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I have abandoned an earlier autobiography, that I was calling Transition, in order to write a different book, that is largely autobiographical but also a history of the world socialist revolution so far, called Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen? I have started publishing that book on the website www.revolutiondestroyed.net, and lessons of the book can be discussed on the ‘revolution-destroyed’ discussion forum. I have already included the most important points I made in Transition (which only covered my early life and the anti-poll tax movement) in Revolution Destroyed? so Transition is no longer accessible from this website.
I have recently written an overview of that book, which is the best fairly brief description of the most important aspects of my life so far, and how that relates to the issue of whether I have enabled or prevented a socialist revolution from taking place. You can read that overview by clicking here.
Some of you may prefer to read another fairly short autobiographical piece, which concentrates on my early life, that was previously on my socialist home page, so I have included it below.
Introducing myself
I was born in Withington Hospital, Manchester (England) in 1966. The name on my birth certificate was Stephen Kim Wallis, but my mum taught me to spell my name as Steven (a far more rational spelling) and that was the name on other important documents such as my passport. I changed my name by deed poll to Steve Wallis, the name I have been known as in my political life and most of my work life, since I may stand in elections and candidates’ full names appear on ballot papers.
I lived in the Withington area of Manchester from my birth until 1970. I can hardly remember anything of the first four years of my life, but our (black) neighbours had a daughter of about my age called Mariam and I played with her a lot; she was my first friend. She was in the same student hall of residence as me in Manchester, Wright Robinson Hall, a couple of decades later.
I lived in Täby near Stockholm (in Sweden), where I was educated in English and Maths by my mum, from 1970 to 1972. I went to school in Eynsham near Oxford (in England) until 1979, when I moved to Penarth near Cardiff (in Wales). I met Rhiannon Williams, the first serious love of my life, at Stanwell School in Penarth. Rhiannon is now somebody I particularly want to be in the revolutionary socialist band Red Day/Galaxia with me. I have not seen or spoken to her for over 20 years, but I have sent her quite a lot of messages via Friends Reunited in the last couple of years. I had my 40th birthday on Sunday the 14th of May, and invited Rhiannon along (and urged her to ring me even if she couldn’t come). However, I was locked up as a political prisoner two days before my birthday, and denied access to my mobile phone, so I don’t know if she tried to ring me on my birthday. A musical poem I have written, Couldn’t Wait Until Sunday, is about my time with Rhiannon and my attempt to meet up with her on that Sunday.
I was fortunate in having a very good education, despite always going to state schools which accepted people of all abilities, and I got an A in A-level Maths in 1983 and then equalled the school record with my A-level results in 1984 – three more As (in Computer Science, Physics and Pure Maths), and one B (in Applied Maths). Rhiannon performed badly at school, having to resit O-levels in 1983 and leaving to train as a nurse (eventually working in a GP’s practice in Bristol). In those days, O-level exams tended to be tests of memory far more than any sort of analysis, and I can understand why Rhiannon had difficulty. My memory was quite good but not brilliant, and reflected by my OK but unspectacular O-level results – four As (in Maths, Computer Studies, Physics and French), three Bs (in Chemistry, English Language and English Literature) and one C (in German). [GCSEs have replaced O-levels as exams normally taken at the age of 16. A* grades did not exist with O-levels.] I was really chuffed with my A in French due to the amount of learning required, but I have forgotten virtually all of it in the 24 years since to make space in my mind for far more important knowledge about the world, how it works and how to change it.
I liked and excelled at things that involved problem solving. Thus, I was good at Maths, and later became very good at computing. I learnt most of my computing at home, writing computer games, mostly in collaboration with my brother Sean. He did the graphics for most of them and wrote some of his own in BASIC (a language that was very easy to learn), with me providing the assembly language code (translated directly into the machine code the computer understands, vital for parts of the program where speed is particularly important) and writing compilers from BASIC to machine code. Before long, some of the games were sold commercially by Kuma Computers. They treated us very well, giving us royalties of 30% (which we split 50-50 irrespective of who had written which game) and lending us new machines to program on. However, we did not make a huge amount of money (I ended up with enough to put down a £10,000 deposit on a house in Moss Side) due to the fact that the best-selling computers at the time were based on 6502 machine code rather than Z-80 (6502 was really difficult to program in but built for speed) and also that Kuma did not market our games particularly well (instead concentrating on business and educational software) and stopped selling them altogether before one of the platforms we wrote for (MSX) really took off. MSX was the first computer platform in which different companies cooperated in producing compatible machines, like with PCs today. The MSX computers which we programmed on were limited to two colours per row of eight pixels (dots) and most games therefore had dreadful graphics, but this was improved soon afterwards (as I only found out recently when investigating MSX emulators to run our old games). However, my best games Fruity Frank and Buster Block had good graphics even on these very limited MSX machines (the former due to Sean’s expertise at art, the latter done by me and made possible because the graphics restriction is less of a problem with blocks). You can try out both MSX and Amstrad versions of these games on modern computers; to find out how, go to the Computer Games page on this website. Fortunately I did not get rich writing computer games, because that would have severely compromised my ability to lead the world socialist revolution!
I went to Manchester University in 1984, and got a BSc (a first) in Computing & Information Systems three years later. This was the software-only degree, which I transferred to from Computer Science after I completely failed to understand how transistors work in a hardware course I took in the first term. Computer Science at the time was half software and half hardware. The Information Systems aspect of my degree consisted entirely of a single course in my second year, during which I learnt how dreadful COBOL (the language virtually all commercial programs were written in at the time) was – it looked like English but was extremely longwinded and the rules of the language were ridiculously complicated. My first COBOL program, an extremely simple one of about 40 lines, generated about 20 errors!
Most programs in use today are written in Java or C++, which are both object-oriented languages – where an object sends a message to another object, which executes a piece of code dependent on the kind (class) the object is and then sends a reply (itself an object) back to the sender. However, those two languages are dreadful to program in compared to Smalltalk, which I learnt while studying for my PhD at Manchester University, because their syntax is very difficult to understand (whereas Smalltalk looks like English) and they are more restrictive in the code that can be written (in particular, pieces of code which may contain commands to return to the calling routine, known as “blocks” in Smalltalk, cannot be passed around as objects and integers of an arbitrary size are not compatible with small integers used for efficient arithmetic and bit-manipulation operations). My serious programming task was designing and implementing SDML, which stands for “Strictly Declarative Modelling Language” and combines object-oriented, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and simulation techniques declaratively (so that a model contains logical statements rather than commands with side effects). Java and C++ are supposedly built for speed, but a lot of my optimisation routines used blocks or bit-manipulation operations, so I could only have implemented them in Smalltalk.
I am planning to get a research job at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in Edinburgh in order to continue work on SDML (as well as FOOD and ROOK that I developed while doing my PhD). SDML has three main problems at present. Firstly, fetching information from a database is very slow in cases where none of the optimisations I have introduced apply. This would be best solved by linking up with a relational database (for which I think MySQL would be best – it is used by the free software I am using for the forum on my Revolutionary Platform Network website). Secondly, the logic behind the language is not always adhered to due to a bug in an extremely complicated backtracking routine that needs completely rewriting. Thirdly, it is implemented using a non-commercial version of Smalltalk which is limited to 512MB; I need to also implement it in the commercial version of Smalltalk which does not have this limitation. For more information about SDML, including how it can be used by conspiratorial organisations on both sides in the class struggle (the working class and big business) to model the world sufficiently to outmanoeuvre the other side, visit the SDML page on this website or the SDML discussion group.
I first got seriously involved in politics when the anti-poll tax campaign started up in Manchester and I was a member of Rusholme Anti-Poll Tax Union. No anti-poll tax union got off the ground in Moss Side where I lived, despite two public meetings, due to the lack of a good community spirit at the time. Drug gangs were very active in Moss Side and there were frequent shootings, some causing the loss of life, including that of 14-year old Benji Stanley at a bakery around the corner from where I lived (at 41 Albemarle Street) in a case of mistaken identity. Later on, community spirit massively improved in Moss Side and the drug gangs moved away to other areas (particularly Longsight) – largely due to a long-running but ultimately successful anti-deportation campaign that I was involved in. It was the Lashley Family Must Stay campaign, against that family’s threatened deportation to Barbados. That campaign, which took place against both Tory and New Labour governments, involved several demonstrations including a very large one through Moss Side at the start of the campaign, protestors blocking major roads during the rush hour on numerous occasions, pickets outside the family’s home on days that they were due to be taken to the airport to be deported, social events at Claremont Road Infants School where younger daughter Takita (who was born in this in) was educated, production of a benefit tape (with Claremont Road Infants School Choir singing a cover version of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” on one side and a track by the Abasindi Drummers and Dancers, with whom mother Lorraine Bartlett was involved, on the back) and an outdoor festival some regarded as better than the annual Moss Side Carnival. Takita was born in this country and threatened with deportation to a country she had never lived in; the Tories eventually decided that she could stay but the other three members of the family would have to return to Barbados – so much for “the party of the family”! Some (probably false) drug allegations about father Owen had appeared in the Barbados press; when I visited Barbados on holiday I discovered that people’s hands were chopped off for stealing so goodness knows what fate would have awaited Owen if he had been forced to return. The campaign ended in victory after an initiative of mine – invading a conference (for which exorbitant attendance fees were charged) mainly involving professionals in the deportation system, that took place at Owens Park, after a march from Moss Side to that student Hall of Residence.
I got involved in the anti-poll tax campaign shortly before a national demonstration against the poll tax, organised by the Trade Union Congress, that took place in Manchester at the time the poll tax was being introduced in Scotland, in 1989. I helped persuade people living in flats above shops on Wilmslow Road in Rusholme to put posters in their windows, so that passing marchers knew that they had support from local people. At about the same time, I went round my own street with “Pay No Poll Tax” posters and persuaded several people to put them up in their houses. The others didn’t stay up for that long, but I kept mine up throughout the campaign, which obviously informed residents that the local anti-poll tax activist lived in my house.
The Militant Tendency, a revolutionary socialist (Trotskyist) organisation, was still using the strategy of infiltration or “entrism” within the Labour Party in order to build a strong revolutionary current within the party which at some point could break away and lead a socialist revolution. Militant initiated and led the anti-poll tax campaign, and was serious about achieving victory (unlike the Socialist Workers Party who participated in the campaign with the main aim of recruitment). Militant did not call on people not to pay the poll tax and then abandon them; it defended them when threatened with the courts, bailiffs (called sheriff officers in Scotland), wage or benefit arrestment (although little action took place in workplaces since the potential penalties for taking strike action were judged too severe by workers) or imprisonment. Many Militant members in England and Wales went to jail for not paying the poll tax (including Terry Fields, the Labour MP for Liverpool Broadgreen). [Militant’s other MP, Dave Nellist, had the poll tax on one of his homes paid by the Sun (a right-wing rag owned by Rupert Murdoch purporting to be a newspaper, noted for its treatment of women as sex objects via its notorious pictures of topless models on page 3) but there were rumours within Militant that he had paid the poll tax on his other home himself.] Scottish law was and still is different, preventing Scottish people from being jailed for non-payment. However, Tommy Sheridan, the leader of the Scottish Anti-Poll Tax Federation, was jailed for attending a mass demonstration that prevented the first attempted warrant sale (of a non-payer’s goods on the street, intended to humiliate him or her). He ripped up the court order (interdict) forbidding him from participating in this demo and made a fiery speech in front of TV cameras, causing him to be given a six month jail sentence. While he was in jail, he stood in the general election for Scottish Militant Labour (as the Militant Tendency had become known when it left the Labour Party in its so-called “Scottish turn”) in Glasgow Pollok constituency and received 6287 votes, coming second to Labour. In the local elections a month later, he was elected from jail to Glasgow council.
The most memorable event of the campaign for most people, including myself, was the huge national demonstration in London on the 31st of March 1990 which ended with a riot in Trafalgar Square. There had already been a very small number of incidences of violence (blown out of all proportion by the media) on a few of the many protests that the anti-poll tax unions had organised outside the town halls across the country when they met to set the level of poll tax. I had seen the newspaper of the anarchist organisation Class War calling for violence at the start of the demonstration and thought that it was ominous. When the violence they were calling for happened, that organisation leapt at the chance of hitting the big time and claimed responsibility. However, Class War were not serious anarchists capable of leading a riot but ones who had previously established a niche for themselves in coming up with humorous headlines.
The Secretary of the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, Steve Nally, was interviewed on TV at the time of the riot and asked if the Federation would hold an investigation into the causes of the riot. The Fed obviously should have done and he said yes. However, when he was then asked whether the Fed would “name names”, he said yes! Informing on your fellow activists to the police is obviously a complete no-no within left-wing organisations; even if the riot had been started by an agent provocateur (an infiltrator on the side of big business within the anti-poll tax movement) then pointing out precisely who that person is would not achieve anything, except for causing a massive explosion of tensions within the movement. What is important is to establish and publicise the processes and important facts that were involved. Militant should have recognised Nally as the infiltrator on the side of big business that he was and expelled him, and the anti-poll tax unions should have elected a new All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation Secretary.
When it was revealed later that Class War were lying and that the police had started the riot, including in a TV documentary, both Class War and violent anarchism generally were virtually wiped out in Britain – until there was a sizeable influx of violent anarchists from other countries (including the Italian Black Bloc who had been infiltrated by 50 fascists at the time of the Genoa G8 summit that I attended in 2001) for the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005. The violence erupted at the latter summit on the 4th of July (two days before the summit started) in Edinburgh. I witnessed clashes with the police at the Carnival for Full Enjoyment in Edinburgh City Centre on that day and realised that I had to intervene. The way I thought of to try to defuse the situation was to take all my clothes off and join the demonstrators naked! I created a massive impact and helped ensure that the other side of what was in many ways an inspiring and humorous event was reported in the media. I even became a page 3 model!!! Well, sort of – a photograph of me naked (taken from behind) appeared on page 3 of the Metro free newspaper.
I used to be a very shy and nervous person (although few would guess that since I am extremely outgoing nowadays), but I gained a lot of confidence during the People’s March Against the Poll Tax. There were three legs, all ending in London with a mass demonstration; the other two started in Scotland and South Wales, but I was one of about 20 people who marched from Liverpool to London over a period of five weeks. There were lots of meetings and demonstrations on the way and I spoke at several of them. I found that, as long as I had made a list of the main points that I wanted to raise beforehand, that I could make an effective fluent speech. Nowadays I speak at meetings or conferences entirely without notes; I have never written out an entire speech beforehand, except at international events where you can pause between sentences for them to be translated. The People’s March has been virtually entirely neglected in histories of the anti-poll tax campaign, but the huge number of events across Britain when marchers on the three legs passed through ensured that non-payment was maintained through a difficult time in the aftermath of the riot.
I must point out that I met Steve Nally in London during the People’s March and he came across as a very genuine guy. There is a simple explanation for this – he was! As I realised while composing the text that you are now reading, Steve was radicalised by the furore over his interview and switched sides to the working class!
Many analysts of the anti-poll tax campaign have claimed that the riot was the main reason why the poll tax was defeated and Margaret Thatcher was removed from office. The reverse is the case – the riot (and the terrible way it was handled by Militant) was in danger of wrecking the mass non-payment campaign. Strategists on the side of big business had attempted to portray us all as violent thugs and thereby discourage non-payment. I have written four chapters on the anti-poll tax movement, including one on the People’s March, for my book Revolution Destroyed?, accessible on the internet by clicking here.
Scottish Militant Labour won a few more seats on Glasgow council and Strathclyde Regional Council. Obviously, gaining a few seats on your own is not sufficient; Militant recognised that it was necessary to be involved in broader organisations. The Labour Party was no longer seen as a vehicle for socialist change, so a new one needed to be set up. Socialist alliances were therefore established throughout Britain, a Militant initiative that drew in a few other organisations and some individual activists. However, the alliances were taken far less seriously by Militant in England and Wales than in Scotland (but not as badly in Greater Manchester as elsewhere partly due to my efforts), with activities generally conducted under the banner of Militant Labour rather than that of a socialist alliance.
At about the same time as the socialist alliances were set up, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill set up the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). However, its constitution was modelled on that of the Labour Party in order to keep Militant out. Tommy Sheridan attended a meeting to discuss the formation of the SLP and was encouraged to join the new party, but he refused point blank when told he would have to leave Scottish Militant Labour in order to do so. Scargill even resurrected the massively undemocratic block vote that had been abolished by Labour. At an SLP conference, an organisation of ex-mineworkers that had affiliated to the SLP outvoted everybody else at the conference put together, using the block vote! The SLP has been extremely sectarian to other left-wing groups and parties, portraying themselves alone as the party that will achieve socialism, and it is now thankfully completely irrelevant.
At the 1998 European School of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI, which links Militant, or the Socialist Party as it renamed itself in England and Wales, to similar organisations internationally), I was the only Socialist Party member to speak in the debate in support of the proposal by the leadership of Scottish Militant Labour to transform the Scottish Socialist Alliance into a party. I recently found a draft of the most important part of the speech I made at that European School, on prospects for a revival of left reformism (still relevant today), and I have put that on the internet here.
I set up a website calling for a worldwide general strike at the time of the next G8 summit in the run-up to the summit at Gleneagles (Scotland) in July 2005, and later proposed similar action for the summit in St Petersburg (Russia) between the 15th and 17th of July 2006. If a world socialist revolution is ever going to happen, which it will, the best opportunity for launching it is arguably at the time of a G8 summit because the eyes of the world are focused on one particular event at which vital issues such as poverty in the so-called Third World and global warming are discussed. For both those issues, world socialism is the only solution and capitalism can at best only alleviate their worst aspects. Indeed, many proposals put forward by Western leaders make the situation worse, such as enforced privatisation for poor countries as a condition for aid increases or debt alleviation. However, I am not currently convinced that there would be a mood for a worldwide general strike at the time of the next summit (in June 2007 in Germany).
The general strikes, demonstrations, occupations and blockades which took place in Bolivia in 2005 (led by trade union leader Evo Morales who towards the end of that year became the new Bolivian President with an unprecedented vote of over 50%) showed what can happen when that privatisation strategy is used by the representatives of big business. Therefore, Western strategists realise that they cannot continue with the privatisation strategy indefinitely and need to adopt measures which alleviate some of the problems that their policies inflict on poor countries but at the same time prevent working class people from fighting back.
I have realised that the most powerful techniques that our ruling classes can utilise are those which involve mind control, and suspect that they will attempt to “feed the world” (as Band Aid called on them to do in 1984 and again in 2004) with genetically modified (GM) food. Obviously, GM food and drink would not be produced on a mass scale unless capitalists realised the effects that it is likely to have on people’s (and animals’) brains. GM possibilities are infinite – big business is just limited by what computers can calculate. Of course, most sensible people would avoid GM products like the plague if they were labelled as such, so they are already being inflicted unknowingly on ordinary people throughout the world. For example, own brand dairy products available in every UK supermarket except for the Co-op and Marks & Spencer come from cows fed partly GM feed. Some anarchists united with several farmers’groups, including Farmers For Action (which had previously come to national prominence by leading the massively successful blockades against high fuel prices), to point this out in leaflets handed out outside Sainsbury’s supermarkets (as I found out at the 2004 Earth First! Gathering). Sainsbury’s was a particularly good target since they had made public statements against GM food in the past, and their largest shareholder and former boss Lord Sainsbury was until recently a New Labour minister. [It is of course a travesty of democracy that some ministers are in the unelected House of Lords; somebody so rich and dodgy would be unlikely to win an election!] I later saw an IndyMedia film about a blockade by anarchists outside a Sainsbury’s depot in the early hours of one morning. The direct action they employed involved protestors linking themselves together with metal bars, which made the police’s attempts to clear the way for lorries completely ineffective. At the end of the film, it was pointed out that every depot in the country was blockaded that morning, so there was no fresh milk in any Sainsbury’s supermarket when they opened. I noticed at about the same time I saw the film that Sainsbury’s had started stocking 2 litre cartons of Cravendale Milk, which only costs slightly more than their own brand milk and lasts much longer due to a different filtering system. The cartons did not specifically say that the milk is non-GM, but it did say that it was “natural”.
Training in the use of those metal bars and other information about how to carry out effective direct action is provided at Earth First! Gatherings, as well as debates on wide ranges of subjects. Most participants have vaguely anarchist rather than Marxist views, but they are very welcoming to genuine left-wing activists of all political persuasions. As mentioned above, until recently I called myself a revolutionary socialist (Marxist heavily influenced by anarchism); my main influence from an anarchist persuasion is Cath Bann.
Cath used to work for Greater Manchester & District Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). I also knew her through the Manchester-based Coalition Against Sanctions and War On Iraq (now known as the Iraq Solidarity Campaign) which I helped found and was heavily involved in until the Greater Manchester Coalition Against the War became the serious organisation campaigning in support of ordinary Iraqi people, as well as the ‘Riotous Assemblies’ (meetings mainly of anarchists) that Cath helped lead in Hulme (the anarchist stronghold of Manchester due to the large number of squatters who lived there before it was regenerated). Cath was my greatest ally in the period between my resignation from the Socialist Party in late 1998 (due to its failure to support the setting up of the Scottish Socialist Party and my desire to publicise infiltration by organisations on the side of big business within that party and other organisations in society to a wider audience) and her temporary move to Cornwall in March 2003.
Alongside her (possibly ex-) partner Nathan, Cath initiated Defy-ID, a campaign against ID cards promoting direct action techniques. They organised a discussion on the subject at a radical bookfair in Manchester towards the end of 2002, which inspired me to take up that issue based on my own experiences of harassment by the state, involving my incarceration as a political prisoner in psychiatric wards on many occasions since the summer of 1998. [My first incarceration happened shortly after the 1998 European School of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) at which I was the only member of the Socialist Party of England and Wales to speak from the platform in support of the proposals from the leadership of Scottish Militant Labour (which became the International Socialist Movement platform of the SSP and subsequently left the CWI) to support the setting up of the SSP. You can read a draft of part of my speech at that European School, on prospects for a revival of left reformism, by clicking here.] I handed out copies of a draft resolution, opposing ID cards on the basis that they would be used to increase the harassment of left-wing activists, at the conference of the Stop the War Coalition which planned the London demonstration of around one million people shortly before the start of the war on Iraq. I also handed out copies of (slightly different) draft resolutions at meetings of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association (IMUSA).
IMUSA was launched by Militant member Andy Walsh, who went to jail for not paying his poll tax, and I attended a packed launch meeting at which he and fellow Militant member Kevin Miles, who had already founded the Independent Newcastle United Supporters Association, spoke. Kevin went on to become a leader of the Football Supporters Association (FSA), which links together fans’ groups across England. I saw Kevin on the TV programme Newsnight defending football hooligans when he was representing the FSA during a World Cup or European Championship. IMUSA had already led the successful struggle to stop Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV from taking over the club and subsequently played a leading role in the Not For Sale Coalition against the takeover by Malcolm Glazer alongside Shareholders United (now the independent Manchester United supporters trust). I finally persuaded IMUSA to support defiance of ID card legislation, due to the possibility of the demand for such cards at football matches and its consequence for those who wish to attend the odd match using somebody else’s season ticket.
I set up a ‘manchester-united-fans’ discussion group in the run-up to Glazer’s takeover, which was the first group found by anybody searching for “Manchester United” at groups.yahoo.com at that crucial time – the search ordering was based on relevance and number of clicks, and many people must have been inspired by seeing the start of my description on searches for them to want to visit the group’s home page, but now groups are listed primarily according to number of members. At the same time, I set up an ‘fc-united’ discussion group to promote the idea of Manchester United fans opposed to the takeover launching a new club; this group also appeared in the top ten searches for “Manchester United”. I sent important messages on other subjects to these groups, including ones on my call for a worldwide general strike at the time of the G8 summit, as well as talking about football. “Manchester United” was undoubtedly one of the top searches made by anybody in the world at that site at the time, due to the massive worldwide fan base of the club, so my initiative of setting these groups up probably had the greatest effect of anything I did to promote the idea of a worldwide general strike. The decision by Vodafone to cancel their sponsorship of Manchester United must have been influenced by the boycott campaign launched by opponents of the takeover, including Shareholders United (now the independent Manchester United supporters trust (MUST) and IMUSA. The resulting FC United of Manchester team (which now has an official website and an unofficial fans website) had to start off in the lowly North West Counties League Division 2, but thousands of fans attended every match whether home or away and the team won the championship by a considerable margin in its first season (2005-6) and is on course to win promotion from Division 1 to the Northern Counties League this season (2006-7).
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is dominated (especially in its leadership) by infiltrators on the side of big business. The SWP promotes CND as well as the right-wing Muslim Association of Britain as co-leaders of demonstrations alongside the Stop the War Coalition that it leads and which does most of the work, because CND is a mainly middle class organisation of ageing activists due to the fact that nuclear disarmament has not been much of an issue for many years (but the situation has been rapidly changing with the debate over the renewal of Trident and the moves towards acquiring nuclear capabilities by the North Korean and Iranian regimes). This strategy of the SWP had the side effect of putting Cath in a very powerful position; she was the main contact person for transport from Greater Manchester to that huge London demo, and over 5,000 people travelled on our coaches and train to that demo.
I moved from Manchester to Glasgow in April 2006 because the latter city is the most important politically due to the strength of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). I intend to return to Manchester frequently and am retaining my membership of Respect and the Democratic Socialist Alliance (a small but important organisation I helped form out of the old Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform).
On the 3rd of September 2006, as a result of former SSP convenor Tommy Sheridan suing the News of the World for defamation (slightly different from libel in Scotland), Sheridan launched a new party called Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement. The SSP had united virtually all serious socialists within one party and the split is obviously unwelcome (especially with Solidarity’s plans to stand against the SSP in very important Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2007), but it has had the very positive side effect of bringing many infiltrators on the side of big business (particularly the Socialist Worker platform) out of the SSP. I joined Solidarity at its launch rally, while retaining my membership of the SSP, in order to influence it in a positive direction (but had to let my Solidarity membership lapse to stay in the SSP due to a resolution passed at the SSP’s October conference). For more information about the Tommy Sheridan trial and the SSP split, go to my web page on socialist organisations.
