March 2010

Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand And Political Television Drama

The Genesis of Bill Brand.

"The political mini-series is by no means foreign to television as examples such as Washington Behind Closed Doors (1977), Blind Ambition (1979), The West Wing (1999-2006), and the 1975 Granada TV British television series The Nearly Man (featuring Tony Britton as a right-wing Labour MP) all show. But rather than interrogating political elements influencing individual lives they often focus upon personal melodramatic issues. In this way they fall within familiar conventions of the type of television drama that Griffiths sought both to utilize and subvert. Personal relationships do occupy key levels of Bill Brand but they are never divorced from the historical and political context of a society that attempts to control individual lives and from which some form of different alternative direction is needed. Since Griffiths has spoken of the significant "detail of the lives of the characters" in this series, it is important to analyze how each episode functions according to this particular type of dramatic process. Transmitted during the summer of 1976 within the 9pm slot following the news program World in Action and preceding News at Ten, the series developed a contrast first sketched in Griffiths' early 1974 BBC One Play for Today "All Good Men" between the reformist tendencies of the Labour Party's version of Parliamentary democracy and another alternative radical tradition constantly betrayed by this party whenever it gained power. Could any form of significant change occur within Westminster on the part of a progressive individual who has left the International Socialists to attempt change from within the system? Alternatively, should other forms of personal and political struggle become preeminent? Such issues dominated every episode and are still relevant today perhaps explaining why this series has never been repeated since its original broadcast or available on DVD in England."

Excerpt from Tony Williams review in The November 3rd Club

The full review can be read at: http://www.november3rdclub.com/2010/02-2010/nonfiction/williams.html

Bill Brand is available to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

February 2010

Second Time Around - A classic revisited

Herald Angels
Bill Hagerty

The Miracle of Fleet Street: the Story of the Daily Herald, by George Lansbury (Labour Publishing Company, 1925, price unknown; republished by Spokesman Books, 20009, pp168, £15.00)

This is not exactly the whole story of what, in the early 1930s, was to become Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper. Those wishing to learn about the ferocious pre-Second World War circulation battles, or the anguished slide that saw the paper metamorphose into the short-lived IPC Sun before being given garish new clothes and soaring away under the control of fledgling emperor Rupert Murdoch, must look elsewhere.

Having been born in 1911 as a daily strike-bulletin when London print Unions came out for a 48-hour working week, and resurrected the following year with capital of around £300 as a co-operative Labour venture, the Herald had been publishing consistently for only 13 years when Labour leader-to-be Lansbury recounted its trials and tribulations - there were many - on the way to relative stability.

An editorial published on October 26, 1912 told of the campaign to put the paper on a sound financial footing and how a woman had visited the House of Commons to tell Lansbury: "My husband has sent me with this message. 'We have only saved a little, but here is £50. Do not let the Daily Herald die'." A Socialist parson presents a cheque for £150, while "another man" said: "Let the landlord go hang for his rent. I am sending it to you." "Was there ever a daily newspaper that had such wonderful support as we are getting?" asked the editorial.

Probably not. But never before or since has there been a similar David of a newspaper struggling, against the Goliath of capitalism, on behalf of which most newsprint manufacturers later refused to supply a paper that was pro-women’s suffrage and supported both the Russian revolution and trades union strikes. Agents scoured the country to buy paper secretly.

Having been able to publish only weekly during the First World War, the Herald campaigned on behalf of workers both in print and with a series of rallies, another of which was planned, to support Labour and to announce that daily publication would shortly be resumed, in November 1918 at the Royal Albert Hall. Four days before the meeting, with 19,000 people having requested tickets, the Hall management cancelled the contract, citing "demonstrations of a revolutionary nature" at previous meetings. Time for the workers of the world to unite: the Electrical Trades Union removed all the fuses from the Hall and suggested that unless permission to use it was restored the whole of Kensington might be plunged into darkness. Oh, and no trains would stop at local stations and taxi drivers would not ply for hire near the Hall. Thousands had to be turned away from the two meetings that subsequently took place.

From its very beginning the Herald produced challenging journalism - the headline "Women and children last!" swiftly followed the loss of the Titanic, which sank and drowned more than half the children travelling in steerage as the first issue of the paper was going to press. Observed the Herald of the White Star Line’s profits: "They have paid 30 per cent to their shareholders and they have sacrificed 51 per cent of the steerage children."

Most opposition papers remained hostile to the Herald, and after Lansbury visited Russia in 1920, Lloyd George’s Government proclaimed it had evidence that diamonds brought to London by a Russian delegation had sold for between £40,000 and £50,000 and the "Bolshevik gold" donated to the paper. The Herald famously insisted that "NOT A BOND, NOT A FRANC, NOT A ROUBLE", though confirming that £75,000 had been offered and pointing out that "if we accepted the offer from Russia (with which this country has been technically at peace since 1855...), we should have done nothing dishonourable and we should not be at all ashamed of ourselves". Such intrigue, such drama; what a movie the early years of the Herald would make.

Lansbury, an MP and the chief shareholder early on, became editor by accident, pitchforking himself into the role for a nine-year tenure in1913 after several predecessors had lurched from one calamity to another. "How many more years of life remain for me, it is impossible to say," he wrote, "but whatever the future may be ... nothing can happen to me which will bring me more satisfaction or more joy than the memory of these great years spent in company with, and service for, the readers and friends of the Daily Herald."

The paper was owned from 1922 by the TUC and the Labour Party, with Odhams Press obtaining 51 per cent in 1929. Lansbury lived to see sales top two million in1933 and died seven years later, long before his dreams were shattered by savage decline and the beginning of the end with the 1961 takeover by IPC, then a publishing giant dominated by Mirror Group. In republishing Lansbury’s long-neglected book - a love story encumbered only by too much detail of political skirmishes - Spokesman has restored an important chapter of newspaper and social history.

© Bill Hagerty, British Journalism Review December 2009

Public cost of private benefit - A review

Global Auction of Public Assets
Dexter Whitfield
£18.00

Dexter Whitfield has been one of the most well-informed and effective critics of the whole programme of privatisation of Britain's public services, begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by New Labour. He is the director of the European Services Strategy Unit, continuing the work of the Centre for Public Services, which he founded in 1973, and has more recently sought to spread his critique worldwide, as more and more countries have begun to move their social infrastructure from a public service into private profit-making businesses. This new book is the result of this extension of his interest. It is, as were his earlier books on the attack on UK public services, both thoroughly researched and immaculately presented.

What began as a specifically British exercise by Thatcher to strengthen the power of capital in relation to labour has been taken up by giant corporations of capital operating in both the developed and developing world. It is the claim of all the new forms of infrastructure organisation that they are public private partnerships is generally a very unequal one.

Dexter Whitfi eld describes it as 'public cost and private benefit'. In this book he presents detailed accounts ot PPPs not only in Europe, where his new strategy unit is based, but in the US, Australia, South Africa, India, Brazil, Russia and even China. As the PPPs spread across the world, more and more of the giant international finance and commercial corporations become involved. Whitfield concludes that, because the relative scale of manufacturing in the g1oba1 economy is declining, investment in the infrastructure becomes of increasing interest for international capital.

The privatisation process began with the physical infrastructure the railways and roads, energy supplies and telecommunications. But Whitfield shows how it is being extended into social provision. The privatisation of social infrastructure has been seen by many commentators simply as a means for governments to finance projects, especially buildings, without increasing their capital expenditure beyond their budget limits. The PPP private partners, however, have begun increasingly to take over more responsibility for whole projects - not just for the building, but for the governance management, consultancy, employment of staff, receipt of revenues, and reinvestment of funds.

This has the effect of removing from national or local public control and accountability the operation of social services. Health and education are key examples, where Whitfield shows particular cases of the shift in responsibilities for a social service.

The analysis in this book is closely related to the latest developments in the worldwide financial crisis and in governments' responses to the dangers of climate change. Whitfield is able to show the extent to which the private ownership of public assets, and the income streams flowing from them, are used by financial institutions as leverage for further profitable lending. The state guarantees that are generally present in social infrastructure provide a base for private speculative activity in what has become a casino of public finances.

At the same time, the effects of climate change are demanding increasing expenditure from governments on national infrastructure that can provide some degree of protection against rising sea levels, more and more damaging storms, heavier rainfall in some areas, drought in others. Extended investment to meet these demands cannot be left to a casino,

The arguments that have been employed in favour of privatisation are shown by Whitfield to be largely spurious. The chief of these is that the costs in the public sector are higher than in private provision. Whitfield shows this is manifestly untrue when all costs incurred in the long run are taken into account.

It is also said that public projects frequently over-run their budget in time and cost. Whitfield shows that such claims are seriously flawed and cannot always be checked because so-called commercial secrecy can be invoked by private suppliers to prevent publication.

Finally, there is an argument about innovatory design and managerial efficiency, which is said to favour privatisation. This can be easily refuted by the large number of PPP projects that Whitfield lists as abandoned, distressed or failed.

It is a pretty well unanswerable case that Whitfield mounts in defence of the public sector - and well worth quoting for its wide-ranging assembly of the evidence.

Michael Barratt Brown in Red Pepper, Feb/March 2010

BUY ONLINE NOW

Regime Changers Anonymous

The Spokesman 107
Edited by Ken Coates

'The Security Service was officially launched in 1909 with a staff of two, who were supposed to defend the realm against Germany. Later they made a painless adjustment and began to defend it against Russia. As the two engaged ever larger numbers of accomplices it became clear that the realm which they defended consisted of ever smaller tracts of establishment England, setting its bounds somewhat short of the area occupied by the masses of the British common people ...

... What can be done to clip the wings of all these spooks? Well, first of all, as far as the junior members of the team are concerned, substantial cuts can be made in their budgets. What precisely is all this intrigue for? How is it to be justified? It should surely be possible to control the expenditures of this kind of service in such a way as to reduce them to a minimum.

Then we shall be told that we need an intelligence service to apprehend terrorists. There are, unfortunately, numerous problems which the anti-terrorist services closely share with the warriors against subversion ... At the very least, there is a case for a close enquiry into this aspect of intelligence work. To learn the lessons of the wave of student arrests in Lancashire early in 2009 might be to discover some arguments for stringent budgetary controls.

But, disturbing though the activities of junior officials may be, the huge and overriding question which hangs over our political system, is how to get the spooks off the Downing Street sofas and to put politics in command.'

Ken Coates, excerpts from his Editorial. The full text can be read here.


CONTENTS:
Regime Changers Anonymous - Ken Coates
Fixing the Intelligence? - Tony Simpson
Law and War - Lord Goldsmith
The legality of the invasion of Iraq - Lord Steyn
Who killed David Kelly? - David Halpin

****

Haiku - Alexis Lykiard
Gallows - John Arden
The US and Israel - Noam Chomsky
Al Rabweh - John Berger
The Dice Player - Mahmoud Darwish

Reviews: Bruce Kent, Stan Newens, John Daniels,
Michael Barratt Brown, Romy Clark and Abi Rhodes


You can buy this issue or subscribe to The Spokesman from our website.

January 2010

Bill Brand - the screenplays

Tribune 8th January 2010

"Trevor Griffiths is best known for stage plays such as Thatcher’s Children, Oi for England and the recently revived Comedians, as well as his screenplays for such films as Reds and Fatherland. But 30-odd years ago he wrote Bill Brand, an ambitious television series broadcast on ITV at peak time - 9pm - in 1976. It starred Jack Shepherd as an idealistic young left-wing MP who finds himself at odds with the pragmatists in a party which wants to hang on to power. Bill Brand showed, once again, the ability of this talented political playwright to dramatise the ideological conflicts of the left during those tumultuous years. Here, in all their glory, are his original scripts." Keith Richmond

Availble to BUY NOW from Spokesman Books

December 2009

Bill Brand - the screenplays

This latest volume in the Trevor Griffiths series contains all eleven episodes of the celebrated 1976 Thames TV series Bill Brand, which was the fictional account of a young left-wing Labour MP entering Parliament for the first time and attempting to influence the policies of his largely right-wing Labour government.

The series was conceived on election night in 1974, written and produced over the following two years and transmitted in 1976. This was a time of great political and industrial unrest in Britain; it produced the first minority government (under Harold Wilson) since 1931, and Bill Brand was watched with extreme interest by both the political classes and the wider population. At times it seemed almost uncannily prophetic; and many of the issues it dealt with remain of great contemporary relevance.

The series starred Jack Shepherd as Bill Brand, Arthur Lowe as the Prime Minister, Alan Badel, Peter Howell, Lynne Farleigh, Cherie Lunghi and many other distinguished actors.

Bill Brand has never been shown again, nor is it at present available commercially on dvd. This book is therefore a unique record of a unique television event.

"... tells us more about Parliament, constituency politics and the Labour Party than the combined writings of most of the Westminster drama critics who masquerade as political commentators." New Statesman

"The most remarkable serial ever seen on the box."
Sunday Times


978 085124 763 2 - £18.00 - 300 pages - paperback - Available to BUY NOW.

*****
In April 2009, Trevor Griffiths attended a screening of his 1997 BBC film, Food for Ravens, at Side Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. Exploring the difficulties in making this wonderful drama about Aneurin Bevan, his talk became an impassioned critique of the way British television has gone.

To watch this video (December 2009 only) please go to http://www.sidetv.net/.

The Dodgiest Dossier

Essential reading as the Chilcot Inquiry into the war on Iraq begins its public hearings in London, 24 November.

These key secret documents include the notorious Downing Street Memo of July 2002, which recorded the candid assessment of the head of MI6, in the presence of Prime Minister Blair, that in the United States 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy'. The documents were leaked in 2005, during the run-up to the General Election of that year. Their authors are amongst the first witnesses to be called by the Inquiry.

A useful and informative independent commentary on the Iraq Inquiry is available online (www.iraqinquirydigest.org).

November 2009

A New Book by Dexter Whitfield

Global Auction of Public Assets

Public infrastructure in the 21st century is confronted with new challenges; adapting to climate change, meeting the economic, energy, water, transportation and social infrastructure needs of megacities in Asia, megaregions in North America, European city regions and older industrial areas.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and the global infrastructure market, financed by investment and pension funds, are fuelling a new era of public asset sales. This first critical global analysis of PPPs examines projects in the UK, France, Ireland, Germany, US, Canada, Russia, Australia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. Over US$500bn of PPP projects have failed, most have little or no democratic control or transparency. They are costly, poor value and lack innovation. Ultimately, they are entirely publicly financed by government and/or user charges.

Global Auction of Public Assets proposes a new strategy for public investment. It sets out new priorities, radical changes in global financial markets, abandonment of PPPs and neo-liberal ideology, new controls on existing PPPs and public management renewal. This is a definitive analysis and an invaluable resource for all those concerned about the future of the public domain.

Dexter Whitfield is Director of European Services Strategy Unit and Adjunct Associate Professor, Australian Institute for Social Research, University of Adelaide. He has a unique, extensive track record of research, policy analysis and strategic advice to public bodies, trade unions and community organizations (www.european-services-strategy.org.uk).

Global Auction of Public Assets is available to buy online from Spokesman Books.

Comedians at the Lyric, London

"Set in a Manchester working-class evening centre in the mid-1970s, the date of its writing, Comedians eschews political theory, professional ideologues and historically sourced discourse on political revolution all the perceived hallmarks of my earlier pieces in favour of a more or less unmediated address on a range of particular contemporary issues including class, gender, race and society in modern Britain."
Trevor Griffiths writing in Theatre Plays (published in two volumes by Spokesman Books, price £15 each)

An acclaimed new production of Comedians , directed by Sean Holmes, continues at the Lyric Hammersmith until 14th November 2009. Some reviews can be read via our Trevor Griffithspage.

Theatre Plays One includes Comedians, The Wages of Thin, Occupations, Sam Sam, Apricots, Thermidor, The Party, The Cherrry Orchard

Theatre Plays Two includes Oi for England, Real Dreams, Piano, The Gulf between Us, Thatcher’s Children, Who Shall Be Happy?, Camel Station


Also available:
These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine (price £15). This screenplay gave rise to the theatre play A New World, which recently finished its highly successful run at Shakespeare's Globe.

Sons and Lovers: Screenplay of the novel by D.H.Lawrence (Price £7.95)

October 2009

Gerrard Winstanley 400th Anniversary Meeting

A celebration of the work and ideas of
GERRARD WINSTANLEY

7pm, Thursday 19th November 2009,

Speakers: Thomas Corns, University of Bangor, co-author of a biography of John Milton, and Ann Hughes, University of Keele, author of "The Causes of the English Civil War" (1998)

Venue: Russell Room, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (Tube: Holborn).

"Fortunately for posterity, there was among the Diggers a man of rare talent and originality, Gerrard Winstanley, who has left behind him in his voluminous writings a record of the faith and beliefs with which he inspired this movement ... Suddenly, in this year (1648), his interest turned to politics and he wrote the most characteristic of his books, The New Law of Righteousness, which is in reality a Communist Manifesto written in the dialect of its day. Throughout the next year, 1649-50, he was the life and pen of the Diggers' adventure. When that failed, after writing Fire in the Bush, a defence of his ideas addressed to the churches, he published in 1652 the most mature of his books, The Law of Freedom in a Platform. It was dedicated, in an eloquent and plain-spoken address, to Cromwell, whom it summoned to lay the foundations of a communist commonwealth. The sketch of a classless society that follows is a deeply interesting blend of the radical democracy professed by the main body of the Levellers with the communism of More's Utopia and a secularism that was Winstanley's own."
Source: The Levellers and the English Revolution by H. N. Brailsford (Spokesman, £18)

Tom Corns and Ann Hughes, two of the editors of a comprehensive new collection of Winstanley's writings, will speak about Winstanley's ideas and their relevance today.

The event is entirely free. Refreshments will be provided.

For further information see:
www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk
www.conwayhall.org.uk

Visit our Levellers page for more of our titles on the English Revolution

September 2009

'Constructive Bloodbath' in Indonesia

Spokesman Books have published 'Constructive Bloodbath' in Indonesia: The United States, Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-66, by Nathaniel Mehr, with a foreword by Carmel Budiardjo.

It is receiving postive reviews, as these two notices show:
Joyo Indonesia News - David Jardine
Jakarta Globe - Armando Siahaan

August 2009

CIA: The Pike Report

Introduced by Philip Agee

" ... the work of the Pike Committee and the other bodies is an exceedingly positive chapter in American history. Who would have dreamed, two years ago, that such a great volume of information on secret American intervention in foreign countries would ever be made public? Who would have dreamed that the vast, illegal domestic operations of the CIA, FBI and NSA would be revealed in great detail? Every bit of this information, together with the general methodology that emerges, can be used by people and organizations to protect themselves now and when the next wave of the same occurs. No doubt wide areas of CIA operations were omitted almost entirely, such as those in the trade union field, but no one can say the world's knowledge of secret intervention hasn't improved thanks to the investigations.

Of equal importance is the continuing strength of the best popular traditions in the United States that the investigations demonstrate: the free flow of information, resistance to oppression by government bureaucracy, resistance to government secrecy and coverups. Through the effective functioning of these traditions Americans have been able to learn how necessary corruption and hypocrisy are to the way the current system operates. Abolition of covert action operations, which corrupt the country's expressed principles, cannot come until fundamental changes are made in other institutions. Meanwhile, the treasure of knowledge gained through the investigations must surely contribute to the understanding that government in a "liberal" society must of necessity function in favour of one class and to the detriment of another.

In July 1976 the chief investigator of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, who had been trying since March to discover how the copies of Parts I and II of the Pike Report were leaked to Daniel Schorr, reported that nearly 50 copies of the report were in different executive and congressional offices when the leak occurred. None of the 207 government officials questioned, including Secretary Kissinger and the members of the Pike Committee, would admit to being the culprit. Thanks to one of them, at least, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation is able to present for the first time in book form Parts I, II and III of the Pike Report, a document of truly historic significance not only for Americans but also for peoples the world over who have suffered from clandestine American intervention."

Introduction by Philip Agee, Cambridge, August, 1976

June 2009

Thomas Paine Events

Thomas Paine died in Greenwich Village 200 years ago this week, a long way from Thetford in Norfolk, where he grew up and worked as a young stay-maker. There are celebrations already under way around the country to remember him, some of which are listed below:

4th -14th JULY 2009, LEWES
Paine lived an worked for some time in Lewes which is holding a festival around Paine's stay. For more details please visit: http://www.thomaspaineandlewes.com/


29th AUGUST - 9th OCTOBER AT SHAKESPERARE'S GLOBE
A New World
The much loved and greatly respected writer Trevor Griffiths (Comedians, Reds) fill this moving story of the life and loves of the author of The Rights of Man with songs, music and the huge carnival spirit of a world turned upside down. In association with Richard Attenborough.
http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/anewworld/

11th SEPTEMBER 2009 AT SHAKESPEARE'S GLOBE
Playwright Trevor Griffiths joins a public panel discussion to explore the writing and staging of A New World, his drama set during the late eighteenth century and inspired by the life of Thomas Paine.

Discussion starts at 6pm, a performance of the play follows at 7.30pm.
http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/globeeducation/publicevents/talksandlectures/


19th SEPTEMBER - 7th NOVEMBER 2009, THETFORD
Tom Paine 200 Autumn Lecture Series. For more details please visit: http://www.tompaine200.org.uk/

Tom Paine Remembered - 8 June Old Red Lion London

THESE ARE THE TIMES - TOM PAINE REMEMBERED

Readings and Discussion to mark the 200th anniversary
of Tom Paine’s death

9 - 10.30pm, Monday 8th June 2009, Old Red Lion Theatre,
Angel, London.

With Tony Benn, sculptor Michael Sandle, publisher Tony Simpson, musician Elizabeth Green and Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, alongside contributions from actor and playwright Jack Shepherd and writer Mike Marqusee.

*

An intimate event, on the 200th anniversary itself of Tom Paine's death, to celebrate and discuss the enduring legacy of one of the most influential radical writers and thinkers in history, at Islington's Old Red Lion Theatre, where Paine actually wrote some of his profoundly important work The Rights of Man.

Featuring a rehearsed reading, directed by and featuring Neil Sheppeck of Love and Madness Theatre, of Jack Shepherd’s play In Lambeth, imagining a meeting between William Blake and Tom Paine.

*

Tickets: £7, £5 (concs. Please provide or bring evidence when booking).

Box Office: 020 7837 7816; www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk

Note: there is a strictly limited capacity. Please book early and arrive promptly.

Old Red Lion Theatre, 418 St John Street, London, EC1V 4NJ.

*

Spokesman Books will run a bookstall featuring:

These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine - an original screenplay by Trevor Griffiths, which follows Tom Paine from persecution in England, to the American War of Independence, to Revolutionary France. It has recently been adapted for theatre and A New World makes its world premiere at Shakespeare's Globe later this year (29th August - 9th October).

Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good - edited by Joyce Chumbley & Leo Zonneveld, includes a photo tour in the footsteps of Tom Paine.

And, the new issue of The Spokesman, featuring Peter Linebaugh's article, Tom Paine ... Two, Three, Many Revolutions, which picks up where President Obama left off in the unattributed quotations from Thomas Paine that concluded his inaugural address in January.

May 2009

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91.

In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas. He had originally collected together this volume of his A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'.

James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface.

Here are the opening lines of the title poem No More Hiroshimas:

At the station exit, my bundle in hand,
Early the winter afternoon’s wet snow
Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun.
I had forgotten to remember where I was.
Looking about, I see it might be anywhere -
A station, a town like any other in Japan,
Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully
Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, ‘Atomic
Lotion, for hair fall-out,’ a flimsy department store;
Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves
Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons,
Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows
Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs of tuna, oysters, ice,
Ablaze with fans of soiled nude-picture books
Thumbed abstractedly by schoolboys, with second-hand looks.

There will shortly be a memorial event for James Kirkup in his home town of South Shields.

The Spokesman and Palestine

Following on from Spokesman 103, Unholy Land, our new issue, Revolutions, continues with the Palestine question.

John Dugard writes on Apartheid in Palestine.

Richard Falk (UN Special Rapporteur on the situationof human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967) reports on the 'Human Rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab Territories.'

Nurit Peled, co-founder of Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents for Peace, encourages people 'to arise and go to Gaza ... or to any other city of oppression in Palestine to see with their own eyes the horrifying ghettoes ... '

Ken Coates situates the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in the context of earlier Russell Tribunals.

George Galloway MP dissects the Charity Commission's obstruction of his remarkable efforts to provide help fpr Gaza.

The Spokesman is available to buy now through our website or any good bookshop.

March 2009

Unholy Land - The Spokesman 103

‘The first King Herod was born in 73 BC and followed a military career, starting out as a general his fame among present generations is attributable to the Gospel of St. Matthew, which tells us that the King sent for the wise men who famously came from the East to Jerusalem and asked them where the Christ should be born. They told him that He would arrive in Bethlehem of Judaea, whereupon Herod sent them to search diligently for the young child ‘that I may come and worship him also’. But the wise men were too wise to fall for that one, although according to Matthew they had the advantage of being ‘warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod’. Be that as it may, ‘they departed into their own country another way’. At this point, an angel told Joseph to take the young child and his mother ‘and flee into Egypt for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him’.

With his victims holed up safely in Egypt, Herod ‘was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under’. Herod’s mercenaries would have found it a painfully difficult labour to slaughter all the infants of Bethlehem and its environs. Today’s Herod has not been dependent on old-fashioned butchery with its exhausting exertions involving swords and knives, but can instead call up massive assistance, which supplies unlimited numbers of bombs containing phosphorus and depleted uranium, and augments them with DIME munitions and F-16s.

It was with such amenities that the modern Israelis were able to massacre 1,380 people in Gaza, of whom 431 were children. We must admit that these will prove to be provisional figures, although they have been provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Five thousand three hundred and eighty people were known to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as having been injured. Eight hundred of these were women and one thousand eight hundred and seventy two were children. All this damage was inflicted during the first phase of the recent war. That future phases may well follow seems highly likely. But the world has not yet fully digested the horrors unleashed upon it in early January 2009.’

Excerpts from Ken Coates’ The Second Coming of King Herod

Available to buy now.

January 2009

Tony Bunyan for Statewatch

"well-researched and very credible and frightening." Tony Benn, Jan 2009

The Shape of Things to Come: The EU Future Group
By Tony Bunyan of Statewatch

The Shape of Things to Come examines the European Union’s plans for justice and home affairs, and warns that the Union is embarked on several highly controversial paths. These include: using the ‘digital tsunami’ to create a surveillance society for law enforcement purposes by gathering personal details on the everyday lives of everyone living in the European Union; allowing law enforcement and security agencies, in collaboration with multinational companies, to determine new technologies to be introduced – including recording details of all phone and mobile phone calls and internet usage; removing ‘obstacles’ (judicial authorisation) to the exchange of intelligence between all European Union agencies; and the outrageous idea that a Euro-Atlantic area of co-operation with the United States should be set up to decide on policies fundamentally affecting the rights and liberties of the people of Europe.

Also questioned is the undemocratic decision-making procedure under which 27 EU governments will agree the ‘Stockholm Programme’ that will set in stone the measures to be introduced. The book ends with a warning that, unless we have an open and meaningful debate now, we never will, because it will already be too late.

To order this title on our website visit our Socialist Renewal page.

December 2008

The Levellers and The Devil's Whore

The Levellers and the English Revolution
H.N. Brailsford
Edited by Christopher Hill

'To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution it was the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious New Model army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive.'
H.N. Brailsford.

The Levellers continue to inspire public interest. Free-born John Lilburne (pictured above) and Thomas Rainsborough are central to Channel 4's four part series about the English Civil War, The Devil's Whore.

For more information about Brailsford's seminal work and other relevant titles, please see The Levellers page.

November 2008

Ending War: A Recipe

By Robert Hinde

'Not this year, not in my lifetime, perhaps in yours, and with a strong probability in my grandchildren's lifetimes, war will be seen as an unacceptable way of settling disputes between states. The aim of this book is to hasten the day.' Robert Hinde, British Pugwash Group

The author was a Coastal Command Pilot, flying Catalinas and Sunderlands, in World War Two. After the war he worked as a biologist/psychologist at Cambridge University. He was appointed a Royal Society Research Professor in 1963, and was Master of St. John's College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1994. He is Deputy Chair (recently Chair) of the British Pugwash Group, Patron of the Movement for the Abolition of War, and Patron of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness Programme. The British Pugwash Group is an affiliate of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.

October 2008

Tom Paine's Bi-centenary Celebrations

An early start to celebrations to mark Thomas Paine's
bi-centenary (he died in 1809) begin in November at Diss Corn Hall.

At 8pm on Friday 7th November Mark Steel kick starts the festivities, which continue through to June 2009, when Trevor Griffiths will read from his screenplay These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine. Further details of this nearer the time.

For tickets to see Mark Steel contact Diss Library or Tourist Information Centre

Community Development Journal Seminar

The Politics of Community 40 Years on

To celebrate the Community Development Journal's 40th Year Anniversary, we have commissioned an International Reader of articles featured in the Journal during this period, which represent the richness and diversity in community development theory and practice, and its changing focus.

We are celebrating the Reader's launch with a free seminar, to be followed by refreshments. All are welcome, including students, practitioners, academics, policy-makers and anybody interested in the politics of community.

Friday 10 October 2008 2 - 4 pm

London South Bank University
Manor Lecture Theatre,
London Road Building
110 London Road, SE1 6LN

Panel:
Tony Benn
Amanda Greenwood, Community Development Xchange
Akwugo Emejulu, University of Strathclyde
Gary Craig, Co-Editor Community Development in Theory and Practice: An International Reader

Chair: Mandy Wilson, Community Development Journal

To book a place, please send your completed booking form to Sally Eserin at LSBU on eserins@lsbu.ac.uk

Please note, Elephant and Castle is the nearest tube station.

Truth and War - John Pilger

New Statesman - 29th September 2008
John Pilger writes:

... Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of the "gravest threats posed by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years". He describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east". The result, writes Cohen, "is a US -built reverse iron curtain and a US denial that Russia has any legit­imate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 ... the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era."

This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again grow US -Russian relations as "a duel to the death - perhaps literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a "pariah". Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, "when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.

*Stephen Cohen's article, The New American Cold War, is reprinted in full in the current issue of The Spokesman, published by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

This is an exerpt from John Pilger's article. The full text is available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/09/pilger-russia-british-britain

September 2008

The Convention of the Left

From Saturday 20th to Wednesday 24th September 2008 the Convention of the Left gathers together in Manchester under the banner 'Another World is Possible', at the same time as the Labour Party comes to town.

"This bold venture comes as a result of people from different left and radical traditions – or none – getting together in Greater Manchester to say that there IS an alternative ... "

Commencing at 12.30pm on Saturday with the Stop the War/CND demonstration, which assembles at All Saints, Cavendish Street, Manchester, the first session of the Convention follows at 3.00pm in the Friends Meeting House in Mount Street.

The Final Programme for the many events, meetings and discussions which are taking place over the five day Convention is available from www.conventionoftheleft.org. Wednesday is 'Peace' day and is a must for those who want to give Peace a chance.

Spokesman Books will attend the Covention. Copies of the new issue of The Spokesman - Tskhinvali: Shock and Awe will be on sale at the bookstall.

Tskhinvali

Georgia's War

"On 7th August 2008, President Saakashvili of Georgia launched an all-out military assault on the capital town of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali. The town was partly destroyed. Estimates of civilian deaths vary, between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Precise figures may become available quite soon, now that it is possible to recover and bury the dead*. Thirty-four thousand South Ossetians fled to the neighbouring territory of North Ossetia, which is part of the Federal Russian State, and they can all talk. They have been doing so incessantly, telling stories of untrammelled brutality ... "

This is an excerpt from Ken Coates' editorial in the most recent issue of The Spokesman

Read more about Georgia's War.

*On 28 August 2008, South Ossetia’s Prosecutor General reported that 1,692 deaths
resulted from Tbilisi’s August offensive. ‘We have information of 1,692 dead and 1,500 injured as a result of the Georgian aggression,’ Russian Interfax news agency quoted Teimuraz Khugayev as saying.