Yesterday marked the celebration of 50 years of independence for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1960, Congo was finally able to free itself from one of the most brutal regimes in all of colonial Africa: Belgian control. Of all the European colonial powers, the Belgians were notorious as the worst for their ruthless exploitation of the Congo’s resources, and their horrendous violence against its people.
Since independence, there’s not been much for people to celebrate, with a 32 year brutal dictatorship followed by a state of total civil war which is the second worst war in the history of humanity, and has claimed for more victims than world war one.
Around the world, not many people think about the almost unimaginable death toll of the wars in Congo, and when they do it’s only to confirm racist stereotypes about independent Africa. The Congo today is not only the home of a devastating war, but also unbelievably high rates of sexual violence, preventable disease, illiteracy and poverty.
But the blame for the disastrous state of the Congo today shouldn’t be put at the door of the Congolese people. Rather, its European powers, and later the US, that must accept responsibility for turning swathes of Central Africa into a hell on Earth.
Yesterday there were general strikes in Greece and the Basque Country. Last week workers in France and Italy walked out as well. Across Europe the working class is waking up to the threat posed by the attacks of European governments, but in the UK the response has still been quite muted.
SSY has been involved in building opposition to the ConDem cuts over recent weeks, with our members taking part in last Saturday’s street rally against the “emergency” budget for instance. But it’s clear that if we really want to stop the neoliberal assault on our rights, we need to learn a thing or two from our friends in Europe.
An armed forces day message to unarmed civil rights protesters
Today the city I call home didn’t feel like home for me. The city centre of Glasgow, like towns and cities all over Scotland, played host to a massive display of weaponry, Union Jacks, and mass recruitment to the British military.
Today is armed forces day, the second time that an annual “celebration” has been held, allegedly to “Show Your Support for the men and women who make up the Armed Forces community.”
I want to make clear from the outset that I have no problem with charities collecting money to support soldiers and veterans. God knows, the way that people who leave the military are treated by the state, they need it. 20,000 veterans, traumatised and psychologically damaged from their experiences, are in prison, probation or parole. As many as a quarter of those sleeping rough in the UK may have been in the forces, and there are hundreds of veterans on the streets or in hostels. Then there’s the harder to measure damage the wars the British government has engaged in has caused to British troops: the mental health problems, the alcoholism, the divorces, the suicides.
But you wouldn’t have heard much about that today. In Glasgow, although the charities that pick up the pieces of these broken lives were round the fringes of George Square, the heart of the city centre was instead given over to a massive celebration of British imperialism, war and military recruitment.
This week Obama sacked his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. What the affair proves is that, for US commanders, it doesn’t matter how many innocent civilians you kill, or deaths you cover up; what really matters is slagging off colleagues.
McChrystal had given exclusive access to a reporter from Rolling Stone, who went on to report some of the stuff he said about other top US officials in Afghanistan. Basically, he and his team don’t think very highly of them.
McChrystal and his aides said of Obama that he was “unprepared” and “intimidated”, and of US Vice-President Joe Biden, “Who’s that? Joe Bite Me?” They called a meeting with a French minister about war policy “fucking gay.” They say the President’s national security adviser is “a joke”. They call the President’s special adviser to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, “a wounded animal”, and react to him contacting them with “Not another fucking email from Holbrooke!”
The comments are so extraordinary they have made some people ask if McChrystal was actually trying to get fired to avoid taking the blame for failure in Afghanistan. Obama has made a promise to start pulling out troops next July, but this is of course dependent on the situation being stabilised to the US’ liking, something which looks just as unlikely as it has done for the last few years. Certainly there seems to be a recognition by pretty much everyone interviewed in the article that the US is not going to succeed in getting what it wants from Afghanistan. In a long piece, the words “win” or “victory” are not uttered by the general or his team. One commander who does say win says:
“It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.”
But a perhaps more convincing explanation is that McChrystal is a product of a society that now accepts permanent war as a part of reality, and glorifies the soldier above the political “wimps” and “pen pushers” back home. The US is an incredibly militarised society, a process which has accelerated dramatically over the past decade. The idea of unending war for global dominance has become acceptable in a way that it wouldn’t have been not that long ago. McChrystal spoke out as part of a culture that loves “mavericks” who ignore what those above them think, causing maximum destruction in the process.
Movies and popular culture help create the context in which McChrystal felt he could publicly speak his mind so dramatically. His backstory reads a perfect action movie character. As a student he defied authorities and was a hard drinker, before going into the special forces to command black ops on behalf of the US government. This is the kind of character who is constantly glorified to the American public. His team of special advisers, who surely must share some of the blame for his gaffes, was composed of special forces veterans, and called themselves ‘Team America.’
The reporter for Rolling Stone himself was suckered into this atmosphere, gleefully describing how, after the “fucking gay” dinner, Team America found the “least Gucci” (unfancy) Paris bar to get “shit faced”, dance, sing incoherent songs about Afghanistan and declare how they would die for each other.
America's top people in Afghanistan
What the tales of macho heroism ignore however is the truth of what a special forces based, counter insurgency strategy actually means. Sacking McChrystal, Obama declared he was making “a change of personnel not of policy.” That is, the plan that McChrystal fought for in Afghanistan remains in place.
The plan is basically to flood Afghanistan with US troops, who will carry out special forces missions to assassinate the networks of opposition, gaining intelligence on how people organise against the US presence and eliminating them. In Iraq, McChrystal headed death squads that systematically hunted US opponents. The article refers to this operation as a “killing machine”, and McChrystal as “a terrorist hunter.”
The only problem with this plan is that it’s been shown again and again not to work. Leave aside all your preconceptions of Jack Bauer lone warrior types from movies, and examine the places were these kinds of tactics have been used before. Algeria, where the French were defeated by the national resistance and independence achieved in 1962. Or Vietnam, where year upon year of American actions failed to remove the political support for the National Liberation Front among the people.
The new US commander, veteran of death squads in Iraq General David Petraeus, wrote a manual on counter insurgency that praises Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This programme used capture, torture, assassinations, terrorism and infiltration to disrupt the civilian population of Vietnam who supported the Communist resistance to the US. It targeted civilian members of the Communist Party, and led to untold deaths and misery. At least 26,000 people were killed. One former US serviceman called it “a sterile depersonalised murder programme.”
Insurgencies, or guerilla wars, fundamentally depend on the support of the people. Mao famously once wrote that “the guerilla must swim in the people as the fish swim in the sea.” Therefore, counter insurgency programmes inevitably end up killing a lot of civilians.
A good example of what the policy means for people in Afghanistan is a night time raid in Khataba earlier this year. US special forces attacked a home, killing a teenage girl, two pregnant women, alongside an Afghan police officer and government prosecutor who were on their fucking side.
On discovering they had made a mistake, the soldiers then carved their bullets out of the bodies with knives, and carved more out of the walls of their home. They washed blood from the scene with alcohol, and went on to tie up the corpses, claiming that was how they had found the scene. McChrystal, as overall commander, supported this cover up. It was only exposed because of journalists who were willing to dig a little deeper. However, McChrystal has suffered no reprimand as a result. If it had turned out that the men in the house had been “enemy combatants,” you can bet they wouldn’t even have bothered with the cover up.
Death covered up: Pat Tillman
McChrystal’s only other major previous brush with trouble was the affair of Pat Tillman. Tillman was a celebrity recruit for the military, a former NFL American Football player, who very publicly joined the special forces after 9/11, in what was a propaganda coup for the military and government. He was later accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan, something which McChrystal helped cover up by signing off on a falsified report aiming to make it look like he had been killed by hostile fire. But even when this was exposed he got away with it, even though this time it was an American celebrity dead rather than a (to the US public) anonymous Afghan girl.
So the conclusion to take away from all this is clear: the US government doesn’t care about civilian deaths, or even that much about the deaths of their own grunts. Deaths are what they send commanders abroad to cause. But when you start fucking with your fellow officials and commanders, well then your job really is on the line.
Who would have thought this man's party would ever have money problems?
UKIP, the acceptable face of far right politics in the UK, are possibly facing a financial disaster next month.
July is likely to see the judgement of the Supreme Court over the party’s refusal to forfeit over £350,000 of illegal donations. The Electoral Commission says it knows about at least 67 instances of the UKIP breaking the law on donations. Under electoral law, if a party is given over £200 it has to check if the donor is on the electoral register. UKIP failed to do this, despite loads of warnings from the commission.
The party got £367, 697 from these incidents. Most of the money came from a retired bookie and owner of a bathrobe company, Alan Brown, who was not on the register when he gave them several separate donations. In magistrates court, UKIP was ordered to pay back only part of the amount, but the electoral commission has escalated things to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get the full amount forfeited, in which case it would go to the treasury.
As well as this money itself, if UKIP loses the case then they would face millions in legal bills. It could effectively bankrupt the party.
Should we be happy about this? Absolutely we should, because UKIP are the hidden threat we face from the organised far right. Leftfield has reported before on UKIP as a potential seed from which an important party of the radical right could become a major force in British politics. The model for this would be far right racist, anti-Muslim Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has just gained a big result in the Dutch general election.
Alan Brown hands over an illegal donation
Wilders is the darling of the English and Scottish Defence Leagues, who admire him for his stances such as banning the hijab from all public institutions, calling for the Koran to be banned whilst comparing it to ‘Mein Kampf’, and for the construction of prison camps for Muslims in the Netherlands.
Alan Lake, the shady businessman who bankrolled the rise of the EDL, has said publicly that he’s backing away from his street army of football casuals to focus on finding them a voice in the mainstream political process. He’s doing that by working with UKIP.
Souter en route to count his millions in a Scrooge McDuck-style tower full of YOUR CASH
Brian Souter, one of the richest arseholes in Scotland, has just won a court battle to get more taxpayers money for his Stagecoach travel empire.
Shares in Stagecoach have surged in value after it was announced the UK Department for Transport will be forced to pay him subsidies this year rather than next for operating trains into London.
Not many people realise that the although the rail industry is privatised, this doesn´t mean the taxpayer doesn´t pay for it. The rail network was publicly owned for decades and run as a public service, and many routes have to be run this way because they won´t ever make a profit.
So, rail companies throughout the UK receive huge amounts of public cash in order to keep them afloat. Souter is one of the richest men in Scotland, and his empire is set to see £100 million of public cash as a result of this judgement. He also successfully argued that the cash that Stagecoach makes from charging people to use their station car parks shouldn´t be included in the calculation of their revenue.
Souter branded the Department “deceitful” during the dispute, and correctly predicted that “we will end up with a very large cheque.”
He´s a man we´ve written about on here before, as one of Scotland´s premier knobheads. He´s used to getting his own way, such as when he gave the SNP half a million quid just before the last election. The SNP did have a policy of reregulating the buses, which would have meant that Souter´s gangster style business practices of driving rivals out of business so that he can charge extortionate fares on the routes he controls, would have been brought to an end. However, shortly after he gave the SNP a big fat cheque, this policy mysteriously disappeared. Hmmm.
One thing that Souter didn´t get all his own way on was his attempt to impose his raging homophobic born again Christian bigoted views on Scotland. He bankrolled the Keep the Clause campaign, which tried to get people in Scotland to vote in a private referendum to keep a bizarre law outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality” in Scottish schools. The public ignored him and the clause was repealed, showing Scotland is not as bigotted as the millionaire transport baron.
Souter is so hungry for profit he´s trying to replace ferry services at Yoker with amphibious buses. This is actually true!
This latest judgement has to make us wonder why the fuck anyone would support the ridiculous system we have since the privatisation of the railways and the deregulation of the buses. The SSP has long campaigned for the whole transport industry to be brought back into public ownership, and for all fares to be abolished. Free public transport for all is not only possible, but necessary as a major measure against poverty and climate change. It´s been tried and succeeded in the Belgian city of Hasselt, and in various parts of the USA.
The good news is that support for this idea is spreading. The PCS union, which represents civil servants, recently backed their idea at their conference, and are in the process of setting up a UK wide campaign demanding free public transport, which the SSP and SSY will obviously thow our weight behind as much as we can. Hopefully, PCS members who work for the Department for Transport will have their determination boosted after being branded decitful and dysfuntional by someone who´s making a killing out of the current (dysfunctional) system.
Graffiti in Bilbao for the banned Basque youth organisation SEGI
Yesterday I was priviliged to meet an activist in the Basque pro-independence socialist youth movement.
I have to be careful how much I write about this, because Basque youth face repression on a scale that is unimaginable to us in Scotland.
The modern Basque youth movement began in 1979 with the founding of Jarrai, which was based in the southern part of the Basque country, which is currently ruled by Spain. In 2000 it merged with a French-based organisation to form the first national organisation of left wing pro-independence Basque youth.
All these organisations have been outlawed by the Spanish courts, declared to be terrorists. The only real reason for this is that they refuse to condemn the armed struggle for Basque independence: they are in fact simply political organisations working for the rights of youth, and it is a political decision to ban them. The Spanish state directs its repression particularly against youth organisations, as they want to cut off the next generation of the whole movement.
When Haika was banned its members attempted to relaunch the organisation under the new name of SEGI, but this group to has now been banned. Of the 800-odd Basque political prisoners many are members of the youth movement. Today in Donostia there was a demonstration to mark the trial of the latest 26 members of the group to be put on trial. In detention activists are tortured horribly by the Spanish authorities.
Attempts have been made through the European courts to challenge the hugely undemocratic bannings, but so far the will of the Spanish government has been upheld. It´s worth noting that the British government has been at the forefront of supporting the Spanish on this issue.
This means that the important work the youth movement does has to carry on in a semi-underground way, and it is very dangerous for its members to be publicly identified as part of SEGI.
In Rome a couple of weeks ago SEGI supporters who were living in Italy came out to protest the visit of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was in town for talks with Berlusconi the idiotic right oligarch leader of Italy. Three protesters were arrested by Italian police on warrants originating in Spain.
Bewildered by protesters: Spanish PM Zapatero
The activist I met with explained to me how the youth movement came to be formed.
“We understood that Basque youth are oppressed in two ways. Firstly, we don´t have the right to our language, to self determination for our country, or for our democratic rights as Basques.”
“But we are all also oppressed as youth. Work for young people is all very precarious, and it is very difficult to make a living. There is also a serious problem with housing for youth. On top of this we face police repression. Even wearing certain clothes that mark you out as `alternative´ is enough to make the police stop you, question you, ask your address, who you know and so on.”
“So we came to realise that youth is a social condition. It is not defined by the individual age, but is a socially created identity through your relations to others and society. Out of this understanding we built a movement to tackle the problems of youth.”
“Our aim is independence and socialism, and we believe it is necessary to start building the world we want to live in as part of our day to day reality.”
The Basque youth movement works closely with LAB, the Basque pro-independence left wing trade union federation, in campaigning against poorly paid, insecure jobs for youth.
There is a huge squatters movement in the Basque country, with young people taking over derelict buildings and converting them into homes and places to meet, organise and party. This is a direct response to the crisis in housing: activists argue, why are there people who can´t get a home when there are buildings lying empty.
Some squats are intended purely as homes for a group, but others are converted into what are called “youth houses”, which provide a space for young people to come together, talk and organise, and also hold concerts and have a party. There are youth houses all over the Basque country, even in small countryside towns like the one I´m staying in.
These organising spaces often play host to “youth assemblies”, where self-organised youth in an area come together to discuss local probblems affecting them, and organise to to do something about it.
When police have attempted to kick out the squatters, it has at times led to running battles that have lasted for days.
Youth have also organised to establish free radio networks in the Basque country, just one of the means they use to create alternative media. This is an attempt to what they identified as the problem of communication: it is very difficult for Basque youth to communicate with each other and discuss their problems when all the mainstream media are against them. So they produce radio, alongside online and writted sources of information as well.
The youth movement recognises that the situation is especially difficult for young Basque women. They have a women´s group which self organises, and meets monthly to discuss the issues specifically facing young women and to organise their own campaigns.
The movement organises their own version of Camp Secret Squirrel, a summer camp in the Basque mountains that attracts thousands of participants.
They also have an international perspective, with a special group dedicated to building links with friends in struggle around the world. Now that I´ve made contact I´ll be discussing back home with SSY what we can do to strengthen links with the Basque youth movement, as well as apply some of their valuable experience to what we do.
From my short time here it´s clear that I´ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the level of self-organisation for independence and socialism. The youth movement organises thousands of people, in the face of incredible repression, imprisonment and torture.
But it´s also clear to me that there is so much we ought to try out back home that they´re way ahead of us on here. The idea of taking over a building and providing a space for youth to self-organise may seem unachievable to us now, but that didn`t stop the comrades here: they just went ahead and did it! When I return home I hope a few of those reading will have had a serious think about how much we could emulate the successes that have been achieved here. Anyone know any good abandoned buildings?!
I’m writing this from Stansted airport, en route to a major international conference in the Basque country at which the SSP and SSY have been asked to represent Scotland.
The Basque people are quite possibly the oldest still existing nation in Europe. They speak a language completely unrelated to any of the other European languages, and which probably predates the arrival of modern Europeans thousands of years ago. Evidence of how old their language is includes the fact that the words for “axe” and “knife” contain the roots of the word for “stone”, suggesting these words have been the same since the Stone Age.
In Medieval times, the Basque lands were gradually absorbed into the territory of France and Spain, and today there are three Basque provinces in the French state and four in the Spanish.
The Basques have suffered tremendous oppression as a result of their desire for independence and to defend their language and culture. After the Spanish civil war, the fascist dictator Franco undertook repression against all the minority peoples of Spain, such as the Basques and Catalans. Thousands were jailed or executed, and to speak your own language became a crime.
As a result, an armed resistance movement, Euskadi ta Akatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), emerged, and played a major role in the resistance to the fascist dictatorship, perhaps most famously by assassinating Franco’s handpicked successor and President of the government Admiral Luis Carrerro Blanco. His death helped ensure that Spain would undergo a transition to parliamentary democracy, and that the dictatorship would not continue.
The fascist regime came to an end in 1978, and there was a move towards a new democratic constitution for Spain that would allow the Basques and Catalans their own parliaments, and some devolved autonomy, a bit like what Scotland now has.
When put to a referendum, the new constitution was approved throughout Spain, but not in the Basque country. Although it allowed some autonomy, it specifically denied the right of the Basques to vote for full independence, and gave the Spanish military the right to intervene to prevent this. This was rejected by the Basque people, who realised it was an attempt to buy off their desire for independence and integrate them into the Spanish state.
Despite Spain now supposedly being a democracy, the repression continued. In the 80s, the state set up the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (‘Antiterrorist Liberation Groups’, or GAL) to conduct a dirty war against the Basque national movement. These state supported death squads committed murder, kidnap and torture, not just against members of ETA but against civilians demanding Basque independence as well. These were set up by the supposedly “Socialist” governments (in reality more analogous to the Labour Party here), who claimed it was necessary for the state to “defend itself in the sewers.”
Despite this, the Basque national liberation movement has grown in strength and organisation. It is composed of a whole series of different organisations, from feminist and ecological groups, to a pro-independence left wing Basque trade union association, to self organised autonomous youth groups.
The youth groups are of particular interest to SSY, considering some of the really cool stuff they’ve done. They organise youth assemblies for young people in a particular area to discuss issues that relate to them and organise action. They clear out derelict buildings and turn them into self managed autonomous youth centres for people to have somewhere to hang out. They’ve even set up and run their own radio stations and record labels. All these are run on the principle of young people organising for themselves, autonomously.
It’s important to understand that the national liberation movement is heavily influenced by anti imperialist struggles around the world, from Palestine to Latin America, and as a result is firmly left wing and socialist in its outlook. Like the SSP and SSY, their vision is for an independent, socialist Basque country.
The brutal repression against the Basque movement has continued. In 2003, the left wing pro-independence party Batasuna was banned by the Spanish state, and prevented from standing in elections. Its leaders have been jailed, often on the opposite side of Spain from the Basque country. The youth movements have also been targeted, with their leaderships being jailed en masse.
Another scandalous move was the banning of the only exclusively Basque language newspaper Egunkaria. It was shut down in 2003, accused of being a front for ETA. Just last month, courts completely exonerated the journalists of these charges. Editor Martxelo Otamendi says he was tortured in detention.
Right now the Basque parliament is governed by an alliance of the “Socialist” party, and the right wing People’s Party, which traces its ancestry back to Franco. This alliance has put the moderate Basque National Party (PNV) out of power. To make an analogy, if Batasuna are a bit like the Basque SSP (except quite a bit better organised and influential!), the PNV are the Basque SNP. To continue the analogy, the current Basque government is like Labour and the Tories teaming up to keep the SNP out of power.
But the Basque pro independence left are regrouping and preparing the way to move forward with their struggle for independence and socialism. One of the ways they’re doing that is by strengthening their international links.
Basque youth conference
The organisation I’m going to meet, Askapena, organise brigades to other countries to learn from their struggles, and have recently visited Cuba, Venezuela and Greece. This August they intend to visit Scotland, and participate in Camp Secret Squirrel, so that’ll be a great chance for us to learn more about their struggle.
They’ve organised a conference to discuss the national liberation struggles of stateless nations in Europe. It’s a real honour and a privilige to have been invited to participate in these discussions. I intend to gather as much info as I can, interview Basque comrades, and generally give Leftfield the first scoop on everything going down in the Basque lands. So, keep checking back here for more updates, I’ll be adding them as often as I’m able to get internet access.
Spot the difference: On the right, Frank McAveety and on the left, Frank McAvennie off of Only an Excuse
Scottish Labour have been again embarrassed as leading MSP Frank ‘the Wank’ McAveety was exposed as a pervy bastard.
McAveety was forced yesterday to resign as convenor of the Scottish Parliament Petitions committee and as Labour spokesman for sport. As if Labour hadn’t learned their lessons about microphones being left on already, he was overheard in the committee ogling a member of the public. You can hear what he had to say below:
This of course comes hard on the heels of Stephen Purcell, who like McAveety was leader of Glasgow City Council, being forced to flee the country after being exposed as a school closing, land grabbing, gangster tripping, corrupt coke hound.
McAveety has had a far from glittering career as a typical Labour careerist hack, working his way up the ranks by way of several spectacular acts of idiocy.
After Donald Dewar died, he dithered about whether to support Jack McConnell or Henry McLeish as his successor as Labour leader and First Minister. In the end, trusted by neither, he ended up without a job.
He got back into a minster’s seat in 2002, and in 2003 he was promoted to Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport. Then came the infamous piegate.
"Just one more. I'll just tell them I was at some arty shit anyway."
When he was due to be answering questions in the chamber, he was nowhere to be seen. He eventually turned up really late, and told MSPs he’d been “unavoidably detained at the Scottish Arts Council Book Awards.”
This in fact turned out to be a load of bollocks. He had in fact been munching it up in the parliament canteen, where all the posh grub costs about a pound thanks to subsidies provided by you and me. Journalists had spotted him tucking into pie, beans and roast potatoes, and he was soon caught out as a liar who’d tried to cover up a leisurely lunch.
Funny as this was, it’s hardly the worst offence in the world, and we’re sure many readers can sympathise with someone bullshitting their way out of an extra long lunch at work. Of course, most won’t be on the £73 grand salary of McAveety at the time.
What was a worse error was when he tried to have a couple of anti-war protesters fitted up for “intimidating” him. By intimidating he meant “they said bad stuff I did and it hurt my feelings.”
While out canvassing he’d been challenged on his inaction to oppose Labour’s war mongering in Iraq, as well as the closure of the Govanhill pool. His response was to get the police involved and try to get the protesters thrown in jail. But the Sheriff laughed him out of court, saying surely politicians campaigning on the streets are “fair game” for people who want to voice their disagreement. Frank didn’t agree, saying that he’d “suffered the worst intimidation” he’d felt in his life.
The Sheriff responded that he “must have led a very sheltered life.” He added that Frank had “completely blown his credibility.”
He got his third (or is it fourth) shot at the big time in 2007, becoming Labour shadow minister for Sport and petitions committee convenor, a nice wee gig that will have boosted his salary again. Now that’s come crashing down around him as he’s been caught out perving.
Sheltered life: Protesters take on Frank the Softy
Probably a lot of people will say ‘So What?’ about this, but joking aside it is actually worth remarking on how the woman concerned must feel just now. Low level perving like Frank was engaged in is the thin edge of a spectrum that includes staring at women, shouting stuff in the street, all the way to groping or unwanted physical contact. It’s this kind of thing that means many women are made to feel really uncomfortable in public on a regular basis. For someone in a position of authority like him to do it legitimises this kind of behaviour in the eyes of other men, and will embolden some to go further.
Frank isn’t the first old pervy boy in the parliament. Let’s not forget former Presiding Officer David Steel, who when he saw SSP MSPs Carolyn Leckie and Rosie Kane coming up to vote was heard to declare “Well, the view has certainly got better in this parliament!”
There’s nothing wrong with finding a woman attractive. For a man who’s already in a long term relationship with kids to be sitting ogling a woman and pointing her out to a fellow parliamentarian is kind of not cool though. (Incidentally, is anyone able to identify who was sitting next to him and was on the receiving end of this chat? Because it’s also worth remarking that they did nothing to challenge him, a tacit acceptance that it’s OK to treat women as on display for MSPs’ entertainment.)
Then there’s the whole “dark and dusky” thing. Someone has to come right out and say it: Frank McAveety clearly has racialised fantasies. This is pure speculation (we like speculating on things we can’t prove!), but I would guess he’s probably got a lot of that from porn. Pornography, as well as promoting violence and degradation of women, is riven with racism and racialised views of what women from different parts of the world are “like” sexually. Women from the Philippines, who are clearly a group that gets Frank a bit hot and bothered, are some of the most abused and exploited people around the world, not just in the sex industry but also by employers of migrant workers in virtual slave conditions.
A Gauguin painting from Tahiti: One for Frank's wank bank
Frank also references the painter Paul Gauguin, just to prove how cultured he is (“there’s a wee bit of culture for you”). Gauguin is well known for ending his days in a Tahiti, a French colony that he regarded as a tropical paradise where he could shag natives to his heart’s content in between painting them. He’s a contradictory figure, as although he did argue with colonial authorities, his art is also responsible for helping develop exoticised, sexualised images of Polynesian women back in Europe.
Frank clearly isn’t the worst example of sexism and racism we could throw at you. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a casual sexist or racist. How would you feel, subjected to his leering gaze? Or if you learned that he’d described you as “dark and dusky”, with clear undertones of “a horny exotic native type.”
What we can take away from the whole affair is that Labour produces a certain class of idiotic, careerist fuckwit, who can mess things up again and again but always end up with a cushy job with a salary higher than most of us will ever earn. For a man like Frank, being in the Labour Party provides you with a great career path to not working too hard, long lunches, and plenty of women to perv over in the public gallery. It’s high time we recognised these chancers for what they are: not defenders of the Scottish working class who vote them in, but parasites making a life for themselves on our backs.
Today sees the launch of the 2010 football world cup in South Africa. It’s great news for football fans, and we’re playing our part with a world cup raffle (comment if you’d like to get a ticket!) and South Africa night for the final (watch this space for details.)
But great as it might be for us on the other side of the world to get a month of football to watch, the real costs of the tournament for South Africa are getting hidden amongst the excitement.
Over the next month we’re going to be bringing you a series of articles about South Africa, its history and long political struggles for democracy and socialism that are far from over.
Twenty years ago, holding the world cup in South Africa would have been unthinkable. The world at large refused to allow South Africa to participate in most major sporting events because of Apartheid, the state enforced system of extreme racial segregation and oppression.
But with the fall of Apartheid in the early 90s, the world’s media told us South Africa’s problems were solved. There was democracy, and a government elected by the black majority was finally in power.
Since then however, South African governments have turned away from the left wing ideas that inspired many in the struggle against Apartheid, and looked to global capitalism to solve South Africa’s problems.
The result has been that the majority of South Africans continue to live below the poverty lines, with millions of homeless and low rates of access to clean water or electricity. The average male life expectancy is just 49, and there are unemployment rates of 40%.
While so much has been spent on the world cup, the government still does not provide thousands with a proper home
The government has made the world cup an important part of its economic strategy, and has spent $4.1 billion on hosting the event, more than any other country before it. A series of brand new stadia have been built, driving an economic bubble in the construction industry. However, now that the work is done, the real question is, how much will South Africa actually benefit from the world cup?
Yesterday there were general strikes in Greece and the Basque Country. Last week workers in France and Italy walked out as well. Across Europe the working class is waking up to the threat posed by the attacks of European governments, but in the UK the response has still been quite muted.
Today sees the launch of the 2010 football world cup in South Africa. It’s great news for football fans, and we’re playing our part with a world cup raffle (comment if you’d like to get a ticket!) and South Africa night for the final (watch this space for details.)
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