Socialist Fight

Corbyn was elected leader of the

J eremy
Labour party on 12 September. On the
14th The Sunday Times reported that a senior
serving unnamed British General has threatened direct action by the armed forces
against a future Corbyn administration:
The Army just wouldnt stand for it. The
general staff would not allow a prime minister
to jeopardise the security of this country and I
think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that The intelligence services will refuse to let Corbyn see
information on live operations because of his
sympathy towards some terrorists.

that I want to rid it of injustice, to make it

fairer, more decent, more equal. Fair play for
all, solidarity and not walking by on the other
side of the street when people are in trouble.
Respect for others point of view. It is this
sense of fair play, these shared majority British values that are the fundamental reason
why I love this country and its people.

Leon Trotsky, writing in the period leading

up to the General Strike in 1926 said that the
lefts in the trade unions and Labour party
were ideologically formlessness and the
rights had a big advantage over them because
with them stands tradition, experience and

routine and, most important, with them

On the 15th he had failed to ask God to save
stands bourgeois society as a whole which
the Queen. On the 16th Nigel Dodds, depuslips them ready-made solutions.
ty leader of the DUP, attacked John McDonIn that period the masses were radicalising as
nell, because in 2003 he had said:
now, the lefts controlled the General Council
Its about time we started honouring those
of the TUC as they do now but unlike then
people involved in the armed struggle. It was
the lefts now also lead, even if they do not
the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by
fully control, the Labour party.
the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain
to the negotiating table.
Yet on issue after issue the combination of
th
mass
media, Tory and right Labour push the
On the 18 Corbyn was accused of
lefts back. Corbyn will sing his dirge to God
snubbing the rugby world cup opening
and the Queen and reportedly bend the knee
ceremony and Englands first match.
to her to become a Privy Councillor,
These new Corbynites were thoroughly
McDonnell has apologised his unfortunate
unpatriotic chaps, simply bounders, ranted
tribute to the heroic Bobby Sands. Trident
the right wing press, Tory politicians and
Blairite supporters in Labour. Right Labour will be a free vote courtesy of the left Unite
leader McCluskey and the right GMB leader
Eurosceptic MP Kate Hoey, of Ulster UnSir Paul Kenny. It is an outrage that he will
ionist origins but late of the International
Marxist Group and Troops Out of Ireland in not commit to blowing up half the world,
reactionaries tell us. And we must have a free
the 1970s, now thinks Labour is losing bevote on bombing Syria.
cause it drifted too far left wing under Ed
It is the duty of Marxists and revolutionists
Milliband. Back in June the pro-fox-hunting,
anti-bicycle bigot said of working class UKIP to make clear our political criticisms of the
fundamental weakness of the Corbyn leadersupporters:
ship. In the first place it has no economic
They feel very strongly about their country
appreciation that the crisis of capitalism is
and we have been extremely unpatriotic as a
structural, caused by the falling rate of profit,
party to our country. Theres just a feeling
the most powerful law of capitalist economthat were half-hearted about being British,
were half-hearted about the monarchy, were
ics, Marx correctly asserted.
half-hearted about the way we see our country
This cannot be remedied by Keynesian
in the world.
economic solutions like printing money in
As Corbyn and McDonnell are atheists, rethe mistakenly belief that underconsumption
publicans and socialists it might be thought
is the problem. The big transnationals conreasonable not to honour an imaginary deity, trol all imperialist governments and restoring
an unelected monarch and to oppose the
their rate of profit means war. War in Iraq,
crimes of British imperialism. A Corbynite,
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and
Clive Lewis, Shadow Minister for Energy
against Russia and China ultimately. That is
and Climate Change, went part of the way:
the essence of the patriotic defence of Empire, with or without God and the Queen.
Im a humanist. Im an atheist humanist. If
This is what cause immigration and refugee
he decided not to sing the national anthem I
would have defended him. I would have said I
crises, this is what causes economic collapse
served in the Army, I dont think my love for
and chaos. To defeat this we must unite with
my country and my patriotism can be defined
the working class of all lands. It is a great lie
by a song from a very jingoistic period of
that there is any patriotic common cause
our history singing about what I believe to
between the British working class and the
be a non-existent deity, saving an unelected
British ruling class; there is only an internahead of state.
tionalist duty on us all to unite the workers
Note defence of the Empire is still there. In of the world against the imperialism of fihis Conference speech Corbyn asserted his
nance capital and their transnational corporaalternative patriotism:
tions.
Its because I am driven by these British
Britain and Ireland still holds some 100
majority values, because I love this country,
Republican prisoners who

Turn over

In this memorial the fighter looks away lest he is captured

and forced to reveal the name of the young woman helper
under torture. Britain has now paid 19.9 million to Kenyas
Freedom Fighters and 90K for the memorial above.

No colonial war was more brutal than the British against

Kenya from 1952-60. Caroline Elkins in her 2006 Pulitzer
Prize winning book Britains Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya describes what happened:
It was a culture of routine beatings, starvation, killings
(the hanged represent only a small fraction of those who
died in British custody during the Emergency) and torture of the most grotesque kinds. Alsatian dogs were used
to terrify prisoners and then maul them men were
forced to sodomise one another. They also had sand,
pepper and water stuffed in their anuses. One apparently
had his testicles cut off, and was then made to eat them.
Things got a little out of hand, one (macho European)
witness told Elkins, referring to another incident.
By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his
eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket.
Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.

Women were gang-raped, had their nipples squeezed with

pliers, and vermin and hot eggs thrust into their vaginas.
Children were butchered and their body parts paraded
around on spears. Then there were the pettier deprivations: women forbidden to sing hymns in Komiti camp,
for example, because they were putting subversive
words to them. All this while anti-Mau Mau and proBritish propaganda blared out at detainees from loudspeakers.
Anderson quotes the testimony of a European officer
in 1962, recalling an attempt to interrogate some
Mickeys a slang name for the Mau Mau.
They wouldnt say a thing, of course, and one of them, a tall
coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I
slapped him hard, but he kept right on grinning at me, so I
kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He went down in
a heap but when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at
me again and I snapped, I really did. I stuck my revolver
right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I dont
remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all
over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys
were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they
didnt tell me where to find the rest of the gang Id kill them
too. They didnt say a word so I shot them both. One wasnt
dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove
up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didnt
believe me but all he said was bury them and see the wall is
cleared up.

The significant thing here (apart from the refusal of the

three prisoners to co-operate) is that the officer had no
qualms about describing all this.

Open letter to Nicholas Anderson from Sheffield who gave up

his British passport and
became an Irish citizen in 1983

icholas was ashamed of being British

state we live in is The
because of the crimes of British imperi- United Kingdom of Great
alism (presumably after witnessing the deaths Britain and Northern Ireof ten courageous men led by Bobby Sands on land. This implicitly
hunger strike for political status in 1981).
acknowledges the truth
Giving up your British passport is a silly
that the north of Ireland
thing to do because it accepts the lie that Brit- is a part of the Irish
ish working class people and the middle class nation occupied by Brit- Communist prisoners are lined up and shot by the British Army during
(who are really working class but dont want
ish imperialism because the Malaya Emergency. Plantation workers were shot in cold blood by a
to admit it) are responsible for the crimes of
it is more powerful mili- 16-man patrol of the Seventh Platoon of the Scots Guards in December
the British Empire and modern day British
tarily, it imposed its will 1948. Many of the victims bodies were found to have been mutilated
and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground.
imperialism. You didnt do it, you couldnt
on Ireland with the
No weapons were found there. In 1969 several of the Scots Guards
stop it and the only thing you can be accused assistance of the Free
of is not opposing it enough in the right way. State government in the on the patrol that day gave interviews to The People newspaper, alleging
that they had been ordered to massacre the villagers in Batang Kali.
And that is most probably down to not
civil war of 1922-3 and
Two sergeants, however, insisted that the men had been shot because
understanding what it is and how to fight it.
it has the support of a
they tried to escape.
Changing your passport is a cop out.
Loyalist supremacist
The defence secretary, Denis Healey, instructed Detective Chief SuIt is true that the crimes of British imperial- minority of the nation
perintendent
Frank Williams of Scotland Yard to investigate. However
ism are heinous, but so are those of French,
(18%) to hold on to it.
the inquiry was abruptly stopped by the incoming Tory government in
German, Italian, Japanese and American imBut we understand
1970, for lack of evidence.
perialism, to name the biggest.
Nicholas motivation
Healey also authorised the expulsion of Chagossians from the Chagos
The US is the global imperialist hegemonic nonetheless in giving up Archipelago, and authorised building of the United States military base
power who is primarily responsible for all the the passport, whilst
at Diego Garcia amongst other imperialist services.
wars, famines, hunger and oppression on the disagreeing. Many BritA Supreme Court case by victims began in April 2015. It is opposed
planet because it is the central defender of the ish socialists refuse to
by government lawyers who fear presidents for compensation in cases
international community. Imperialism enback England in footin the north of Ireland (the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacre
sures that available supply of food, medicine, ball and rugby because
for example) and for many others murdered in the British Empire.
health care and education never reaches those of shame at the history
who need it became the rate of profit of fiof empire and fear of being associated with far
Remember the Levellers of the English civil
nance capital and global transnationals comes right bigots and British chauvinists.
war, the Peterloo massacre, the Chartists, the
before all else. The US have a military as big
But learn the history of the British working Dockers Tanner, the Bryant and Mays match
as the next 15 nations combined to sort out
class and you can be proud of that. If the Em- girls, the Great Unrest of 1911-14, the internaany dissidents. They have invaded 50 nations pire ruled the waves the working class brought tionalist dockers and their communist supsince WWII to do just that.
the world the first trade unions and the Laporters of the Jolly Rodger, the General Strike,
And the ruling classes of oppressed nations; bour party and the global history of class
the wartime strike wave of 1941-3 supported
Ireland, Africa, South East Asia and Latin
struggle.
by the Trotskyists alone, the great miners
America were and are absolutely vicious
strike to mention but a few to be proud of.
against their own poor and oppressed. The
True the trade unions and the Labour party
crimes of Stalinism are indeed among the
too became bureaucratic and British chauworst, because, like bourgeois nationalists,
vinist but always there were those within
these socialism-in-a-single-country bureauthem who sought to prevent the slaughter
cratic monsters sought to appease imperialon the 1916 Somme, for instance, for the
ism as its agents within their own states.
greater glory and profits of British or GerIrish socialists are acutely conscious of
man imperialism.
the method of oppression of church and
With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn many
state in Ireland. But it is a nation historically
more of these struggles will re-emerge and
oppressed by British imperialism. We
victory will eventually be ours.
should not let that history of oppression
And then you can be proud of them and
Irish capitalists use against its own people,
not just despise the Empire apologists but
as an agent of foreign imperialism in part
learn to do something to defeat them.
as well as in pursuit of its own profits and After World War I the Allies were trying to prevent Warmongers like Tony Blair, Margaret
the Bolsheviks from gaining power in Russia, the
privileges, in a racist way against all Irish
Thatcher and their political clones and
JOLLY GEORGE was chartered to load ammuni- heirs need defeating. A new generation of
people just as we demand you do not use
the crimes of British imperialism against all tion and supplies in London for Russia. On 10 May fighters is emerging to defeat them. They
1920 the pro-communist dockers refused to load the would live forever as heroes to many if
British people.
vessel. It is believed that Harry Pollitt, whose picAnd the north of Ireland is not even
everyone opposed to them abandoned
legally or formally British, the name of the ture appears on the stamp, was behind the action. Britain and became foreign citizens.

Patriotism are tortured, brutally strip

searched and denied their rights,
including proper medical care. As Chair of the
Labour Representation Committee John
McDonnell, and Corbyn - a leading member are surely in a powerful position now to remedy this; they voted for it at successive AGMs.

Jeremy Corbyn is in good position to fight

for justice now for the victims of the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday state massacres.
He surely cannot allow himself to be manoeuvred into a position that he becomes
responsible for another Batang Kali atrocity
like Atlee, a Kenyan Mau Mau slaughter or

another Bloody Sunday massacre.

Corbyns speech at Labour Conference half
suggested opposition to all this. But he must
fight for it openly by mobilise his radicalising
followers or he will demoralise and lose them
all. Rejecting God and Monarchy would be a
start. But its capitalism itself that must go.

Contact: Socialist Fight: PO Box 59188, London, NW2 9LJ. Email: Socialist_Fight@yahoo.co.uk