On 5 January Newcastle FRFI attended a Stop the War (STW) Coalition ‘emergency protest’ for Venezuela at Grey’s Monument.
The 50 attendees were subjected to speech after speech denouncing kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro as ‘authoritarian’, or claiming that he stole the elections, thereby amplifying bogus imperialist justifications for regime change. At the very same time Maduro was stood before a New York court hearing in shackles.
The demonstration was tightly controlled. The same day as it was announced, we contacted STW on multiple platforms to request an FRFI speaker. We received no response. We also invited them to our own Venezuela demonstration on 4 January and to use the open mic. Nobody from STW bothered to show up.
When we asked for a speaker at the demo, the compere, Tony Dowling from Counterfire, unilaterally refused. His justification: ‘you [FRFI] don’t support Stop The War’. When we pressed further, he cowered behind his posse, with ex-Labour councillor Shumel Rahman physically preventing us from getting anywhere near him to ask for an explanation.
The real reason was that we would defend Maduro and the Venezuelan government against the imperialist smears. This would been embarrassing for STW, as several of their lined-up speakers regurgitated the lies.
One such speaker was Jane Byrne, former Labour Councillor turned Your Party representative, who chaired the Newcastle Your Party regional assembly and addressed its conference. She read a speech off her phone, starting with: ‘I don’t think Maduro won the elections’, before labelling him ‘authoritarian’ and saying he’s not a socialist, unlike herself. Apparently in Britain voting for cuts budgets for six consecutive years as a Labour councillor makes one a socialist.
Despite being billed as an ‘emergency’ demo, it was held on the third day after the US attacks on Venezuela. STW Newcastle did nothing for the whole weekend and ignored FRFI’s demo on Sunday. Even then, they couldn’t be bothered to properly mobilise for their own demo: they didn’t bring any placards, flags, banners or materials about Venezuela, unless you count a blank piece of card with ‘US hands off Venezuela’ hastily scrawled on it, held by Mez Shah, one of the organisers. If it wasn’t for FRFI’s banner and placards, passers-by could have easily missed that it was a Venezuela demo. In fact, Counterfire was forced to use a picture of FRFI supporters holding our banner on their website because STW’s demo was such a sorry sight.
Because we were refused speaking rights and STW excluded anti-imperialists from the platform we had no choice but to heckle, exposing the speakers’ smears about the Maduro government for what they are – imperialist lies. The only young speaker was from the Revolutionary Communist Party, who had been granted speaking rights on the day and started by denouncing the lack of open mic.
Afterwards, FRFI held an open mic on our own sound system and exposed Stop the War’s sectarianism and their amplification of imperialist lies. FRFI Newcastle will continue organising practical work in solidarity with Venezuela. We will continue to invite Stop The War to attend and speak on our open mic, as we have done consistently on our own Venezuela demos during the last few months of increasing US aggression.
