Free Event.

           Anarchist Film Group are holding a free event/PowerPoint talk followed by a discussion, in the Electron club CCA 350 Sauchiehall Street, Tuesday 26th March 7pm.
            It's on direct action and community activism with specific examples covering housing issues, the 1984/85 miner's strike and the Poll Tax. The Speaker will be John Cooper, long standing member of https://spiritofrevolt.info He will be using material from our John Cooper Collection T SOR 3 and his own personal experiences. This is a must and should prove very interesting.
            If anyone is interested they are welcome to attend.

 

Image courtesy of The Guardian.

 

Visit ann arky at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

In This Economic System Brutality Repeats Itself.

 

        There is always talk of change, but in this capitalist system, certain things never change. I wrote this little piece back in 2012, and here we are in 2018 and the same  basic structure still continues. Wealth and power control our lives, that wealth and power is created by the daily grind of the ordinary people. We furnish them with the wealth and power to continue exploiting and controlling our quality of life.

February 2012:

       We should never forget that in any industrial struggle you are not only fighting your employer, but the powers that be. The authorities will always throw the full extent of their power in support of the employer and against the workers. You elect them and they support your employer, that's how the system works. That power can be police intimidation/brutality/provocation, to bringing the troops onto the streets to crush the resistance of the group in dispute. Britain is no different in that respect, we have had the troops on the streets on numerous occasions. Troops were put on the streets in Liverpool during the 1911 dockers strike, resulting in two strikers being shot dead on the street. Later in Glasgow 1919 during the 40 hour week struggle, once again the state brought troops on to the streets. That event in Glasgow became known as Bloody Friday. We can go away back to what was probably the first organised strike in the country and the then authorities ran true to form and brought the troops out against the strikers, that was the 1787 Glasgow weavers strike. Don't ever expect "YOUR" elected representatives to support you in any workers dispute, they support the system, which is one of exploitation and business orientated, your are just the replaceable wee cogs in their greed machine.

Let's jump forward, 1984/85 miners strike

       Of course it is not just industrial disputes that the full force of the wealth and power cabal will come down on the public. Any resistance to whatever  legislation they wish to force on to the public will be met with the same brutal onslaught, jump forward to 1990, remember the poll-tax? In that case it was a victory for the people.

       Real change for the benefit of all our people will only come when we demolish this greed driven exploitative, unjust system, and replace it with a society that is free from the profit motive, sees to the needs of all our people, and is built on sustainability.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Rent Strike To Bloody Friday, Part Of The Same Struggle.

 

     Friday, January, 1919, a date that we should never forget, that was the day that brought about the stationing of armed troops on Glasgow's streets, they were also stationed at entrances to the docks around the city. As is usual in these situations, it was the workers that had come up with the rational decision, To help alleviate the unemployment situation after WWI, the idea was to cut the working hours and try to soak up the unemployed. A 40 hour week was the suggestion, but the state and the employers would have none of that. By 30, January, 1919, 40,000 workers in the engineering and shipbuilding industries in Clydeside were out on strike, plus approximately 36,000 miners from the coalfields in Stirlingshire and Lanarkshire, who were also on strike. 

        On the Friday, January, 31, a demonstration, of an estimated 60,000 citizens, in support of the shorter working week took place on George Square. Unexpectedly and unannounced, the police attacked the demonstrators, an action that lead to all hell breaking out.

THE DEMONSTRATION, BLOODY FRIDAY.
On Friday 31 January 1919 upwards of 60,000 demonstrators gathered in George Square Glasgow in support of the 40-hours strike and to hear the Lord Provost's reply to the workers' request for a 40-hour week. Whilst the deputation was in the building the police mounted a vicious and unprovoked attack on the demonstrators, felling unarmed men and women with their batons. The demonstrators, including large numbers of ex-servicemen, retaliated with whatever was available, fists, iron railings and broken bottles, and forced the police to retreat. On hearing the noise from the square the strike leaders, who were meeting with the Lord Provost, rushed outside in an attempt to restore order. One of the leaders, David Kirkwood, was felled to the ground by a police baton, and along with William Gallacher was arrested.

       The situation was volatile, and the authorities were getting very nervous indeed. Our lorda and masters in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, feared what the state always fears, that the people were taking control of their own lives. Something had to be done, and the only answer the state ever has, is violent repression, and has no qualms about turning the military on its own people.

RIOTS AND ARRESTS.

After the initial confrontation between the demonstrators and the police in George Square, further fighting continued in and around the city centre streets for many hours afterwards. The Townhead area of the city and Glasgow Green, where many of the demonstrators had regrouped after the initial police charge, were the scenes of running battles between police and demonstrators. In the immediate aftermath of 'Bloody Friday', as it became known, other leaders of the Clyde Workers' Committee were arrested, including Emanuel Shinwell, Harry Hopkins and George Edbury.

TROOPS.

The strike and the events of January 31 1919 “Bloody Friday” raised the Government’s concerns about industrial militancy and revolutionary political activity in Glasgow. Considerable fears within government of a workers' revolution in Glasgow led to the deployment of troops and tanks in the city. A full battalion of Scottish soldiers stationed at Maryhill barracks in Glasgow at the time were locked down and confined to barracks, for fear they would side with the rioters, an estimated 10,000 English troops, along with Seaforth Highlanders from Aberdeen, who were first vetted to remove those with a Glasgow connection, and tanks were sent to Glasgow in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Friday. Soldiers with fixed bayonets marched with tanks through the streets of the City. There were soldiers patrolling the streets and machine guns on the roofs in George Square. No other Scottish troops were deployed, with the government fearing fellow Scots, soldiers or otherwise, would go over to the workers if a revolutionary situation developed in the area. It was the British state’s largest military mobilisation against its own people and showed they were quite prepared to shed workers’ blood in protecting the establishment.

        Of course "Bloody Friday" should not be seen in isolation, it didn't just spring up from nowhere, it was just one flashpoint along a long road of struggle by the ordinary people for a better life.

        Like all the events in political struggle it is difficult to trace the thread back to what brought it to this stage, Bloody Friday 1919 is no different. This was not just an attack on a large demonstration in Glasgow, it was the culmination of a series of radical events in Glasgow and the Clydeside area where the state showed its brutality. Perhaps we could even take it back to the 18th century and the radicals like Thomas Muir and others. However we can certainly take it back to the rent strikes of the first world war, the forming of the Labour Withholding Committee, (LWC) The Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) and the political climate of that period. 

A warehouse in the east end of Glasgow 1919.

    All of these events are lesson for us to learn from, solidarity, organisation, co-operation across our communities and our workplaces. Something we have to get to grips with in this more fragment type of society that we find ourselves living under. 

      Something else we should never forget, this wasn't the first time that the British establishment had brought out the military to break a strike. During the 1911 dockers strike, the military shot dead two strikers on the streets on the street in Liverpool.

Liverpool during the 1911 strike.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Striking Miners.

       And still on miners, striking Spanish miners show that quality that abounds in the working class, ingenuity.

      This video of striking Spanish coal miners during the 2012  miners strike. when they blocked roads and clashed with police inside a mine in the northern region of Asturias. Thanks arrezafe

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Exploited And The Exploiter.

      Another fine day, what a country, what a climate, I know, I know, but we really don't have to take into consideration, March, April, May, June, July or August. After all if that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, can leave out great big junks of necessary information, why can't I?

       The photo below, raised the question in my head, "why did I grow up with six of us, in a room and kitchen in Garngad, one of Glasgow's many stinking slums, with no hot water, and a shared outside toilet, while others lived in houses like the one in the photo, surrounded with trees?" Was it because my father didn't work hard enough? Well it certainly wasn't that. My father was a coal miner all his life, with all the obligatory injuries that go with the job. The only time he wasn't at work was during the miners strike after the first world war. During those lean years he would turn up at the boxing booths on Glasgow Green to go three rounds with their man, to earn bit extra cash to feed his family. He eventually retired with a strained heart and pneumoniconiosis. So what was it that made our houses so different? The answer is simple, I was born into a capitalist system of exploitation as one of the exploited and not one of the exploiters.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Workers Know Your History, Death On The Picket Line.

      Last March, at the start of the 30th. anniversary of the 1984/85 miners strike, Spirit of Revolt, along with Clydeside IWW and Glasgow Anarchist Collective, co-sponsored  a talk in Glasgow, by Dace Douglass. After the talk, Dave asked if we had any knowledge of a recording of The Ballad of Freddie Mathews. Freddie Mathews was a Hatfield miner who was killed while on the picket line.

      Sadly we drew a blank, nobody seemed to know of a recording, so I approached Alun Parry and asked if he could make a recording. This he done, and he will be performing it at the Hatfield Colliery Gala in Doncaster, later this month.

       Thanks Alun. Settle down and enjoy a tale from working class history and struggle.

After almost a year of bitter and brutal struggle, the strike ended on March 3rd. 1985.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Churchill's Jewish Conspiracy.

 

 The young imperialist Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

     At the moment, the babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is all a glow over Churchill. We are continually being told what a wonderful man he was, a great leader, a towering figure of courage, morality, and intellect. Like so many of those who are handed the reigns of power in this country, like the Cameron/Osborne cabal, he came from an aristocratic family, the Dukes of Marlborough. Like most of that ilke, he had a dysfunctional family life, farmed out to a "nanny", hardly spoke to his father and while at Harrow, wrote repeated letters to his mother begging her to come and visit him. It is also commonly known that he was overly keen on alcohol, to put it mildly, and among other repugnant beliefs, he was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini right up to 1937.

1st. Duke of Marlborough. His family still exerts power over us.

     What the babbling brook of bullshit will omit from their sickening syrupy spew about this rather blood thirsty aristocrat is his Gallipoli disaster, which saw him removed from is post as First Lord of the Admarlty. I also doubt if they will mention any of the facts listed below.

The voice of a man born into wealth, power and privilege

 all taken from Wikipedia:

     Another account said the police had the miscreants—Latvian anarchists wanted for murder—surrounded in a house, but Churchill called in the Scots Guards from the Tower of London and, dressed in top hat and astrakhan collar greatcoat, directed operations. The house caught fire and Churchill prevented the fire brigade from dousing the flames so that the men inside were burned to death. "I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals."[79]

    A major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".[97] He secured, from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet, intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation

   Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer oversaw Britain's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926.

      That Commission solved nothing and the miners' dispute led to the General Strike of 1926. Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, and during the dispute he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country" claiming that the fascism of Benito Mussolini "rendered a service to the whole world," showing "a way to combat subversive forces"—that is, he considered the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of communist revolution. At one point, Churchill went as far as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius ... the greatest lawgiver among men

      Churchill opposed Gandhi's peaceful disobedience revolt and the Indian Independence movement in the 1930s, arguing that the Round Table Conference "was a frightful prospect".[116] Later reports indicate that Churchill favoured letting Gandhi die if he went on a hunger strike.[117] During the first half of the 1930s, Churchill was outspoken in his opposition to granting Dominion status to India. He was a founder of the India Defence League, a group dedicated to the preservation of British power in India. Churchill brooked no moderation. "The truth is," he declared in 1930, "that Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed."[118]

      At a meeting of the West Essex Conservative Association, specially convened so that Churchill could explain his position, he said "It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace ... to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."

        In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India, Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn't died yet. In July 1940, newly in office, he welcomed reports of the emerging conflict between the Muslim League and the Indian Congress, hoping "it would be bitter and bloody".[118]

      Churchill's attitude towards the fascist dictators was ambiguous. After the First World War defeat of Germany, a new danger occupied the political consciousness—the spread of communism. A newspaper article penned by Churchill and published on 4 February 1920, had warned that world peace was threatened by the Bolsheviks, a movement which he linked through historical precedence to Jewish conspiracy.[136] He wrote in part:

    "This movement among Jews is not new ... but a "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality

        Churchill expressed a hope that Hitler, if he so chose, and despite his rise to power through dictatorial action, hatred and cruelty, might yet "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation and brought it back serene, helpful and strong to the forefront of the European family circle.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Dave Douglass In Glasgow, On The Miners Strike.

       On the 24th. September, 2014, in Glasgow, to mark the 30 anniversary of the 1984/85 miners strike, Dave Douglass was invited to give a talk on that momentous class struggle. The event was co-sponsored by Clydeside IWW, Spirit of Revolt, Glasgow Anarchist Collective, Radical Independent Bookfair, and Glasgow Anarchist Federation. The event proved to be very interesting, informative, and well attended. For those who missed it, they can now see the event on video, thanks to Bob at City Strolls.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Miners Strike In Glasgow.

      Wednesday evening Dave Douglas will be in Glasgow talking about the 1984/85 miners strike, a monumental class struggle that showed just how far the state will go to crush any working class resistance. It was the Thatcher era, the cull on the working class.

      Come along to the Fred Paton Centre, 19 Carrington St., G4 9AJ at 7pm and hear first hand experience of this legendary struggle, from a miner who was there and felt the wrath of the Thatcher state, come along and add your stories, ask questions, learn about your history. There will also be stalls and displays. an interesting and informative evening is guaranteed, and it is free.

     Carrington Street is between Great Western Road and West Princes Street, near St George's Cross, Glasgow.

      Dave talks in a Channel 4 special about what Thatcher meant to him: stoking a fire of donated old shoes just to keep his family warm through the winter.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Dave Douglass And The Miners Strike.

    I doubt if there is anyone, with even a passing interest in UK politics, who hasn't heard or read about the 1984/85 miner's strike. An event that lasted approximately a year, during which time the British state threw its full force of repression against the striking miners. It tried every tactic in its arsenal, short of tanks in the mining villages and towns, to crush the resistance of the miners. This epic working class struggle should not be forgotten, to this end several groups are organising and co-sponsoring a talk and discussion by Dave Douglass, a miner who was there.

     There will be an event to mark this struggle, organised by the Clydeside General Members Branch of the International Workers of the World and co-sponsored by Glasgow Anarchist Collective, Glasgow Anarchist Federation, Radical Independent Bookfair, and Spirit of Revolt. It will be held on Wednesday, September 24th. 7pm to 9pm, in the Fred Paton Centre, 19 Carrington Street Glasgow, and is a free event. Carrington Street is between Great Western Road and West Princes Street, not far from St George's Cross. There will also be stalls and displays, an event not to be missed

       Come along, hear about your history, and add your stories and opinions.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Miners' Strike And International Women's Day.

       International Women's Day, in 1910, in Copenhagen, a second International Conference of Working Women was held. At that conference Clara Zetkin (Leader of the 'Women's Office' for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) put forward the idea of an International Women's Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women's Day - to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women's clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin's suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women's Day was the result. 

 

 

       It is fitting that we celebrate the start the 30th anniversary of the miners strike, as we celebrate International Women's Day, for during that year long savage and bitter strike, the courage and solidarity of women is writ large. Throughout the miners strike, March 1984 to March 1985, women were an integral part of the struggle. They took their place in lines against the police brutality, they organised fundraisers, organised and ran soup kitchens, they battled on the streets, they were the cement that helped hold the mining communities together. Without the strength and backing of the women and the communities, the strike would have been quickly crushed.

 

       International Women's Day is a day when we can pay homage to all those women who selflessly fought to improve the conditions of not just women, but all humankind. Women who struggled to improve working conditions, for justice, for peace, for unity of all ordinary people. The miners strike was not just about miners and pit closures, it was about communities and an attempt to stop the devastation of those communities, and women were an inseparable part and parcel of that struggle. That is why the women of the miners strike can take their place on that roll of honour, not only of women, but of working class heroes.

 

  

   Every country, every city, every town, has its roll of honour of such women, perhaps not publicly displayed but it will be there, in folklore, in song, in theatre and poem. Glasgow can be proud of its list of women who fought injustice where they saw it, some struggled away in obscurity, some in the limelight of publicity, all paid their part in improving our lives. Today more than ever we need our women heroes, we need the unity of all men and women to combat the savage onslaught against our living standards. Today more than ever people have to stand up and join hands in solidarity with all people's across the globe.
      Here are just a few of Glasgow's women from our recent past that are worthy of being honoured today.

Mary Barbour, Ethel MacDonald, Helen Crawfurd, Agnes Dollan, Jenny Patrick, Rita Milton, who would you add to this list, there are hundreds if not thousands, from which to choose. Where are our modern Mary Barbour's, where is today's Ethel MacDonald? Can you name them?

       "It is not by changing ministers - such guilty men! - or issuing declarations that fascism will be conquered. The problem is more complex than that. We do not intend to add our voice to those who delude the workers that their 'leaders' will get them out of the mess. The problems need a complete transformation in the present attitude of the working class." Marie Louise Berneri From; War Commentary, December 1940.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk