Notts Trades Council and its allies have come out fighting – not against local council cuts, or against racism, or indeed in support of Palestine, but against what is clearly a far more important target – the Revolutionary Communist Group and FRFI.
At a hastily-organised meeting on 5 May, speakers fulminated against our comrades’ heckling of their much-feted main speaker, ‘left’ Labour MP Nadia Whittome, at the local May Day demonstration three days earlier. There was no shortage of angry participants in the meeting – they were going to write a letter, they were going to demand an apology, they were going to publish videos of battered stewards and terrified children, they were going to exclude us from future May Day events.
All in all, it was a clarion call for the official labour movement to spring into action, and to preserve its dignity against a group which had called out Whittome for what she is – an apologist for the genocide in Gaza by remaining a member and MP for the Labour Party. A perfectly reasonable suggestion to the meeting from Women against the Far Right that things could have been resolved by allowing us to speak from the platform was laughed out of court. A photographer at the meeting advised against publishing any footage of a steward being supposedly injured in the May Day scuffle – it did not paint the steward in a good light.
Socialist Party representative Gary Freeman was not satisfied at all: he wanted to go further and ban not just the RCG but the solidarity organisation People for Palestine as well as they could not be trusted (probably because the Socialist Party calls for a socialist democratic Israel – ie a democratic colonial-settler state); the SWP’s Richard Buckwell muttered obscurely about Germany and the divisions in fighting fascism in the 1930s.
All this stemmed from a May Day protest on 2 May that attracted no more than around 50 participants – the lowest May Day attendance ever. Yet the diminishing ability of the trade unions to mobilise the Nottingham working class was not on the agenda. Freeman surreally went on to say that the trades council should encourage people to approach RCG stalls and shout at them that the RCG are ‘wreckers of the labour movement’ – he and his allies have already wrecked it without any difficulty.
Our comrades, obviously banned from speaking from the May Day platform because the massed ranks of the official movement knew we would condemn the reactionary Labour Party, had challenged Whittome over her continued membership of the Labour Party. Immediately they were set about by stewards, one of them a former prison screw, who tried to wrestle a young black comrade to the ground. The tussle went on for several minutes. Whittome is a representative of this racist, genocidal anti-working class party and imagines she should never be held accountable because she can occasionally make some radical speeches and even express charitable concern for refugees and the Palestinian people. But these sentiments are meaningless while she remains a member of the pro-genocide, racist Labour Party.
A report to the 5 May meeting claimed we had falsely accused Whittome ‘of being an apologist for genocide in Palestine, using “guilt by association” with the Labour Party to justify the accusation.’ This is utterly dishonest: she is not ‘associated’ with the Labour Party, she is a member, and not just any member, but a parliamentary representative for the party. People are tired of semantic tricks whereby supposed left MPs can be excused their continued Labour Party membership by weasel words such as these.
However hypocritical Whittome may be, she is outdone by those to her left, the self-styled ‘revolutionary socialists’ whose job is to provide a left cover for the rotten representatives of the Labour left, praising any radical sentiment however insignificant, promoting their importance for the working class, and of course protecting them from any criticism and especially the unseemly behaviour of communists.
This episode is illustrative of the utter bankruptcy of both the official labour movement and the left who so cravenly defend it.
