Author Archives: Gerry Gable

A massive win for all workers

The Supreme Court has ruled that employment tribunal fees are unlawful in a case brought by Unison. Reacting to the decision, Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis commented on 26 July:

Today’s Supreme Court ruling is the most significant judicial intervention in the history of British employment law. This result is a massive win for our union and a massive win for all workers, whether they’re UNISON members or not.

Working people who need protection the most – low-paid workers, the vulnerable and those treated poorly by their employers – were denied access to justice by employment tribunal fees.

The government infringed EU law, constitutional law and even the Magna Carta with a piece of legislation explicitly designed to deny working people their rights. Today, the Supreme Court has righted a terrible wrong and sided with those the government sought to silence. This ruling shows that rights are only meaningful if they can be upheld – that’s a principle with significant implications for all of our rights and protections as we head towards Brexit.

This result has been a long time coming and has involved years of hard work. Our challenge to the then coalition government – including the Liberal Democrats and their so-called progressive values – was of course legal. It was also a moral struggle – one of those moments where something is so clearly and blatantly unjust that it is imperative to challenge it by any means possible.

The government’s attacks on public service employees as a result of austerity had already hit UNISON members hard in terms of pay, jobs and services – to then turn on their right to legal recourse was the final straw.

I knew as soon as the legislation was introduced that our union had to take a stand, especially when it had such a clear and direct discriminatory impact upon our million women members. Back then I promised UNISON members at our conference that we’d take this fight to the highest court in the land to fight for their rights. Today we can say that we did that, we fought, and we won.

I made a promise to our union that whatever it took – however many years and whatever the cost – I wanted our union to take this case. This was more than a legal case – it was a moral case.

Doing so has been a hard slog and a huge financial investment for UNISON, but it has been worth every penny. I am so proud of our union – and in particular of our union’s legal team, who have worked tirelessly to achieve this incredible result. Their skill and dedication has once again secured a huge win for working people everywhere.

Of course, as well as being a day of celebration, today is also a time for reflection. We will never know just how many people were stopped from taking legal cases as a result of employment tribunal fees. We will never know how many people have been denied access to justice and to legal recourse. Their stories may remain untold and their rights unprotected. Likewise, there are those who have been forced to pay employment tribunal fees who will now demand those fees are returned to them. We will work with them to ensure the government cough up and admit they were wrong – legally and morally.

Today’s result should bring to an end the cruel employment tribunal fees regime, and ensure that no-one else is ever forced to pay crippling fees just to access basic justice. But it is also a reminder of the importance of trade unions in fighting for all of our rights, and the importance of a legal system that allows us to stand with our members, and win for our members.

Fascist EDL – not wanted in Rochdale, this Saturday, 29 July

Just seven days, after the fascist group Britain First held a hate gathering in Rochdale, another group of fascists, the EDL, will be making an incursion into the town. The EDL are, like Britain First, trying to create division by racialising the issue of crimes of sexual exploitation.

Our thoughts must be with all those affected by such horror. Sexual exploitation is an appalling crime but it is not linked to ethnicity or religion.

Unite Against Fascism, trade unionists and others will be protesting for the second week running, to send a clear message to the EDL that they are not welcome in Rochdale. Years of consistent, broad-based mobilisations have pushed the EDL back to the point where – at their most recent demo in London – they were only able to muster a tiny group of about 50 fascists.

Similarly, in Liverpool on 3 June, when around 1,000 people humiliated the EDL, the fascists could only gather a rabble of, at most, 60.

The EDL is a fascist organisation – their founder ‘Tommy Robinson’ was a member of the British National Party. Leading EDL figure Alan Spence was also a member of the BNP and alongside the EDL’s ‘leader’, Ian Crossland, has a history of racist violence.

Despite differences, Britain First expressed support for the EDL’s gathering, this Saturday, though how long this truce will last is another matter.

Join us on 29 July, to show for the second time in a week, that fascists are not wanted in Rochdale.
More details will be confirmed. For further info please contact [email protected], or see event page here.

Protest against fascist Britain First, Rochdale, 22 July

Pictured below, alongside Paul Golding (second from left), leader of the fascist group Britain First, is Jason Marriner (blue shirt), an ex Combat 18 fascist thug and convicted football hooligan. This is the sort of person that Britain First keep company with. One reason, among many, to demonstrate against Britain First next Saturday.

Unite Against Fascism – Rochdale Unity Statement – No to fascist Britain First!

We, the undersigned, support the protest – organised by Unite Against Fascism, trades unionists and others – in opposition to the intrusion by the fascist group Britain First in Rochdale on 22 July. The event page for the protest is here.

Britain First’s leader Paul Golding was imprisoned last year for eight weeks for his campaign of “invading” mosques. Leading Britain First member Jayda Fransen was convicted for religiously aggravated harassment, after she abused a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.

The man arrested for the racist attack on Finsbury Park Mosque – which killed one man and injured eleven other people – is reported to have followed Britain First’s Golding and Jansen on Twitter. After the attack, Britain First posted that ‘Finsbury Park Mosque was notorious as a haven for Islamist terrorists and extremists’. Thomas Mair shouted ‘Britain First’ before he brutally murdered Jo Cox MP in 2016.

The Britain First leader was also recently filmed trying to intimidate people outside East London Mosque, while members of the Mosque were working to give aid to people affected by the horrific fire at Grenfell Tower. An antisemitic priest who was due to speak at Britain First’s recent Birmingham rally was detained at the airport. This shows that these fascists are hostile not only to Muslims, but also to Jews and others. Former EDL leader ‘Tommy Robinson’ – pictured with the leaders of Britain First – has also been trying to stir up Islamophobia.

Now Britain First are trying to create division by racialising the issue of crimes of sexual exploitation. Our thoughts are with all those affected by this. Sexual exploitation is an appalling crime but it is not linked to ethnicity or religion. We call on people to join us in opposing the attempt by the fascists of Britain First to hijack this issue in order to further their political agenda and to demonise and punish an entire community.

We oppose Islamophobia, antisemitism and all forms of racism.

We urge everyone to attend the demonstration in opposition to Britain First in Rochdale on 22 July.

To add your name/your organisation’s name to the Rochdale Unity Statement, please email [email protected].

German Nazis fail to save terrorist Horst Mahler from prison

Horst Mahler will be known to most long-time anti-fascists and readers of Searchlight as a man who has spent a lifetime as an active terrorist and the guru for thousands of hardline National Socialists and those who frequent up-and-coming extreme-right groups around the world.

His father, a man of the cloth, was an underground opponent of the government in the German Democratic Republic, which was controlled by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. For some unknown reason the East German regime relaxed its strict rules prohibiting its citizens from leaving the country and allowed the family to move to West Germany. Suddenly Mahler became an activist inside the left-controlled student movement. His writings were, and in some cases still are, attracting a readership in some fringe anarchist groups.

He ended up as an active member of the terrorist Baader Meinhof group which bombed and murdered across Germany. The German government and media proclaimed them as coming from the Left; others were suspicious that the group was a creation of Gladio, the Nato and CIA backed organisation that was using far-right groups as “stay-behinds” should Russian tanks roll into the West. One of its targets was to destroy the legitimate left and the growing peace and anti-war movement. The Baader Meinhof group targeted a wide range of institutions and individuals. Many bombings of US military bases took place, businessmen and politicians were targeted, but they also targeted Jewish institutions and in one raid on a care home for elderly Jews a caretaker was shot dead, in a cold-blooded murder for which nobody was ever convicted. When the group collapsed, its two main leaders died in prison in mysterious circumstances. Some members fled aboard, other died and some received prison sentences. Among these was Mahler.

When Mahler left his prison cell he joined the German post-war Nazi scene and ended up as the lawyer defending the National Democratic Party (NPD), the largest extreme-right party, in the constitutional court. It was Mahler’s skill as a lawyer that saved the NPD from being banned. Sometimes his relationship with the NPD leadership was fractious. But his esteem grew in the international hardline Nazi scene.

In recent years he had played a leading role internationally with Holocaust deniers not only in Europe but worldwide. He drew a number of older and some younger people who idolised him.

These included the Jewish traitor and jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, who started to campaign for Mahler’s release from prison, where his activities had led him again. Among those who were prepared to take a stand on Mahler’s behalf were Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler, and a group of other ageing senior SS women, who were involved in distributing illegal Nazi propaganda and training young Nazis. They intervened by raising funds to support them in court and as a result some were sent to prison themselves.

Mahler’s supporters wanted to give an international dimension to their campaign for his release by calling on other Nazis to protest to and picket German embassies abroad and to demonstrate outside courts and the prison when Mahler was appearing.

Atzmon has built a very close relationship with Mahler. They have exchanged communications, sometimes illegally, with Mahler writing many words of praise about Atzmon and vice versa. Atzmon, who is one of the top jazz musicians in the world, makes a very good living appearing in the UK and other European countries but some time ago became very nervous that the German authorities were intercepting some of the illicit communications between them and decided to stay out of Germany because, if action had been taken against him under the Schengen Treaty, he would have banned from entering all its 26 signatories. Clearly, when push came to shove, Atzmon put earning a living before his support for a national socialist icon.

Mahler became seriously ill and part of one of his legs had to be amputated. He was then returned to carry on serving his sentence in a prison hospital. At this point the authorities served fresh charges against him over his current illegal activities. His supporters decided to take the step of rescuing him from prison.

On 20 April 2017, the anniversary of Hitler’s birth, he was sprung from prison and driven across the German-Hungarian border to the town of Sopron which has a large German population. Many friends and admirers of Mahler were waiting to greet him. The group that assisted in his escape was an upmarket Holocaust denying group called Ende der Lüge, the End of Lies. Its leaders are Henry Hafenmayer, Christian Zielonka and Robert Steinert. The group appears to have its base in northern Germany.

Mahler brought into play his legal knowledge with an appeal to the right-wing Hungarian government for political asylum, but his timing was out of sync as the Hungarian government had just begun expelling foreign Nazis who had set up shop and homes in the country. Among the first to be expelled were Nick Griffin, the former BNP leader and MEP, and his Ulster loyalist extremist James Dowson.

Mahler’s application was immediately rejected and he was put on his way back to a prison cell in Germany.

We wonder why the Hungarians are continuing to allow Arktos Media, one of the largest peddlers of all sorts of Nazi and hate material, in the world to stay.

Launch rally in Vecses of Force and Determination

A face in the crowd at the launch of Force and Determination

Out of the blue a Hungarian openly Nazi party, by the name of Force and Determination, has announced its formation and hopes to do well in the 2018 elections. From a Nazi standpoint it is understandable why its leaders, Balázs László and Zsolt Tyirityán, have created this group, because the existing main extreme-right party Jobbik has begun to weaken its extreme line in the hope of closing the gap between it and Fidesz, the ruling party. The new group thinks the field is being left open for it to continue the wave of murderous attacks on Roma communities and the few refugees who have made it through the heavily militarised Hungarian border.

Earthday 2017: Exploring the ‘Green’ Racism of Ann Coulter

This article has been contributed by Frank Houghton. Frank Houghton is a tenured Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Public Health & Health Administration at Eastern Washington University. He has experience of working in Public Health and academia in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and the USA. By training he is a Public Health Geographer with research interests in health inequalities, gun control, therapeutic landscapes, and courage/advocacy.

April 22nd 2017 marked the 47th anniversary of Earthday. Conceived in the aftermath of Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring, and amidst the Vietnam War and student unrest, Earthday aimed to energize environmental action through popular protest. The inaugural Earthday in 1970 saw 20 million Americans protesting. By 1990 it involved 200 million people across 141 countries.

However, Ann Coulter, an American social and conservative and political commentator, used the day as a convenient segue to launch yet another racist diatribe against immigrants in the US, albeit through an environmental lens (Coulter 2017a).

Coulter has gained significant exposure through supporting Donald Trump over the last year, as evidenced in her book In Trump We Trust. Her notoriety has increased after the University of California at Berkeley cancelled her speech for fear of violence and civil disorder (Svriuga et al. 2017). This denial led to right wing student groups to sue the university citing free speech (Wisner 2017).

Coulter has a long history of racist attacks on immigrants, including her book Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (Coulter 2015). One of Coulter’s trademarks has been to equate Hispanic immigrants with child rapists:

‘Before breathing a sigh of relief that, unlike Western Europe, we don’t have Muslim rapists pouring into our country, recall that we have Mexican rapists pouring into our country.

Almost all peasant cultures are brimming with rapists, pederasts and child abusers. Latin America just happens to be the peasant culture closest to the United States, while the Muslims are closest to Europe.’ (Coulter 2017b).

The conflation of immigration, border security and sexual assault is nothing new and has been noted elsewhere (Ticktin 2008).

Coulter also openly attacks Muslim immigrants to the US (Coulter 2017c). Recurring themes include: the large US population of Muslims; US Muslims should emigrate; accounts of assaults on Muslims are false; the grandfathers of white US citizens were born in the US (which is supposed to entitle them to more rights, although interestingly the rights of American Indians are not discussed); and the media is a left-wing conspiracy. Before ignoring Coulter it is important to remember that her text Adios America was a New York Times bestseller, and she is a syndicated columnist, active blogger, and author of over ten books.

In her Earthday commentary, provocatively titled ‘Your choice: A Green America or a Brown America’, Coulter (2017a) attacked the Sierra Club before continuing a familiar racist polemic against Hispanic immigrants. Her attack was notable given her use of an environmental conservation perspective.

Coulter’s barrage against the Sierra Club accuses it of accepting a $100 million donation not to discuss immigration. Coulter’s portrayal is notably different from other commentators from the period, who outline how ‘progressive Sierra Club members, as well as 13 past Club presidents, are fighting back’ against attempts at a ‘hostile takeover by forces allied with… a variety of right-wing extremists’ (Hartman 2004, 2).

Coulter’s (2017a) Earthday diatribe continued:

‘people… can’t help but notice the environmental damage being done by hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans clamoring across the border every year, setting fires, dumping litter, spray-painting gang signs in our parks and defacing ancient Indian petroglyphs.

The problem isn’t just the number of people traipsing through our wilderness areas; it’s that primitive societies have no concept of “litter.” That’s a quirk of prosperous societies. The damage to our parks shows these cultural differences.’

The emphasis on the clamoring masses crossing the border is both alarmist and reminiscent of neo-Malthusian ideas of the population ‘bomb’ (Connelly 2006). Coulter describes the ‘Hispanic littering problem’ stating that ‘The Mexican cultural trait of littering is apparently well known to everyone’.

For support Coulter (2017a) draws on the work of Oakes who describes the:

“reprehensible” damage being done to “towering cactus, Joshua trees, flowering cactus varieties, colorful wildflowers and rock formations” by illegals. With accompanying photos, she noted that the immigrants’ litter included “abandoned vehicles … used needles, drug paraphernalia, plastic grocery bags, paper products, empty water containers, blankets, clothing, used disposable diapers, among other things.”

Oakes (2007) provides a written description of areas along the US side of the Mexican border, as well as a number of photographs. It is interesting to remember that the potential cause of at least some of this environmental damage having been caused by animals, livestock, visitors and hikers noted by Oakes is glossed over in the account presented by Coulter. In reading such accounts of the littering and environmental damage perpetrated by migrants, it is hard not to juxtapose this with concerns over environmental contamination in other once pristine environments that have been ignored by the far right. For example the issue of rubbish left by foreign climbers and their local guides on Mount Everest in Nepal is well known. As Figuera (2013) notes: ‘This ecological wonder has become strewn with garbage and peppered with corpses’. Given the danger, distance, temperatures and arid terrain confronting immigrants crossing the border, it seems nonsensical to expect a ‘leave no trace’ approach.

Some of the language used by Oakes (2007) is disturbing. In shaded areas, where migrants shelter en-route in this arid terrain, she describes the accumulation of rubbish as ‘ similar to family groups of nesting apes in the jungle’. This animal imagery is painfully similar to colonial era discourses that provided a would-be ‘justification’ for the enslavement of Africans (Lott 1998).

After reviewing just three US towns with Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and litter problems Coulter (2017a) continues:

Mass Third World immigration is a triple whammy for the environment because:

1) Millions more people are tromping through our country;

2) The new people do not share Americans’ love of nature and cleanliness; and

3) We’re not allowed to criticize them.

This contrast between cleanliness and immigration littering is reminiscent of other racist tropes such as those of the immigrant as dirty (Henry 1994), contagious (Trauner 1978; Leung 2008), and contaminated (Cisneros 2008).

Deliberately misquoting the poem associated with the Statue of Liberty Coulter (2017a) concludes with:

Give me your tired, your poor, your empties and pizza boxes, your Cheetos bags, your soiled diapers and abandoned couches …

Reflecting on Coulter’s piece, it is ironic that a major issue for the National Park Service in the US is the under-representation of minority populations visiting national parks (Rott 2016). Concerns over race, affect and national heritage sites are not unique to the US, with racial exclusivity having been explored in other similar environments (Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010).

It is alarming that Coulter ignores other contemporary initiatives that will have serious negative environment impacts. These include the construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, and Presidential hostility/ ambivalence towards the Paris climate agreement. Other examples include Trump’s promotion of coal production and his review of Obama’s clean power initiatives. Trump has also critically weakened the Environmental Protection Agency through funding cuts and deregulation, and in the most direct attack yet on parks and parkland in the US, he has ordered a review of new parks created since 1996.

Coulter’s approach to the topic of race and the environment revives and promulgates old clichés of the immigrant as lazy, dirty, untrustworthy, infectious, and a sexual predator. It should be acknowledged that Coulter is an increasingly influential demagogue of the far right in a post-truth world (Davies 2016). Coulter personifies populist politics where alternative facts rule (Swaine 2017), pathos is embraced, and logos and ethos are scorned. However, Coulter should not be ignored. She offers public/ intellectual leadership to the far right. In evaluating the impact of Coulter’s racist propaganda, the term ‘weaponized lies’ is most appropriate (Levitin 2017).

References

Carson R 1962 Silent Spring Houghton Mifflin, Boston

Cisneros J 2008 Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 4 569-601

Connelly M 2006 To inherit the Earth. Imagining world population, from the yellow peril to the population bomb Journal of Global History 1 3 299-319

Coulter A 2015 Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole Regnery Publishing, Washington DC

Coulter A 2016 In Trump We Trust Sentinel, New York

Coulter A 2017a Your Choice: A Green America Or A Brown America 19th April (http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2017-04-19.html)

Coulter A 2017b ‘Immigrant Privilege’ drives child rape epidemic 8th March (http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2017-03-08.html)

Coulter A 2017c The Great Hijab Cover-up 4th January (http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2017-01-04.html)

Crang M and Tolia-Kelly D 2010 Nation, race and affect: senses and sensibilities at National Heritage sites Environment and Planning A 42 10 2315-2350

Davies W 2016 The Age of Post-Truth Politics The New York Times August 24th

Henry A 1994 There are No Safe Places: Pedagogy as Powerful and Dangerous Terrain Action in Teacher Education 15 4 1-4

Lam B 2017 Trumps ‘Two for One’ Regulation Executive Order The Atlantic January 30th

Leung C 2008 The Yellow Peril Revisited: The Impact of SARS on Chinese and Southeast Asian Communities Resources for Feminist Research 33 1 135-149

Levitin D 2017 Weaponized lies- how to think critically in the post truth era Dutton, New York

Lott T 1998 The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation Blackwell, Malden

Figueroa P 2013 Vanity, Pollution and Death on Mt. Everest United Nations University 15th July

Oakes R 2007 Desert Trash: Illegal Immigrants’ Impact on the Environment December 15th 2007 (http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/EvergreenEnergy/oakesr.html)

Rott N 2016 Don’t Care About National Parks? The Park Service Needs You To National Public Radio 9th March

Svriuga S, Wan W and Dwoskin E 2017 Ann Coulter speech at UC Berkeley canceled, again, amid fears for safety The Washington Post April 26th

Swaine J 2017 Donald Trump’s team defends ‘alternative facts’ after widespread protest The Guardian 23rd January 2017

Trauner J 1978 The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905 California History 57 1 70-87

Ticktin M 2008 Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti‐immigrant Rhetoric Meet Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33 4863-889

Wisner M 2017 Conservative Students Sue UC Berkeley Over Cancellation of Coulter Speech Fox Business 25th April