Solidarity is for white women: what happens in the British left

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of white women in the left who offered me warmth and support as a sister while I was an activist. So it is with pleasure that I see one black American feminist, Mikki Kendall, stirring it up with the brilliantly exasperated Twitter hashtag, #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

I recently attempted to draw attention to the actions of a prominent section of the British left who are moving rightwards and redrawing events in living memory as a white narrative, as demonstrated in the all-white Ken Loach's "Spirit of '45", a feature film-length documentary which covered the birth of the welfare state and its legacy. Interestingly, my article was met with only two irate tweets from rabid right-wingers but a blizzard of denial and hostility from the white left.

Instead of debating this worrying trend, personnel in the grouplet Counterfire tried to lead a Twitter mobbing (they got four involved) and attempted hounding me on the Third Estate website before one of the site co-founders gave the perp a slap.

I'm told that, failing to engage with the issues of blind spots in the movement regarding the blatant exclusion of non-whites that need addressing, bods at Shiraz "Socialist" (hah!) are resorting to an ad hominem dismissal of me as a "loose cannon" (as opposed to line-toeing hack, I guess). I hear that one principled leftist has posted evidence of my argument going back ten years but again, rather than deal with the problem, the response is bluster and then silence.

And Lindsey "Shibboleths" German of Counterfire did a phone round denouncing me as a chippy Chinese actress with a grudge about slave labour. Well, I do hope so, Lindsey. Never mind the use of language straight out of a Life on Mars episode illustrating the worst of the 1970s, I hope that any genuine socialist would be unhappy about activists being ripped off for their labour while Glorious Leaders draw a wage from the movement built by those activists Animal Farm stylee.

(And, by the way, why did you, in your role as convenor, decide NOT to mobilise Stop the War Coalition (STWC) action on the most crucial day for the anti-war movement? The day of the Parliamentary vote in March 2003 when a protest at the Palace of Westminster may well have stopped the war in Iraq.)

Unless we all stand together in the face of worsening assaults under capitalism, we all go under. We understand that revolutions have gone wrong when the new boss behaves like the old boss with all the same hang-ups, greed and personal ambitions, so we'd better learn fast that we have more in common than divides us ... and put it into practice.

In Lindsey's honour I'm reposting here my article from earlier in the year looking at the phenomenon of sistahs who ain't sistahs no matter how many big fat tomes they write on the subject.

The Left's invisibilty bomb: how's that liberation thing working out for you?

Perhaps it's unconscious and far from deliberate but there's a set of prejudices in the Left that they just won't confront. You can be a woman, non-white or working class but not all three at once or you get the INVISIBILITY BOMB exploded all over you.

Feminist Camilla Power wrote to me earlier this month asking me to link to her piece on the Socialist Workers Party crisis, Feminism is a Dirty Word, (which I did). However, in a letter to the CPGB Weekly Worker about the dreadful treatment of WOMEN, she then cites the experiences of MEN only. As the elephant in the room who's been writing about this for years as an insider with direct experience of the problem, I wrote to her:

"Imagine my surprise and disappointment to find your letter to the Weekly Worker citing several men but not my experience as the lone working-class non-white woman consistently whistle-blowing and challenging the sexism and abuse in the SWP and elsewhere in the left over several years — in a debate about WOMEN.

"I didn't find this further marginalisation a particularly sisterly act. I'm sure it was unconscious — it was certainly unthinking and insensitive but then what do my emotions count for?

"Please read your letter again and then marvel at the irony. I would hate to think you were part of the problem and not the solution — or all theory and no knickers, as us non-egghead non-people might say."

I got a polite email back — a sort of an acknowledgment — and I'm waiting with bated breath to see whether there's any serious attempt to redress this omission.

This situation has been going on for years. Once again I feel compelled to remind the "comrades" that it took a non-white working-class woman to propel your various campaigns into the media spotlight when the left was refusing to engage with the "bourgeois press" and wouldn't even put out a press release for fear it would sully their revolutionary purity: chiefly (but not solely) the Socialist Alliance and Stop the War Coalition. All full-time and for no pay leaving me in debt having paid to establish the anti-war press office while leaders such as John Rees and Lindsey German drew a wage.

Then there's Ian Sinclair's abysmally-researched book The March That Shook Blair, in which three people lay claim to being the STWC's press officers, but the one person who was at the coal-face actually battering down media resistance from Day 1 is left out. Shame that, because I have the day-to-day blow-by-blow accounts of what it took to get mainstream media to notice STWC when they tried to ignore the mounting anti-war anger.

[EDIT: This was written by Ian Sinclair only a few days ago specifically dealing with abuse in the STWC anti-Iraq war campaign, and I'm still not allowed to have a say. STWC is described as "... perhaps the most high profile campaign of the last decade...". How do you suppose it got to be "high profile"? Charles Shaar Murray writes: 'First time it's happenstance. Second time it's coincidence. Third time -- it's enemy action.' -- Ian Fleming, Goldfinger.]

According to Greg Palast, research shows that not just white people, but even black people, overlook black people when it comes to intellectual tasks. That's no different in the left where, with a few exceptions, everyone congratulates themselves for being "right-on" until something like the SWP sex-abuse accusations bites them on the bum and shines a spotlight on exactly how archaic their own assumptions and practice actually are.

Of course, I could always stay schtum and submit to my own obliteration as a human being. Standards of respect, comradeship, appreciation, decency, solidarity, inclusiveness, equality and other bourgeois individualistic fripperies evidently don't apply to uppity effnik coolie labour, only to the self-appointed chosen ones; but since this is how marginalisation and objectification work, I say screw that.

So backward is the left on this issue that they're behind even the comedians who've acknowledged the phenomenon in Paul Whitehouse's "The Fast Show" series. Arabella Weir's character regularly finds her bright ideas and solutions ignored by the boys in the room until, moments later, they regurgitate what she's said like it's their own. We are all Arabella Weir. Well, some of us are more Arabella than others.

It's a white boys club with a few women allowed to play. You have to be the "right" sort of non-white or woman to register in whatever passes for awareness. The left's current mindset has nothing to do with my liberation and EVERYTHING to do with continuing my oppression.

Anna's updated account of life, dearth and sexism in the SWP and the British left.

My time on the left has largely felt like this.

Public health warning about the People's Assembly as currently led.

A Bad Case of the Trots — an early public airing of the SWP/STWC problem in 2003.

Maybe less elephant in the room and more basketball gorilla. Does this mean I can rob banks?

This was written by Ian Sinclair only a few days ago.

The Smethwick Problem in 2010 by Evan Smith.

Ethnically cleansing working class history: my Guardian article

Photo: Great Western Hospital workers have been on strike against Carillion for a year.

My article in the Guardian today

People of colour like me have been painted out of working-class history

It's shocking how even voices on the left mythologise the history of Britain's labour movement as an all-white affair

Black people have lived in Britain at least from Roman times, and some historians claim that north Africans were here as much as 3,000 years ago. We know that Indian people were here as far back as Shakespeare's time. The first Chinese visitor we know of was the Jesuit priest Shen Foutsong, who communicated in Latin when he worked at Oxford's Bodleian Library in the 17th century. His portrait still hangs in the Queen's collection. People of colour have been part of the fabric of British society for centuries, but you won't find many in official histories – either from the right (look at Michael Gove's draft national curriculum) or, more shockingly, from the left.

Ken Loach's feature-length documentary, The Spirit of '45, is one recent example. A documentary about the creation of the welfare state and its legacy, it presents us with Loach's vision of the British working class, united in the struggle for a better Britain. And though it covers the period from the 1930s up to the Thatcher era, everyone featured in the film is white – it's as if people like me have been bred out of the working-class gene pool.

In this Loach is swimming with the tide. Both Maurice Glasman (of Blue Labour fame) and David Goodhart, the former editor of Prospect magazine, are very influential in Labour's thinking – and both nostalgically emphasise the importance of continuity and community values in the British working class, as against immigrants, who threaten that continuity. While the working class is rarely discussed in mainstream left circles these days, the "white working class" is endlessly debated. "Working class" becomes indivisible from "white" in such debates. ...

... Examples of cross-race class struggle are many: so why impose such a filter? Who gains? Constructing a narrative palatable to a constituency increasingly susceptible to the dishonest blandishments of the right is a divisive and dangerous game, especially in the current atmosphere of immigrant bashing and fear of the other. Harking back to a fictitious golden age when everyone was white represents surrender to an antagonism stoked up towards "outsiders", with polls showing that increasing numbers of us blame immigration for dwindling resources, though facts prove otherwise.
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Clarification: although the Grunwick strike feels in retrospect like a victory because of the massive support received by the strikers whose struggle became a cause celebre, it actually ended in a defeat for the courageous women who stuck it out. I should have called it a "famous strike".

Liverpool and its Chinese seamen — history of the forcibly repatriated Chinese.

Chinese mariners forcibly sent back to China leaving families behind.

Blood and Treasure: not quite the Spirit of '45.

Guardian Black History month timeline.

Wilf Sullivan on black workers and the trade unions.

Dr Evan Smith with an illuminating response to my article: the British left and BME workers.

Indian suffragettes march for the vote.

Carillion hospital strikers out for over a year so far are mostly South Asian women.

Ken Loach talks about Spirit of '45 on BBC R4 Night Waves.

Ian Bone: That John Rees correction in full.

Ken Loach's 'The Spirit of 45' review: ethnically cleansing history

There have been black people in Britain at least from Roman times; some historians claim that north Africans were here 3,000 years ago. The first Chinese visitor we know of was Jesuit priest Shen Foutsong, who communicated in Latin when he worked at the Bodleian Library in the 17th century. His portrait still hangs in the Queen's collection. British involvement with India has a long history: Indian people were here in Shakespeare's time.

People of colour have been part of the fabric of British society for centuries, but seek as you might, you won't find any in Ken Loach's feature-length documentary, The Spirit of 45.

It gets off to a cracking start. Powerful archive footage from the 1930s reminds us of the horrors awaiting if the Tory-led coalition succeeds in clawing back all the post-World War II gains made by the British masses.

Witnesses of those grim pre-war times are interspersed with commentary from younger pundits. In perhaps the most moving testimony, Sam Watts describes how he and his siblings slept five to a bed infested with fleas and bugs in a hovel with rats in the skirting and behind the walls.

Outside toilets were the norm. Meals consisted of swede and potato with no meat. Bread and dripping, far from being a staple, was a luxury as you needed beef for dripping, so carbohydrate-heavy jam was the unnutritious standby for hungry children.

To see footage of swaggering mine-owners juxtaposed with that of miners who'd had to dig out the bodies of their fellow workers because the health and safety the right so gleefully lampoons was absent, is to well up with tears of both sorrow and anger.

The tragedy befalling us, and a key message of the film, is that the days of filthy rich exploitation of the dirt poor are coming back.

Time and again you find yourself drawing parallels between the inequity we thought was consigned to history, and the devastation wrought today during the biggest upward redistribution of wealth — from the poorest to the richest — for centuries. A third of council housing is now owned by private landlords who charge exorbitant rents, subsidised by the public purse because successive governments won't dare cap rents. Our utilities are in the hands of profiteering cabals. Food production is skewed by the big supermarkets (squeezing both farmers and consumers) who donate to political parties and even sit in government.

Back then, politicians understood that, to build a home fit for the heroes who'd won the war, it was crucial to combat the five evils: “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.”

Atlee's government accelerated the construction of council homes, nationalised key industries and gave us the first National Health Service in the world. To combat poverty, the government's emphasis was on creating proper jobs making things, the best known cure for "idleness". The tone of the era as captured by the film was one of coming out of the second world war together and rebuilding the nation out of the rubble.

As an antidote to the poison being poured out by today's media backing the corrupt and discredited austerity policy of our unelected government, it is a powerful reminder that better things are possible.

However, about thirty minutes in, a growing unease sets in. The film may be shot in monochrome, but it presents a rose-tinted view of the Labour government, lacking any reference to its savage treatment of liberation movements in Kenya and Malaya, or its pursuit of cold war policies that specifically excluded people like Loach and his associates.

And suddenly the anaesthetisingly sentimental Hovis ad music shrieks and I'm shot out of the feelgood trance Loach is weaving, like Neo waking up in his dystopian cocoon in The Matrix. Not one non-white speaker. NOT ONE! He couldn't find any in the NHS? Transport? Posties? Pensioners? It's as if people like me have been bred out of the working class gene pool in Loach's vision of an idealised white working class.

My own father, an ex-seaman, was a British trade unionist in Liverpool from the 1920s onwards, and one of the founders of the Chinese Seaman's Union. It was needed as Chinese ran much of the merchant navy during World War II and plenty died for us in conflicts up to and including the Falklands War, and yet they were horribly discriminated against. Others, for example, wrote for the press, including Jack Chen, a correspondent for the Co-operative Movement's Sunday paper Reynolds News. Had Loach researched archive footage with any genuine determination to represent the working class and the movement in its full range and diversity, he would have found plenty of Chinese firefighters in wartime Liverpool.

Trade Union historian Wilf Sullivan has published an overview of the immensely important work done by people of colour in the movement since the 1930s, and I know personally of one south Asian shop steward at Dagenham Fords in the 1970s, and yet Loach couldn't find ONE?

If not from that specific period, then how about the younger talking heads commentating in the film? Are there really no activists of colour he could find who could add to our understanding of the political shift in post-war Britain?

Why distort the composition of the class that needs to resist capitalist predation? The Spirit of 45 gave rise to the Welfare State which required major waves of immigration from the Caribbean as a direct result of creating the NHS and all those jobs in transport. Where were they in the vision of '45? Why are we being sold a mythologised Little England where everyone is white?

George Orwell pointed out in his bitter 1939 essay, "Not Counting Niggers": "What we always forget is that the over­whelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa."

Loach is well aware of this, as he's been in enough revolutionary milieux and is familiar with the role of imperialism in the world. So why impose such a filter? Who gains?

Loach's airy dismissal on BBC Radio 4 of his ethnic cleansing of our history was simple: "That's how it was. That's the record of the time. That's what people thought, that was the moment of the time." You can't include stuff " ... to suit our present sensitivities."

Harking back to a fictitious Golden Age when everyone was white is a dangerous game to play in the current climate of immigrant-bashing. It represents a surrender to a media-created antagonism towards non-whites and immigrants with polls showing that increasing numbers of us blame immigration for dwindling resources. Is this the audience that Loach and the People's Assembly are hoping to win over? Films like The Spirit of 45 should be inspiring and educate people with the truth, rather than implying that if you can't beat the EDL and UKIP then join them.

In constructing a narrative palatable to a consistuency increasingly susceptible to the dishonest blandishments of the right, Loach is speciously coy about the identities of his participants.

I recognised most of the talking heads as being members of far left groups and yet they weren't identified as such, opting for titles that made them look like "ordinary" witnesses and workers when they clearly weren't. It is absolutely fair that the far left, as members themselves of our society, should have a say in how our society is run. However, I'm puzzled as to why left leaders who tell their rank and file members to publicly identify themselves — indeed, that they should shout it from the rooftops — fail to do so themselves here. Why not? Why be so modest about your political affiliations?

As the late prominent sect leader Tony Cliff used to say, you must never lie to the class. That presumably includes lying by omission.

The most disturbing moment comes towards the end with a dramatic lingering still shot of an angry young black man raising his fist, the first and last image focusing on an ethnic figure rather than ones who'd accidentally strayed into view. It was as if the filmmaker and his associates were saying, "We will utilise your fury but we won't give you a voice. We will do it for you using your muscle but not your political input. Thanks for the window dressing." Given the absence of minorities in the telling of the tale, this seems opportunistic at best. It is also a sharp reminder of how the 9/11 attacks prompted former SWP leaders (now running Counterfire) of the Socialist Alliance to ditch the People's Assembly Mk I when they courted the angry energy of disaffected Muslims. They weren't slow to dump white working class interests then, to be picked up ten years later when the Muslim charm offensive had run out of steam.

It's a shocking exclusion, and one that Loach's defenders have tried to write off as an unthinking omission. It's unlikely that a director with several decades' worth of experience at the top of his craft wouldn't know exactly what his mise en scéne was communicating.

It's the same with his amnesia regarding the less savoury aspects of Labour's history. Loach has been a political filmmaker since I was in nappies, so did he really forget Britain's shameful roles in Korea and Kenya? Or that while it was imposing eight years of austerity they still had the funds to make Britain's nuclear bomb? Or Labour under Harold Wilson closing more mines than Thatcher? Or its vicious attacks on the working class in the 1960s and 70s?

The film's leap from from 1951 Festival of Britain to 1979, missing out, among others industrial conflicts, Grunwicks, is jarring and baffling.

In his eagerness to weave a romanticised view of the period Loach has resorted to distorting events. Does he have the courage of his conviction to let the facts galvanise his audiences into action and develop their consciousness? Or does the film induce a trance-like state for his audiences, a slack-jawed Spielbergian passivity?

The Spirit of 45 is emotionally effective but, as Tariq Ali once said of the huge Vietnam War protests, emotion doesn't last. Look at how the Occupy movement has fizzled out despite the best efforts of principled activists. You need the politics and the theory to plan a course of action that will be effective and endure, otherwise you end up repeating the same mistakes and time is running out. I could quote Pete Townshend and the greatest political rock song ever written, Won't Get Fooled Again, but most have been around the block more than once and know it by heart. If only it no longer held true.

My Guardian article: Ethnically cleansing working class history.

Harpy Marx on The Spirit of 45

A review by Tom Jennings who also spots the glaring exclusions and omissions.

Not quite the Spirit of 45, Blood and Treasure.

The Left's Invisibility Bomb

The People's Assembly led by the same characters who destroyed the Socialist Alliance (People's Assembly MkI) when it suited them, and Respect.

More SWP rape accusation: "a dangerous place for a woman"

Dr Evan Smith with an illuminating response to my Guardian article: the British left and BME workers.

Chinese coolies on the Western Front in World War I.

How was anti-Iraq war demo energy frittered away? Demobilising the STWC on the most crucial day of the anti-war movement.

Ken Loach & Michael Heseltine debate Tory cuts on Newsnight

Ken Loach pwns Michael Heseltine over Tory lies on cuts.

I'm listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme right now, horrified that the consensus that those at the bottom of society have to pick up the deficit bill goes almost entirely unchallenged. It's as if we've forgotten the bankers until someone like Loach speaks up.

And, no, a mild-mannered Mark Steel right at the end of the programme is no counter-balance for the skewing of facts by Nick Robinson, Robert Peston, John Humphries, "Sir" John Tusa, et al.