers of a publication was more theoretical than real. The second issue was the name. We adopted the name Labour Briefing, not because we had any connection with the London magazine of that name, but because we wanted to talk to the Labour Party from inside the Labour Party. Later we developed a partnership with London Labour Briefing, but it was never a relationship of dependency. Thirdly, and this was the most hotly disputed issue, we had to decide whether to sell the magazine to the public or somehow restrict it to party members. The first issue published in July 1983 was theoretically limited to party members only, but later this rather limiting and unrealistic policy was abandoned.


Managing Exeter Labour Briefing on Welfare

My personal situation changed in the summer of 1983. In September, no longer a student, I moved into a bedsit and the main source of my income became welfare benefits. The outlook for Briefing appeared grim as my three associates left Exeter one by one. Yet two sources of recruitment remained. The first was the University Labour Club now under the control of three left-wing mature postgraduate students who played some role themselves, but also encouraged Club members to involve themselves in Briefing. The second was the the pool of unemployed university leavers who remained in Exeter with time on their hands. Most were angry that recession Thatcherism had robbed them of an opportunity to work and loathed the narrow-mindedness and cultural debasement of Tebbit-ridden Toryism. The Thatcher regime was only four years old and they did not believe it would entrench itself for a generation. Instead, they believed something more radical and principled than the Labour Party establishment of Denis Healey was both necessary and possible. Briefing was something local and practical to give expression to those feelings.

One immediate need of every political project then as now was funding. In those pre-internet days, it was not even possible to publish anything without access to funds for typewriters, typewriter cartridges and print shops. All required money as did the hire of rooms, usually above pubs, to hold meetings. Smaller meetings among comrades who were friends could be accommodated in bedsits.

As nobody was going to fund us, we had little choice but to finance the project ourselves. And given that nearly everyone lived from dole money or on a student grant, the task was not easy. I purchased a small brown paper cash book, which soon became known as the "shit-coloured book," and gave everyone a page. It was basically a means of taxation: each Briefing supporter was given a weekly sum based on his or her income, ranging from some thirty pence to two pounds. Throughout the week I did the rounds to bring in the money and deposited it in our account at the Cooperative Bank on the High Street.

Initially I had thought that my taxation rounds would prove unpopular, but the opposite turned out to be the case. The politically induced recession of the early eighties hadn’t just cut through England’s manufacturing north, but had also sharply diminished the number of graduate employment opportunities across the land. There was thus an inflated pool of discontented educated youth who were either unemployed or on the verge of it. Market fundamentalism as an ideology was far from entrenched and many believed in the possibility of change. Briefing, based on the educated young, had a strong minority appeal, and more people than I had thought possible wanted to discuss politics with me and hand over small quantities of money.

The biggest difficulty was not tapping into the pool of support but activating it into participation in Exeter Labour Party. The whole ambiance of the Labour Party in Exeter was undoubtedly depressing and made worse by the barrage of insults that met the young who did participate. Among the most vindictive was that coined, or at least most often deployed, by the Exeter party’s only employee, Dorothy Parker, that “these are just transitory people” - with the implication that the young and unemployed constituted some sort of Untermensch. The reaction tended to produce one of two responses: the young person wanted nothing further to do with Exeter Labour Party - and many in the party were happy with that result. Or a relationship of hate developed and he or she threw everything into Briefing. That latter reaction was the basis of our strength.

Poverty of itself does not produce virtue; and only discipline and a sense of purpose can overcome the debilitating effects of the cold in winter, poor diet and exclusion from much of normal life. Why I was motivated enough to put in fourteen-hour days to what amounted to voluntary work remains a mystery to me even a quarter of a century later. At around ten my typical day started with a journey to Exeter University Library. Though I was no longer a student, I had no practical difficulty in getting in and was able to continue my studies in academic Marxism and much else in peace. In the late afternoon I visited comrades around the town raising funds, collecting articles and selling the publication; and most evenings there were meetings: of the Labour Party, Briefing itself or of associated groups, e.g. CND. For some reason the massive job of assembling Briefing for the press was always done through the night.

My own control of my limited money was crucial to my survival. My normal social security income was some twenty-seven pounds a week. I budgeted for two pounds a day with nearly all of that being spent on food, mostly vegetables and bread - and on those days when I had the money, a small piece of cheese and a chocolate bar. I spent nothing on heating or travel: I walked or hitched. Curiously enough I never bought second-hand clothes, so they were either in tatters or very occasionally new. The remainder was spent on political activity or saved.

Among us there was a camaraderie, mostly male, but not exclusively so. The women were either in relationships or more often were the partners of male activists. One girl, though, remained singularly aloof from the crowd. When and how she joined Briefing now escapes my memory. She lived alone in the most spartan of bedsits; her bed, covered with rags, took up most of the tiny room and on a small scratched and stained chest-of-drawers was some bread and a piece of cheese. She was different from the rest of us: she had been privately educated and was only eighteen years old. Seen as taciturn and as hard as nails, she fitted in with difficulty; and were I not entrusted with collecting her subs, I too might have passed her by. Yet sitting next to her that day on her bed, for there were no chairs in the room, I sensed that behind her intense penetrating green eyes, a gentleness.

A clear choice faced me: either try to learn something about her or else take the money and simply leave. I chose to listen to her and slowly she opened up. She had found the company of her overbearing mother intolerable and had chosen instead the poverty of bedsit land. Entitled to next to nothing on social welfare, she lived a hand-to-mouth existence utterly and completely alone. I too was alone. My arms went round her thin body and I kissed her. Her eyes continued to stare unmoved with a depth of pain that I could not reach. We moved apart and continued to talk, cordially and even in friendship, but with no intimacy.


Opinions within Exeter Labour Briefing

Briefing was never a monolithic body of people. Differences ran through the group: militant reformism commanded a majority, but there were attachments to other sets of ideas too. I will consider the three most important here: radical feminism, Trotskyism and anarchism.

Briefing had been set up by men, and it was unlikely in that age and in that milieu that women would have started the project. Nonetheless a significant minority of Briefing supporters were female, though they were never numerous enough to take control of the Exeter Labour Party’s women’s council even when it lay there for the taking. Most of the female supporters described themselves as feminists and most of the men supported them in most of their demands. Yet there was a clear dividing line between what can be defined as socialist feminism and fundamentalist feminism. The former focused on those processes in society, the Labour party and Briefing itself which discriminated against women. So in the spirit of the time, language was changed so as not to carry sexist connotations, thus the chairman was always a chairperson. Positive discrimination to boost the representation of women in leading positions was also supported; and the principle of the separate organisation of women, in addition to their general participation, was also endorsed. For the early 1980s Briefing was undoubtedly more progressive on feminist issues than the Exeter Labour Party, a situation which was unanimously applauded within the Briefing group.

A minority though was influenced by a fundamentalist feminism which saw the source of female disadvantage not in society in the fist instance, but in the sexuality of men. Male sexuality, the act of penetration in particular, was responsible for creating patriarchal power structures, detrimental to the interests of women. At its most extreme the organised political meeting and reasoned argument were seen as patriarchal inventions which should be abolished. This kind of dysfunctional political nihilism had much in common with the anarchism which I discuss below.

Trotskyism, curiously enough, did not impinge much on Briefing. In its manifestation in 1980s Britain, Trotskyism was associated with small groups of people, predominantly male, who shared a political analysis which all members of the group were required to propagate. Though Trotskyist groups differed on whether to participate in the Labour Party, and if they did for what purpose, they all maintained three unshakable positions: first the imposition of political uniformity on their members (democratic centralism); second, that only a disciplined party like themselves could lead the working class to socialism; and third, that the transition to socialism would require the forceful overthrow of the existing regime in Britain. These almost apocalyptic and religious-like views made them incomprehensible to most inside Exeter Labour Party, making them an exotic irrelevance.

Two Trotskyite groups had a marginal influence in Exeter. Inside the Labour party there were a handful of Militant Tendency supporters who might well have been the target for disciplinary action, had it not been for the presence of Briefing. We had very little dealings with this moronic collection of people, except in the sense that from time to time we found ourselves voting the same way. A branch of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party also existed in Exeter; for the most part they were concerned with their own internal debates, though later several of the activists in the WRP joined the Briefing group, but not the Labour Party. Trotskyism at best provided people with whom we could discuss politics and were important in that sense; or at worst they were irrelevant to everything that Briefing was doing.

At least Trotskyism, even if its adepts worked towards a totally unrealistic political agenda, could, in so far as they were involved the Labour Party, work to bolster the position of the left. That could not be said of the anarchist contingent who saw politics entirely differently. The guiding thread of many anarchists in Exeter was that the correct response to recession Thatcherism was to undermine, and if possible destroy, all political organisations by actions which were often illegal and usually anti-social. The only freedom worth having in their view was within a space created outside the law and routines of established society; decisions inside this disorderly collection of people were theoretically made by consensus in informal structures, but were in fact the dictats of a few charismatic and seemingly mentally ill people.

As a serious political programme ideas of this kind were an utter nonsense. However more than radical feminism or Trotskyism, anarchist sentiments were problematic for Briefing for two reasons. First a few of Exeter’s anarchists involved themselves in the Labour Party for a short while, but far more dangerously many anarchist ideas had a resonance inside the Briefing group among otherwise intelligent people.

Briefing’s association with anarchism acquired farcical dimensions in the so-called ceremonial chair incident. An ornate wooden ceremonial chair (The Freddie Tarr chair) adorned the main committee room at Clifton Hill and its allusion to authority had angered some of the Young Socialists who met once a month in the room. We were one of the few branches of the Young Socialists in those years not controlled by the Trotskyite Militant Tendency. The branch supported Briefing and sent two Briefing supporters to the GMC; I was chairman of Young Socialists but avoided sitting in the ceremonial chair.

After one meeting I was asked by a couple of people on the periphery of Briefing for the key to room as, they claimed, a pullover had been left in the room. Only after the key had been handed back did I realise something didn’t ring true. On returning to the meeting room I discovered that the chair had been removed.

My first thought was to separate myself and Briefing people from this incident. Quite obviously an expulsion from the party based on theft of party property would rest on sound ground; and indeed getting us expelled was precisely what the anarchists wished to bring about. I immediately reported the incident to the party leadership, who in turn notified the police. Although I refused to answer any police questions, I was nonetheless branded by the anarchists, and to some extent by the their sympathisers inside the Briefing group, as a police informer and scab. Though these attacks left me somewhat vulnerable for a while, in the end result was positive as clear water was created between us and the anarchist contingent.

Matters took an even more absurd development as it then turned out that the whole theft had been witnessed by a right-wing member of the General Management Committee. Immediately opposite the Labour Party headquarters in Clifton Hill was a town park. Unknown to me the park was a meeting place for gay men, and apparently this party member had been in a bush when the chair was unceremoniously dragged into the park before being taken away in a van. What actually happened to the chair is not clear; several anecdotal accounts speak of it being religiously burnt by the anarchist fraternity.

The incident ended with me being summoned to the Executive Committee, but on this occasion I was on the leadership’s side. Strangely, the committee members did not see the theft of the chair as seriously as I did. In my petty-bourgeois thinking the mindless theft and destruction of the property of another was an unforgivable sin, even if it belonged to Exeter Labour Party. For many on the executive it was a piece of horseplay. Perhaps they hated me so much that they even started to identify with the anarchists.


Avoiding violence

It is a tribute to both both Briefing and Exeter Labour Party that in the whole conflict not a single punch was ever thrown. Yet the hatred was such that violence always lay suppressed just below the surface. One associate of Briefing, who involved himself in the group but not in the Exeter Party on the grounds that he was active in another constituency Labour Party, once approached me with a novel proposition. He offered, if I thought it helpful, to put one particular member of the Exeter Labour Party in hospital for a while. He was not joking because I had witnessed his tactics being used elsewhere and I hated them, not just on the grounds of a moral prohibition against initiating violence, but in a belief that the end doesn’t so much justify the means, rather the end becomes contaminated by a rotten means. Declining his offer was not so much a self-sacrifice, but done in recognition that, even if I had supported violence, I could never have carried a majority of Briefing with me. Had our opponents ever used violence against us, no doubt the situation would have changed, but fortunately they never did.

The open structure of Briefing meant that these different strands of opinion discussed above could easily be accommodated. I never even thought of censoring different views but supported their articulation into articles in Briefing. In any event we could always out-write them. Typing and compiling Briefing was hard work and it tended to fall to me and a couple of other people to do the work. Most Briefing meetings were discussion groups which aired views but did not have to reach decisions. The only Briefing meetings which did have to come to clear conclusions were the pre-meeting meetings. These need explaining.


Working inside Exeter Labour Party

Soon after Briefing grew from a couple of people, it became obvious that some form of Briefing pre-meeting was required before branch and GMC meetings. Many Briefing supporters were young and politically inexperienced, so the bullying and bureaucratic procedures of the Labour Party were baffling and intimidating. Several functions were served by meeting up in a pub beforehand. We could discuss the issues and structure of the meeting on our own first, so people didn’t go in blind. We could check that everybody was there; a pre-meeting drink was quite an incentive to turn up. Also we could distribute our interventions in the meeting between us. As there were always some neutrals in meeting, we found it helpful not to be so obviously functioning as a group because individual arguments, rather than group chorus, were more effective in bringing neutrals over to our point of view.

As an organised force Briefing hit raw nerves in Exeter Labour Party and violated their comfort zones. Anger against us intensified as time went on. The intention of the right-wing was simple stop Briefing from publishing and/or rid the party of these irritating new young activists. In the early summer of 1984 the GMC asked the Executive to investigate Briefing and I and a third year university student were ‘summoned’ to the Executive Committee. Ours were two of the named editors of the magazine; the others had already left Exeter. The main accusation against us was that Exeter Labour Briefing could be confused as a Labour Party publication.

The official charge against us was plain silly. But when an organisation has insisted on an ‘official truth,’ the more absurd the belief, the more it is clung to. The truth was that not even a moron in hurry could have muddled Exeter Labour Briefing with an official Labour Party publication; it carried no Labour Party emblem and it spoke to not for the Labour Party. Yet, this absurd accusation also provided an escape route for us if we wanted it: if the name were changed, then the leadership of Exeter Labour Party would surely have no objection to it. And that was precisely what happened: we changed the name to Devon Labour Briefing.

The compromise of changing the name divided the leadership of Exeter Labour Party. One group led by Chester Long shouted loudly that the name was the never the issue, but it had only been adopted as a stick to beat us with. He wanted to proceed with expulsion whether we changed the name or not. A majority, though, were unhappy to take the heavy step of expulsion and saw the expulsion threat as an attempt to silence us, not take away our party cards. Long’s hand was also weakened by something else. While the issue was dragging on, Tony Benn from the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party had written to the leaders in Exeter stating with certainty that in his opinion were Exeter to proceed with an expulsion the national party would overturn it. And indeed in 1984 they would have done.

Changing the name also divided Briefing. Some argued, wrongly as it turned out, that defusing the conflict by changing the name would bring on board much of the supposed centre ground of the party. Others, including myself, felt we would avoid expulsion even if we kept the same name and if the dispute went up to London our profile would be enhanced. At the end of a packed sardine-can bedsit meeting, two decisions were made. One was to change the name of the publication to Devon Labour Briefing. The other was an obscure issue: to change the editorial from issue to issue rather than repeatedly reprinting the same political statement. On both issues I was part of the minority.

On that note Exeter Labour Briefing came to an end in the summer of 1984, merely a year after its launch. Altogether, it produced a mere five cheaply printed issues, but brought into existence a movement of people in one town in the south-west of England. Within the decade, Briefing in Exeter would fail and disappear, but first reincarnated as Devon Labour Briefing it would experience expansion beyond students and the young unemployed. It would contain more pages, involve more activists and have more money; two more expulsion attempts would be launched against its editors and writers. Yet the core of its political analysis would remain fundamentally unchanged as it first expanded and then fell apart.


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Adverbs and Adverbials

Adverbs are the most complicated part of speech to understand. All adverbs and adverbials modify other elements in sentences.

Adverbs and adverbials

Adverbs and adverbials are essentially the same thing. We use the term adverbial when referring to a group of words and adverb when talking about a single word. E.g.,

Yesterday, we saw Helen. ADVERB
The day before, we saw Helen. ADVERBIAL

In this text I shall use adverbial to cover both adverbs and adverbials.

Defining an adverbial

In grammar an adverbial is word or group of words (phrase, clause) which modifies or tells us something about the sentence, the verb, adjectives, prepositions or other adverbials. Look at the examples below:

Danny speaks well. (telling us more about the verb)
She is quite stupid. (telling us more about the adjective stupid)

Two levels of adverbials

Adverbials operate at two levels: those that are a sentence element, as in the example below:

Lorna ate breakfast yesterday. (SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT + ADVERBIAL)

and those that are contained within sentence elements, as in the following example,

A very tall man entered the shop. (SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT)

In the above example the adverbial is contained within the subject.

Types of adverbials which form sentence elements

Adverbials which form a sentence element in their own right fall into four classes

(i) adverbial complements: these are adverbials that render a sentence ungrammatical and meaningless if removed, e.g.

John is in the park.

(ii) adverbial adjuncts: these are part of the core meaning of the sentence, but if omitted still leave a meaningful sentence, e.g.

John helped me with my homework.

(iii) adverbial conjuncts: these link two sentences together.

John helped me. I was, therefore, able to do my homework.

(iv) adverbial disjuncts: these make comments on the of the meaning of the rest of the sentence.

Surprisingly, he passed all of his exams.

Types of adverbials which are within sentence elements

Adverbials within sentence elements fall into four classes:

(i) verb modifying:

He jumped up. (within the verb phrase)

(ii) adjective modifying:

A very heavy bag. (within a noun phrase)
He is rather ill. (within a predicate)

(iii) adverb modifying:

She ate her food exceedingly quickly. (within a sentence adverbial)

(iv) preposition modifying:

She sat very near the door. (within a sentence adverbial)


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A Police State?

Is Britain a police state? Well it depends what you mean by police state.

Britain has a vast and growing web of laws to restrict individual freedom and action by civic organisations. State surveillance is mushrooming. Police and other law enforcement agencies are inadequately held to account by political and judicial authorities, and within limits enjoy almost a free hand. Imprisonment and other sanctions are often unduly severe.

While Britain falls short of the standards expected in a liberal democracy, it is not a police state. First, it is still possible to form organisations and ‘speak out’ as my posting of this comment shows; and neither are the courts or political authorities under police control.

It’s better to use language carefully because when we actually live in a police state we will have cried wolf. Using the expression "police state" to describe what exists today devalues language. That may be no comfort to the increasing list of victims of state repression. Yet facts and emotions are separate things.


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Twitter criminals: useful idiots

The prosecution of writers of racial and gratuitously offensive comments is a cover for the British state in its attempt to stiffle free expression on the web.

At a moral level it is utterly impossible to defend people who gratuitously insult others – and make matters worse by adding racist abuse. For that reason many progressive people will remain silent when idiots like Liam Stacey are jailed for doing just that.

Yet we should stop and raise two issues: one a matter of principle, the other of policy.

As a matter of principle, no-one should face legal sanction merely because s/he has said something offensive. If you harass somebody, threaten them, blackmail them etc., then, yes, you commit a legitimate crime. But merely expressing an opinion, however obnoxious, should not in itself be a crime. That is an essential ingredient of free speech.

Let us ask a question about state policy. Why is the state so pro-active in clamping down on Twitter insults, when it cares so little about the economic well-being or political liberties of ordinary people in general?

It is far more credible to think that what motivates this kind of prosecution and the imposition of disproportionate punishment is a state strategy of intimidating free expression on the net. The claim to be fighting racism is the pretext.

Nothing makes that point more clearly than a case which came to light just as Stacey began his prison sentence; London police officers were recorded racially abusing a black suspect, yet the IPCC and CPS have dragged their feet and have so far declined to prosecute. The contrast with Stacey’s case could not be starker.(see details)

Twitter and similar technologies are highly effective means of communication for ordinary people, but they are also excellently tailored for state surveillance and manipulation of all who use them.