Liverpool's Miltant years... what lessons are there to be learnt today

[Fisher_Gate]

Absolutely appaling... you repeat all the lies they used and then say they were hypocrites. What was your solution? - licking the arses of the Black Caucus and buying a few off with token council 'race relations' jobs so they could assist you in keeping the rest of the liverpool black communities in thier 'place' ? Exactly what the previous liberal council had done for decades.

Militant "economism" meant building thousands of decent houses (particularly in the liverpool 8 area); creating hundreds of real jobs and training places (particularly recruiting people from the liverpool 8 area); and building a unitied working class struggle against the tory government that cut across racist division - things that did much, much more to assist in fighting divisive racist crap than I don't know how many decades of bleating middle-class white university lecturers ramblings (the appalling book you mentioned); or a couple of token black faces 'monitoring' prejudice (while setting up thier safe wee homes and businesses well away from the 'community' they claimed to love so deeply) ever did These were people who were happy to be used as the muppets of the likes of the daily mail (when it is convenient for the ruling bigots) to defend thier pathetic careers. These people you wish to appease are hated much more than the militants ever were within the black communities of liverpool.

Sam Bonds qualifications were real ones - years spent organising within black communities against state and police and organised racist crap. One of the founding organisers of the original Newham Monitoring Project when it was part of the initial self-organisation for self-defence of communities. Real qualifications - not university qualifications about 'race relations'. Even the Black Caucus members on the very recruiting panel that employed him were so impressed they voted for him getting the job - before they changed their minds like...

and NALGO - who was in control of Liverpool NALGO at the time... don't you remember - the CP and fellow-travellers. Not exactly unbiased were they?? (additional: funnily enough, one of my friends is now a leading light in the Liverpool UNISON - after sone hard fought battles with the old leadership of that branch - a black, scouse militant... funny, given how 'hated' the militants are?)

Oh dear.

Your tirade precisely illustrates the point I was trying to make. To defeat the Tories it was necessary to have unity of the radical and progressive forces. It wasn't Sam Bond's credentials that were at fault but the way he was appointed and subsequently defended. Yes the leadership of Nalgo was influenced by the CP (though Walker and Cresswell were actually left wing Labour) - but unity was needed and given that Nalgo represented many thousands of workers in the council, your denigration of them only served to isolate the leadership of the council from a significant part of the workforce they needed to ally with.

When the redundancy notices came it was that much easier to attack Militant and the leadership. You can castigate them all you like, but I've met people in Nalgo who were certainly not 'middle class' who wanted to fight, but who had their redundancy notice displayed on the wall at work to remind them what they saw the council was trying to do to them.

You talk about 'self-organisation', but Militant always opposed that being opposed to Black sections in the Labour Party and trade unions at the same time. Little wonder that some of the black leaders were driven into the arms of the LibDems.

Name me one organisation where Militant worked with significant other forces? You opposed working with the CP, you walked out of the Socialist Alliance because you claimed the SWP were to influential - no wonder you lost the plot in Liverpool and shrunk to an irrelevance.

And your obsession with housing also meant that other services were starved of resources to pay for it. The Polytechnic, for example, struggled for many years to recruit staff, and had to put up with appalling buildings and accommodation, which was so bad the CNAA (the degree awarding body) threatened to withdraw accreditation meaning thousands of working class students being denied their right to education. But then you don't see that - you saw it only as bleatings from middle class lecturers, not the working class demanding the right to a decent higher education. Little wonder that on the 1st April 1989 when the Poly became independent from the Council, the management were able to curry favour by cleaning the windows and buildings to bring them up to scratch to loud cheers from the workforce.

 

[Fedayn]

additional: funnily enough, one of my friends is now a leading light in the Liverpool UNISON - after sone hard fought battles with the old leadership of that branch - a black, scouse militant... funny, given how 'hated' the militants are?

Not seen him for years, how is he these days?? Hope he's well.