The most important web page you will ever read

By Steve Wallis (www.stevewallis.org)

 

Note: This web page is so important, and censorship of the internet is so intense, that many people will have difficulty accessing it. Therefore, I advise you to print out copies of the page and hand them to your friends and relatives.

 

Note 2: I edited this web page between the 8th and 14th of July 2003, as a compromise with my psychiatrists. This was a necessary step, to enable me to have access to my laptop again and be given unescorted leave at some point in the near future. The original web page had some specific allegations about other psychiatric patients which my psychiatrists said were unacceptable for me to put on the web. In particular, I accused three patients of criminal activities, specifically attempted rape, theft and drug dealing. None of those three patients are on my ward any more so I no longer consider it essential to publicise as many details about them. I also put some suspicions of another patient, who is still on my ward, about him being a robot, due to some extremely repetitive behaviour that he exhibited. Two other patients who I have met on a different ward exhibited similar repetitive behaviour, so I think that there are a number of beings in society who look like people but are really robotic. I believe that there are a large number of cover-ups in science, and that the fields of biotechnology and robotics have been developed sufficiently to enable robots to be made out of flesh and blood and to give them sufficiently complex behaviour which enables them to mingle in society.

Note 3 (made on the 24th of June): This page is in need of an update, since I know of a few things are wrong. I have edited it today to correct my email address, but it is otherwise unchanged.

 

Like all other Marxists, I believe that there is a continuous conflict between the two key classes – big business and the working class – underneath the surface of society. My views, however, go beyond classical Marxist theory by recognising that secretive conspiratorial organisations are dominant in society, and that these organisations (on both sides) use computer modelling in order to try to out-manoeuvre the conspiratorial organisations of the other side.

 

I am involved in the struggle for a world socialist revolution. Revolutions cannot be achieved solely by conspiracies – they need the active involvement of the masses in society. However, conspiratorial organisations of big business such as the official ‘secret services’ (e.g. MI5, MI6, the FBI and CIA) and far more powerful ones that recruit from such organisations that few people have ever heard of (the most well known of which is the ‘Illuminati’) are capable of stopping revolutions from taking place. Big business is not all powerful of course – working class people have set up conspiratorial organisations of our own to neutralise the effects of those of big business and therefore enable revolutions to take place.

 

I have actually been a member of a fairly secretive infiltrating conspiratorial organisation. Many of you reading this web page will have heard of it. It was known as the Militant Tendency and it infiltrated the Labour Party to try to turn it into a genuine socialist party that truly represented working class people. In Liverpool in the mid-1980s, Militant led the Labour council’s defiance of the Tories. In the first year, the council achieved a partial victory, gaining more resources for local services, which was then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s first defeat. Her second and final defeat was by the mass non-payment campaign which defeated the poll tax – I joined Militant during that struggle in June 1990, when I had become convinced that it was serious. If Militant could lead a campaign mobilising about 14 million people (over 18 million at its height) then it could also mobilise working class people in a revolution.

 

It is part of the remit of organisations like MI5 to target subversive organisations, and Militant was definitely subversive! Therefore they, and more secret conspiratorial organisations, infiltrated Militant to try to undermine it from within. Militant made two huge mistakes, and these were both in my opinion a consequence of infiltration. The first was in Liverpool – sending out redundancy notices to the entire workforce supposedly as a delaying tactic. The second was during the anti-poll tax campaign, when leading member Steve Nally said on national TV after the riot in Trafalgar Square on the 31st of March 1990 that the Anti-Poll Tax Federation would “name names”. Instead of expelling Steve, as it should have done, Militant defended him saying he had meant that names would be named within the anti-poll tax movement and not to the police. Obviously, for such a massive campaign, the police would have had no difficulty in finding out the names if they were named within the movement! Of course the naming of names did not happen, but this one blunder put Militant on the defensive at the very time when it could have recruited many thousands of people.

 

After Militant’s defeat in the Labour Party, Labour swung rapidly to the right and it transformed itself into a party representing big business. As a result of the ongoing transition and the success that Militant was having in campaigns outside Labour such as on the issue of the poll tax, Militant left the Labour Party, firstly in Scotland to become Scottish Militant Labour, and later in England and Wales to become Militant Labour. Militant Labour later became the Socialist Party.

 

Infiltration does not have to be secret – it can be done openly, as when Scottish Militant Labour united with other socialists to form the Scottish Socialist Alliance. Gradually, organisations that had previously competed with each other gained each other’s trust, and the Alliance attracted the support of a new layer of workers and youth, and the Alliance was converted into the Scottish Socialist Party. The individual organisations did not disappear however; they became ‘platforms’ of the new party. Scottish Militant Labour became the International Socialist Movement, and due to the reputation of the organisation’s members, it holds most of the leading positions within the party.

 

Socialists in England and Wales attempted to emulate Scotland’s lead, but unfortunately the Socialist Alliance down here is dominated by the Socialist Workers Party which is using the Alliance as a reformist electoral front. The Socialist Alliance should stand unequivocally for the overthrow of this iniquitous capitalist system but instead merely campaigns on reformist slogans like “Tax the rich”. This fails to impress the working class because it is obvious that the problems of capitalism are so severe that they cannot be solved by taxing the rich more – what is needed is to take the wealth out of their hands! Furthermore, reformism cannot work because reforms granted in a period of boom will be taken back in a period of slump. We need a revolution!

 

I resigned from the Socialist Party in the autumn of 1998, since the infiltrators on the side of big business had become the dominant force within the party, and I wanted to expose this fact outside the party. It had shrunk from about 8,000 at its height in the mid-1980s to several hundred activists, so obviously the enemy within had gained in strength proportionately. The infiltrators ensured that the Socialist Party opposed the setting up of the Scottish Socialist Party and abandoned the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales. In the summer before I resigned, I was the only comrade from England or Wales at a conference of the international organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated, the Committee for a Workers’ International, to speak from the platform in support of the setting up of the Scottish Socialist Party.

 

The Socialist Alliance is now unfortunately dead in most areas, due to the betrayals of the Socialist Workers Party (in which big business infiltrators are dominant), gaining pathetic votes at elections and doing very little as far as campaigning is concerned. What is now needed in England and Wales is what the Socialist Party advocates – for trade union activists to get organised and force the unions to set up a new mass workers’ party.

 

Many people don’t regard themselves as ‘socialists’ since they think that greed would prevent socialism from working. I have long realised that the whole idea of a moneyless stateless society, in which no crime exists and everybody can consume and work as much or as little as they like, never will be achieved. In these days of environmental shortages, it is obvious that that wouldn’t work. Furthermore, there would still be rivalries over love, and crimes such as murder and rape may continue to exist. Whereas the originator of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, was obviously genuine, I have felt for quite a long time that his closest collaborator Friedrich Engels was a conscious agent of big business – and therefore I now think that it was Engels’ influence that persuaded Marx to advocate ‘communism’ as the final state of humankind after years of socialism.

 

It is obvious if you think about it that Engels was acting against the interests of the working class – the forces of big business in England would obviously have assassinated Marx if they didn’t think that they could control him via Engels. Anybody who examines the history of the world in detail knows that the forces of big business do sometimes assassinate people who they regard as big threats – such as the German Marxist Rosa Luxembourg, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Princess Diana (it is no accident that the sole survivor of the car crash that killed Diana and Dodi Fayed is an ex-MI5 agent – obviously many people who have retired from MI5 have gone on to more important jobs for the forces of big business rather than decided to have an easy life).

 

Engels is not the only famous person who I regard as being an agent of big business masquerading as a Marxist. I now also realise that both the main leaders of the Russian Revolution in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, were also agents of big business. Both of these traitors supported the abolition of the Constituent Assembly because the Bolsheviks (forerunners of the Communist Party) lost the election to the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries because peasants massively outnumbered workers in Russia at the time. They argued that the ‘soviets’ (committees based largely on workplaces) were more democratic than representatives based on constituencies, despite the fact that this gave a minority (workers) more power than a majority (peasants). No wonder that ‘communists’ and ‘socialists’ have been regarded by many as ‘undemocratic’ ever since! The result has been over 85 years of world capitalism – you cannot get much bigger traitors to the working class than that!

 

The argument that Trotsky made in his extremely long and turgid two-volume ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ was that the Social Revolutionaries would have sold out to big business and there would have been a massive amount of repression of the Bolsheviks. This argument is frankly absurd – a working class that is strong enough to lead a revolution would not be so weak as to be unable to resist repression by the police or army a matter of months later! Many of the elected Social Revolutionaries would indeed have sold out, because the large landowners had a disproportionate amount of influence within the peasantry, but the democratic and effective thing to do would have been to let them prove themselves agents of big business in practice and then launch another revolution to overthrow them.

 

Nowadays, it is accepted by most people that proportional representation (PR) is the most democratic way of electing your government – so that you get roughly the same proportion of members of parliament for a particular political party as the party gets votes. The New Labour and Tory parties are partly opposed to PR because they don’t want to see the third place Liberal Democrats (who used to be a centre party but are now slightly to the left of Labour on most issues) gaining influence – but the most serious thinkers of big business are worried about the real threat: new workers’ parties to the left of Labour getting off the ground. PR has enabled the Scottish Socialist Party to gain six seats in the Scottish Parliament, and they would not have gained any seats at all using the ‘first past the post’ system whereby one representative is elected per constituency.

 

The fact that I have discarded workplace-based committees as the form of government under socialism does not mean that such committees wouldn’t have a vital role to play. The soviets in Russia had some good points, including having elected managers rather than managers appointed from on high, representatives subject to recall so that they could be replaced if they sold out rather than allowing them to betray the workers for a further few years in office, and democratic decision-making involving the whole workforce on matters of particular importance while allowing the elected representatives make day-to-day decisions. Of course, present-day committees should be better than soviets as they existed in Russia – a form of PR should be used within the workplace to try to ensure that the committees are representative, and overall leaders in an industry should be elected by conferences rather than just by lower-level committees. Of course, you need representatives of service users and workers as a whole as well as workers in the particular industry in positions of power, and these representatives should be elected as openly and democratically as possible rather than simply appointed like in present-day quangos.

 

It is largely a myth that we are living in a democracy in Britain. Elections every five years (or more frequently if the party in power judges that it will stand a better chance by calling earlier elections) are not particularly democratic – if would be far better if they were held once a year and MPs who sold out in the meantime could be replaced via by-elections (triggered by petitions signed by some proportion of the electorate).

 

It is not up to me to spell out exactly how socialism will work – the rough structures will be formed in the heat of the struggle as the best way of combating capitalism, and it will be up to ordinary people to democratically decide how they want to reform such structures to best fit the new society.

 

If I said that I’d been incarcerated for my political beliefs for large parts of the last five years, given mind-altering drugs against my will and had kangaroo courts entirely made up of appointees of the establishment as my only form of recourse, then you’d imagine that I’d be living under a dictator like Lenin or Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Pinochet in Chile, Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the present day Saudi Royal Family backed by the West. In fact, I have been incarcerated solely in Britain (with the exception of a brief stay in Barcelona as a result of mass anti-capitalist protests there) and the dictator in question is Tony Blair.

 

It is a common misconception that torture does not take place in Britain. As a result of my recent exploits (going AWOL to help the Scottish Socialist Party leap forward from one seat to six in the elections to the Scottish Parliament), I was in fact tortured by the Glasgow police. The instruments of torture were the metal handcuffs that are supposed to be used for restraint. However, if that was their real purpose they’d be made out of rubber. In the police van in which I was travelling, there was one police officer holding each of my handcuffs. If I said anything too important, the psychopathic police officer holding my right handcuff would twist it to inflict severe pain.

 

The most important example of this was when I sang my version of the Internationale – the international song of the working class. It goes like this:

 

Arise ye starvlings from your slumbers,

Servile masses arise arise,

We’ll change forthwith the whole conditions,

And spurn the dust to win the prize.

Then comrades come rally,

And the final fight let us face,

L’Internaçionalé unite la classe travailleurs

 

The official lyrics end “The Internationale unites the human race” which is a big mistake – we mustn’t unite with fascists or Tories and must unite with good animals and birds. Therefore, correcting that mistake by saying that “The Internationale unites the working class” (in French – the Internationale is supposed to be an international song so why not?) is a massively powerful statement. As a result, the most vicious twist of a handcuff during all my experiences of the ‘boys in blue’ over the years came when I said the final line of the Internationale in a Glasgow police van.

 

However, the torture did not put me off. Fortunately, having broken my ankle getting onto a train between Shrewsbury and Manchester several years ago I had known much greater agony.

 

I have met many interesting people during my time in psychiatric wards over the last five years. The best of these people politically have generally been attractive young women. This is because women are more exploited in society than men (the discrimination women face in the workplace is obvious whenever you see comparisons between pay rates of men and women) and younger women are less likely to have well-paid jobs or high levels of savings. Furthermore, in order to have a genuine rapport with people, especially of the opposite sex, you need to have genuine feelings of love for each other – these feelings do not have to be sexual but if you don’t love each other then it is a short step to not caring if the other person lives or dies. Since attractive people can achieve a genuine rapport with more people, they tend to be better politically.

 

As time has gone on, the forces of the working class have got stronger in relation to those of big business. This shift to the left in society is obvious when you consider the massive sizes of the demonstrations against the recent war on Iraq. Therefore, people who I have met more recently have tended to be better politically than people who I met a long time ago.

 

The nurse who I have got on best with in about five years of incarceration in psychiatric wards is an attractive young Asian bank nurse (i.e. a nurse who works for an agency rather than one who is directly employed by the NHS) who I met during my stay on Nelson Ward (next to my current ward, Brook Ward, at the Edale Unit of Manchester Royal Infirmary) last year. I am in email contact with her and may see her soon, so I will ask if she minds me including her name on this web page.

 

The second most discriminated against section of society is disabled people – about 50% of them are unemployed. However, by far the most discriminated against section of society is former psychiatric patients.

 

We are discriminated against whenever we apply for a decent job, having to provide details of our medical history, and large numbers of employers perfectly legally use somebody’s mental instability as grounds for refusing a job application.

 

We are discriminated against if we want to drive a car, since you are supposed to have to fulfil several criteria before being allowed to drive again after leaving hospital – and a bureaucrat at the DVLA, who corresponds with your psychiatrists, has to approve your driving licence for driving to be legal. I was told that it would take about a year before I was able to drive again, but I have since found out that the official period is three months of stable behaviour. Many psychiatric patients are not told about these aspects of the law and drive illegally after discharge.

 

We are also discriminated against if we want to get travel insurance – I had to search the internet for quite a while before I found an insurance company that would guarantee to insure me at all without me having to provide details of my medical history, and of course none of them would cover pre-existing conditions. If you travelled to a country like the USA, which has a minimal welfare state, and you had a relapse then you would be left to suffer on the street. Obviously, being a political prisoner, that would not be a consideration of mine – the reason I would not consider a journey to that hotbed of capitalism this side of a world socialist revolution is that it would not be safe – the serious forces of big business now know that they cannot control me, so I would probably be assassinated when over there, if indeed the aeroplane did not blow up en route.

 

The best psychiatric patient politically who I have met in my five years of incarceration was an attractive 18-year old woman who I will call Anna on this web page. I have been advised by one of my psychiatrists to remove Anna’s real name and details that would enable other people to identify her until/unless she gives me permission to identify her publicly. I recall telling Anna that I would put material about her on the internet, and she did not object at the time, but she may have had second thoughts and may no longer want to play such an important role in the world socialist revolution that would bring her into the public eye. If Anna contacts me and gives me permission, I will modify this web page accordingly.

 

The fact that Anna has already endured so much during her short life entails that she is a very strong person (both at karate and emotionally). It is obvious when you see Anna that she has been through extreme mental trauma, because she has inflicted on herself a large number of cuts on her body. She told me that this was due to ‘thoughts’ in her head telling her to do it – obviously for somebody as brilliant as Anna this was not due to her brain malfunctioning; it was due to such thoughts being broadcast into her mind by the forces of big business (the Nazis experimented with such techniques so it would be extremely naïve to think that technology has not reached such a stage where that is possible).

 

Anna also recently stepped out in front of a moving car and broke her elbow. When she first told me that, I thought that she had been attempting to commit suicide – however I later guessed correctly that the car had not been moving that fast. I told Anna that this reckless move of hers was very fortunate – if she plays the sort of revolutionary role that she wanted to play, she will probably face torture at the hands of the police at some point in the future and she will now be able to endure it just as I have done.

 

When two important revolutionaries try to get together, the forces of big business try very hard to keep us apart. Their main agent of big business who tried to separate Anna and me was a violent alcoholic, who attempted (extremely unsubtly) to win her over romantically and (in my opinion) came close to raping her, but I was on guard to stop this from happening.

 

I have found over the years that when I have been at my loudest and most serious, that I have been victimised by vicious members of staff. The occasion on which I protected Anna from potential harm was no exception – I was held down and forcibly injected with Lorazepam and Haloperidol.

 

Lorazepam is one of the worst drugs prescribed by the NHS – it is used as a sedative and generally given alongside the anti-psychotic drug Haloperidol. When I last went AWOL to go up to Glasgow, I was arrested and taken to Aberdeen (supposedly because it was the only place in the whole of Scotland with a psychiatric bed but obviously it was because it is the most right-wing city in Scotland). I was held as a hostage there for a few days, prevented from leaving my room with the guards on my door and the one opposite yabberring virtually constantly. I had no radio and the only way I could occupy my time was by reading a book. However, the Lorazepam I was forced to take made the words from one line of the book merge with words on other lines – I had to continually move the book around and refocus in order to get any reading done at all.

 

Despite the fact that I was incarcerated in Aberdeen for over five days, with no other way to occupy my time, I only managed to get about three-quarters of the way through a single book. The book happened to be the most important one ever written – “Foundation’s Edge” by Isaac Asimov.

 

Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy (“Foundation”, “Foundation and Empire” and “Second Foundation”) was based around the science of “psychohistory” invented by a “mathematician” called Hari Seldon – using psychological analysis to model the past and present in order to predict the future. In the trilogy, Seldon established two conspiratorial organisations called “Foundations”, one fairly open and the other extremely secret. The very secretive Second Foundation used mind reading and mind control powers to ensure that the “Seldon plan” for a revolution in the galaxy was adhered to.

 

The original trilogy had quite a right-wing plot – to establish a new “empire” to replace the existing crumbling galactic empire rather than a socialist society. However, this was not because Asimov was right-wing in those days (in my opinion) – it was to enable the trilogy to get past the capitalist censors at the companies that published the science fiction magazine in which the series first appeared, and later the books and even the BBC, which recorded the trilogy as a radio series. Earlier this year, I bought the radio series compressed onto a single CD for use on a computer, via the “ebay” auction site on the internet. Listening to the radio series reminded me of another way in which Asimov got around the censors – every significant character apart from one was male.

 

I once read on the internet that it was the fact that Asimov realised that the original ending was fascistic – with an elite with mind control powers in control of the new empire – that prompted him to write additional novels in the series, particularly the brilliant “Foundation’s Edge” and the not quite so important final one in the series called “Foundation and Earth”. The ending of the latter two novels is one in which an extremely cooperative society with extreme harmony with nature (on the planet “Gaia”, and called “Galaxia” when extended to the whole galaxy) reigns supreme. In “Foundation and Earth” the reason for this is finally revealed – it enables the human-run galaxy to defend itself from hostile aliens who may try invading from other galaxies in the future. As I have said above, such an extreme communist society is not achievable (and would not be as desirable as a genuine socialist society in any case) but the left-wing future of the galaxy at the end of the extended Foundation series is extremely significant.

 

I had bought that copy of “Foundation’s Edge” at the Waterstones bookshop in the centre of Glasgow when I previously went AWOL there (in the run-up to the vitally important Scottish Parliamentary elections) despite the fact that I had another copy of the same novel at my flat in Manchester. It was obvious when I compared the blurb on the back cover with the plot in the novel that conspiracies were at work to get round publishing censors – the back cover said that the main characters went to Trantor (which is the planet on which the Second Foundation was located) when they never landed on that planet but instead went towards Gaia. Also significantly, there were two points late on in the novel where the justification rules of normal text were broken – where words or series of words of about ten characters were obviously removed after the book had been typeset. Therefore, you have to be careful when buying “Foundation’s Edge” – working class people generally don’t buy hardback versions so avoid them, and buy your copy from a reputable bookstore (in Britain, I recommend Waterstones or WHSmith). In particular, avoid the biggest bookstore on the internet – Amazon – because I bought a book supposedly written by Asimov called “Magic” from Amazon which obviously wasn’t written by him since it is so dreadful. The new book I bought was produced by a company called ‘Voyager’, whereas the old copy that was at my flat (produced when Asimov was still alive) was produced by ‘Granada’ – it seems the same, but I have not been able to compare them word for word and the blurb/justification conspiracies are not present in the original.

 

Anna received an appalling education earlier in her life (she got Cs and Ds at the GCSEs she took at the age of 16) but when she finally studied computer programming she proved that she is extremely clever by getting 98%. She also told me that she has read a hell of a lot – I beat her in Scrabble but she put down three words that I hadn’t heard of. This prompted me to give Anna my new copy of “Foundation’s Edge”.

 

In any sane society, the attempted attack on Anna would have resulted in the perpetrator getting punished. But he was still on the ward weeks after the incident taking place! This is because he was acting as such as strong counterweight to me here that there were big vested interests involved in letting him get away with it. I made strong verbal efforts to get him shifted down to Oxford Ward – a lock-up ward downstairs – and was finally told that if anybody would be moved it would be Anna! I was then told the justification – it was in my notes that I had been found “canoodling” with Anna. In fact, I had been discussing with her until 4am, and the most physical contact we had was when I kissed her on the hand. Fortunately the alleged attempted attacker has finally been discharged.

 

There is not just corruption in this NHS Trust; there is also an extremely high level of corruption in the police force. Shortly after it happened, I encountered a police officer on the ward and told him that I had stopped the attempted rape of Anna. He told me that he was too busy – maybe, but a genuine police officer would have taken down my details and arranged for further officers to investigate.

 

After the attempted rape incident, Anna was not of course so stupid as to risk another night on the ward. She was an informal patient (not sectioned under the Mental Health Act unlike myself) so she left the ward the next day, supposedly to return at 6pm, and failed to turn up. I have since heard from ward staff that she is doing fine and is now discharged. That is of course good news, but it’s not good news that the actions of the forces of big business have temporarily split us up. So please, Anna, if you read this, get in touch by emailing me at socialiststeve@yahoo.co.uk. I think that you are one of the three key revolutionary socialists on the planet, alongside Cath Bann (currently in France, presumably Paris) and myself, so it would be far better for the world socialist revolution if we are regularly communicating and seeing each other from time to time in Manchester and Glasgow (where I’ll be living semi-permanently when I’m discharged). Besides, I sincerely care about you.

 

Although I regard Glasgow as more important due to the strength of socialism there, Manchester is still a vital city on the planet. I think socialism will be established in Scotland first, but it will need to rapidly spread across the rest of Britain and the world, because (especially in these days of globalisation) socialism must be international in order to survive for long. I have lived in Manchester since 1984, and have been seriously involved in politics since 1989, so I should have a fair idea of who will play the most important roles in leading the revolution in Manchester. Amongst people I know in Manchester who are not already involved in left-wing organisations, I think that Anna and the Asian bank nurse who I referred to above are the best politically. The best people I know in Manchester who are already playing important roles are Jo Bird (she recently travelled to Palestine to help defend Palestinians being attacked by Israeli troops, despite the recent murder of a similar American activist and a Manchester University student ending in a coma after doing similar things), Linda Moulsdale (the UNISON convenor at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the tiny ultra-left group Workers Power), Burhan and Sabrina (involved in the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, a fairly secretive organisation that brings socialist exiles from Iraq together) and Ivan Bonsell (who I have long regarded as my best friend and is now in the Socialist Party).

 

In April, I had two periods of two consecutive nights leave per week, and I decided to use that opportunity to go AWOL up to Glasgow – partly to escape somebody on Grafton Ward who I suspected of stealing my mobile phone and who had issued death threats against me; partly because my consultant psychiatrist had refused to extend my leave that fortnight on the spurious grounds that a psychologist had not got round to having a discussion with me (!); but mainly because there was a vitally important Scottish parliamentary election campaign going on. I spent three days in Glasgow, before I was captured by the police and incarcerated in Glasgow’s Gartnavel Royal Hospital. I was away from Manchester for two weeks, but incredibly the suspected thief was still on the ward when I returned, despite me putting a lot of incriminating evidence in a letter to the ward manager and having had two witnesses (nurses on Nelson Ward) to the death threats! I had crossed swords with the Grafton Ward manager before – he incredibly advised me to write to the “Corporate Services Manager” when I needed a change of psychiatrist! I therefore knew that the ward manager was dodgy, but it was not obvious how corrupt he was until he completely failed to do anything about the suspected thief in a whole fortnight.

 

When I have gone AWOL in recent months, I have usually gone to or intended to go to Glasgow. This is because Glasgow is where socialism is strongest in the world; the Scottish Socialist Party got over 15% of the vote there in the Scottish parliamentary elections gaining two Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), Tommy Sheridan and Rosie Kane. However, it was obvious when I attended the Glasgow rally on the Friday before election day that the SSP’s big business infiltrators were gaining the upper hand.

 

That rally was held at a theatre on Granville Street but incredibly the ‘e’ was missed off the end of the street name when it was advertised on the front page of the SSP newspaper, the Scottish Socialist Voice – and the street name was omitted altogether when it was advertised on the listings page of the same issue. This ensured that few people attended who weren’t already SSP members.

 

Incredibly, at such an important time, no public activity to build for the election was announced from the platform of the rally. Instead, a clipboard was handed around asking for people to write their names, addresses, phone numbers and trade unions on. I noticed this being filled in behind me, and asked for the clipboard so that I could write “/ email address (email preferred)” next to the text asking for addresses.

 

I got exasperated talking to people after the rally, because many of them seemed so awful politically, until I met Julie who was by far the best looking woman there. I knew Julie from previous visits to Scotland and she had a beaming smile when she came up to me. Julie had two friends with her, including Leanne who was also good looking (and an awful friend who I hardly said a word to all evening). I spent most of the rest of the evening chatting to Julie and Leanne. I considered it worth mentioning Julie and Leanne on this web page, since many people look up to me and want to know who else they can trust. The other people I trust the most in Glasgow are Rosie Kane (Scotland’s most respected environmentalist and newly elected Member of the Scottish Parliament; she attends in jeans!), Mairtin Gardner (who I met on the People’s March Against the Poll Tax from Liverpool to London in 1990 shortly after joining the Militant Tendency; he then lived in Coventry in which Militant had a Labour MP: Dave Nellist), Allan McCombes (the leader of the International Socialist Movement, the platform of the Scottish Socialist Party that Scottish Militant Labour became) and

 Jo Harvie (who works for the newspaper of the Scottish Socialist Party, the Scottish Socialist Voice; she is also a member of the International Socialist Movement).

 

I took a very important leaflet – calling for democracy in Iraq and opposition to the occupation by Western troops – with me to Glasgow, and handed out copies at the rally. I edited the leaflet the next day, to call for a Scottish Socialist Party vote (particularly on the crucial second vote for which proportional representation was used) on the other side. I intended to make double sided copies and cut them up, but I soon realised that it was better to hand them out as A4 sheets, enabling other people to photocopy them if they liked the politics enough.

 

I was forced to rely on newsagents to make copies of the leaflet, and none of them offered recycled paper. I feel strongly that leaflets should be produced on non-chlorine bleached recycled paper (but such is the level of conspiracies in society that it is virtually impossible to tell if chlorine has been used to bleach paper even if the packaging says it is recycled). I also found there was a shortage of newsagents in Glasgow that offered photocopying facilities at all. [Since Manchester is populated by loads of left-wing sects, in contrast to Scotland where there is only one significant socialist organisation, many more newsagents here have photocopying facilities and they are much cheaper.] I therefore made plans to buy a very fast printer for my laptop as well as large stocks of recycled paper from a computer store. If I had managed to achieve that, the SSP would have won most seats in Glasgow and Edinburgh (which I also planned to visit). However, of course, I was arrested by the police before I managed to do that.

 

I didn’t just hand out copies of the leaflet; I took opportunities to protest loudly when they arose. I went into St Enoch’s shopping centre in Glasgow City Centre, originally trying to find a Nationwide Building Society branch at which to get some cash out. I had learnt that at such important times I could only rely on building society cash machines to give me money – I feared that a bank’s cash machine would swallow up my card, and indeed that seemed to happen with a Clydesdale Bank cash machine when the screen went blank but eventually I managed to get my card out. The Nationwide is virtually the only building society left in Britain, since ‘carpetbaggers’ opened many accounts in order to outvote genuine borrowers and savers at other building societies, in order to make a lot of easy money by getting them to convert to banks run for the profits of shareholders. I have all my savings, mortgage and insurance with the Nationwide. This is not just for ethical reasons – if I let a bank have access to my money they could nick it and destroy the evidence giving me no legal recourse, and you need to have insurance with someone who will actually pay up if you need to claim (I did use Direct Line for insurance, since they seemed cheap, but they messed me around so much that I realised I had to switch to Nationwide).

 

When I went into St Enoch’s shopping centre, I started asking good looking women where the nearest Nationwide Building Society branch was; I got lots of smiles but nobody told me where it was! They were encouraging me to continue asking people, thereby influencing many more people within the shopping centre! I was handing out copies of my leaflet as I went along. Eventually, I got to a café area of the shopping centre and noticed (as is usual) that most people were drinking Coca-Cola or Pepsi. I used this opportunity to explain loudly how both those companies propped up/installed vicious dictatorships in Latin America. I sang some lyrics from my favourite overtly political song of all time – “A Slow Waltz for Chile” by Latin Quarter (from the “Swimming Against the Stream” album):

 

Last night I heard of the death of a stranger to me,

I did not ask how she died,

For the way she had lived is all we need to know.

 

There’s a slow waltz for Chile all down through the years,

Of Pinochet, murder and dread,

No quick step solution, just the will to resist,

Until the last decent Chilean is dead.

 

Of course I eventually got chucked out of the shopping centre by security guards, and they confiscated the remaining leaflets off me. However, that did not stop me protesting! After all, there was a McDonalds across the street!

 

I went into McDonalds first of all appealing to the staff by protesting against the low wages that they get paid. I continued protesting by pointing out that rainforests get chopped down in Latin America in order that cattle may graze in order to produce beef for Western markets. They overgraze the land so that it becomes desert in a few years. My final act of protest at McDonalds was to point out the hypocrisy of a charity collection box, pretending that McDonalds care about people. I, of course, got chucked out.

 

On the street outside, I noticed a beggar with a collecting tin which had five or six pennies in it. He was pretending there is not a welfare state in Britain! If he had looked like an asylum seeker then I would not have taken such action, because they are the one section of society that are denied benefits by the British state, but he clearly was not. Besides, it was so damn obvious that nobody in their right mind would be so mean as to donate a few pennies to a beggar if they thought that he or she was genuine. It was so obviously a scam that it was worth protesting about. Like other forms of crime, begging is big business. I therefore took the tin off him and shouted about it on the street, before chucking it together with its contents in a bin.

 

Soon afterwards, the ‘boys in blue’ picked me up. I managed to call out before I was put in the police van about how it has been recently revealed (in fairly recent supplements, entitled “Big Brother”, to the Guardian newspaper) how miniaturisation of eavesdropping devices was reaching such a stage that researchers are investigating monitoring people using dust (particles of about a millimetre in diameter)!

 

There’s a lot of scary stuff above. However, there is also a lot of evidence that the forces of the working class are overcoming those of big business. We are winning! There will be a world socialist revolution before too long! I appeal to anybody reading this page to join the struggle! If you live in Scotland, join the Scottish Socialist Party (and preferably the leading revolutionary ‘platform’ – the International Socialist Movement). If you live in England or Wales, encourage the trade unions to disaffiliate from New Labour and set up a new mass workers’ party. Together we will win! Forward to international socialism!

 

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