Israel-Hamas: Britain looks for fascists in the wrong place

Paul Bryan

It was like all their Christmases had come at once. This was the evidence they needed to quash their opponents and get rid of that evil witch, Suella Braverman, the now ex-Home Secretary.

Famed Far-Right pantomime villain, Tommy Robinson had put in a brief London appearance on Armistice Day as part of the counter protest against the Pro-Palestine march, though he quickly fled the scene in a taxi once the police closed in. There was some pushing and shoving and objects thrown as a crowd of white men headed to ‘protect’ the Cenotaph. “Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Was. Looking. For. Blood. Every one,” intoned professional scouser, sports reporter and mind reader Tony Evans, formerly of the Times. After all, he should know. “I live in Pimlico,” he tweeted. Enough said.

The media went to town of course, with Channel 4 News embarrassing themselves with the claim that ‘the only scuffles on the day involved far-right protesters who clashed with police.’ This spurious claim was later deleted.

Meanwhile, that bellwether of over-the-top reaction, polemicist Owen Jones, did his level best to impose a simplistic division of oppressed and oppressor on the marches. “There were two protests,” he tweeted. “One were a bunch of far right thugs intent on violence. The other was a massive Palestinian protest with “no issues”. One was whipped up by politicians and media outlets. The other was demonised by them.” At least Owen, waited for events to unfold (somewhat). The Liverpool Echo’s political editor and sometime Newsnight guest, Liam Thorp, couldn’t wait to get stuck in, tweeting at 11am that “The responsibility for any violence today lies solely with the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister who is too weak to deal with her dangerous chaos.” Why does he always sound like a pound-shop Churchill?

The feeling that the script was already written before the birds had tweeted was overwhelming. So let’s get somethings straight. Members of the Far Right were present in London though their numbers are hard to pin down – I’ve seen everything from 200 to 2000 quoted in the media – a x10 level of confusion that points to the subjective nature of the assessment. Quite what qualifies which members of the crowd were Far Right and which weren’t was not always obvious – though white skin, opposition to the Pro-Palestinian marches and shouting obscenities seemed qualification enough for many pundits. I suspect membership cards of the English Defence League and their like were largely absent but who knows? After all, the Far-Right label is used so promiscuously these days, it’s becoming hard to distinguish between your Mosely’s and your Monetarists. Alan Gibbons, leader of the Liverpool Community Independents seemed to sum up the mood of presumption - “Look, if it quacks like a fascist, chants like a fascist and attacks police like a fascist it's a fascist.” Obviously not spent much time around Red Action then. Anyway, Alan thought he’d found the smoking gun – a picture of a thug with a swastika tattooed on his torso. Labour MP Dianne Abbot was chuffed about it too. Sadly, a quick reverse image search revealed the picture was from 2016 and not in fact from this year’s Armistice Day marches, but let’s not allow facts to get in the way of good story.

If our understanding of fascism becomes reduced to hunting for swastikas, we may miss the bigger picture. Image: Twitter

Talking of facts, here’s a few – 126 people have so far been arrested in a demonstration involving over 300,000 people. More will most probably follow but the number is thankfully relatively small. Many of those arrests, as one officer explained on the radio, were pre-emptive of serious trouble, the police choosing to use arrests as a method of keeping opposing camps apart. A knife, a knuckleduster and a baton were found as well as some class-A drugs. Nine police officers were injured amidst chants of “You’re not English anymore.”

We’re told the majority of arrests were from the right-wing and according to the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner, Matt Twist this group was largely made up of “football hooligans from across the UK.” The police are now trying to hunt down protesters from the pro-Palestinian side who are accused of that most amorphous of crime/non-crime categories - hate crime, as well as possible support for proscribed organisations like Hamas. Officers intercepted a group of 150 who were wearing face coverings and firing fireworks. Arrests were made after some of the fireworks struck officers in the face.

So there you have it. It got ugly in places, and where it did the police successfully kept a lid on things. But and here’s the rub, I’m struggling to reconcile the relatively small scale of the trouble with the histrionic shout-outs for a disaster averted. The question we should ask ourselves is why were the ‘Ceasefire Now’ crew so excited about the appearance of a scintilla of right-wingers?

---

“The idea that white, Far-Right nationalists were just waiting for their Asian Home Secretary to let them off the leash is of course absurd.”

---

I think there are two answers to this question. One is about Suella Braverman and the other is about diverting the public gaze from the horrors of Palestinian violence.

On the first point, LBC presenter James O’Brien, who likes a good quote, couldn’t help giving the game away. “The Home secretary wanted a riot,” he thundered. Does he do anything but thunder? He continued… “Editors of national newspapers, columnists and commentators… ‘pray that there is not a riot at the Cenataph’ they wrote, while licking their lips at the prospect.” Oh, the hypocrisy! It should be clear to everyone that Suella Braverman is everything progressives hate. They were determined to pin this one on her because they wanted her head and they weren’t going to be satisfied until they got it. Right wing violence on Armistice Day was the metaphorical bullet and they were determined to pull the trigger.

I just wish the James O’Brien’s and the Liam Thorp’s of this world would be honest about that – they were licking their lips too. The absurdity of the proposition that it was all Suella’s fault was for me, best summarised by this tweet…

Adult literacy amongst the Far-Right has clearly improved in recent years. Image: Twitter

‘Seen the latest from Suella lads? Worth the subscription to get over the Times paywall. Also excellent pieces from Caitlin Moran and Giles Coren, and Eleanor Hayward is simply the best health correspondent in Fleet Street,’ wrote Gareth Roberts.

The idea that white, Far-Right nationalists were just waiting for their Asian Home Secretary to let them off the leash is of course absurd. But it reveals how the public is increasingly viewed by the political class as mindless puppets who will do whatever they’re told. If it wasn’t for Suella, the logic goes, the yobs would have stayed at home, ironing their flags of St George. They were ‘inflamed’ by her words, unleashing the beast within. As if.

The other reason for the lip-licking is all too transparent. It’s the finger pointing of the anti-racist. ‘Look’, they say, ‘only racists and white supremacists would not want to join our side in our quest for a Free Palestine. Israel is an apartheid state. Join us, as we march from the river to the sea.’

---

“For all the focus on the threat of Britain’s rump of a right-wing and their historic focus on immigration and racial purity, do you not see a far more extreme mirror of that vile ideology in the rantings of Hamas and Hezbollah?”

---

These tactics are destined to fail because there are many who can see through them and don’t want to become apologists for a form of Islamofascism. Yasser Arafat, the one-time Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and leader of the supposedly more tolerant Fatah Party, once said, “We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilt to redeem our land.” What do you think he meant exactly? For all the focus on the threat of Britain’s rump of a right-wing and their historic focus on immigration and racial purity, do you not see a far more extreme mirror of that vile ideology in the rantings of Hamas and Hezbollah? Except, unlike the EDL, these ‘liberators’ have the weapons and the resources to kidnap, maim and kill, as well as making victims of their own people.

Calling for a Ceasefire Now means leaving Hamas intact, free to pursue future campaigns of horrific barbarism. More October 7ths. No thank you. Not for me.

Israel-Hamas: Collective insanity threatens to overwhelm us

In the aftermath of the Pro-Palestine marches in London and the much smaller counter-protest, a game of political ping-pong has ensued. Videos clips are being swapped online from all sides as a new digital currency in moral certainty. Have you seen the one of fascists surging past the police? Yobs! Right-wing scum. Yes, but have YOU seen the one with the Palestine supporter saying, “Hitler knew how to deal with these people.” Islamic fascism right there. Yes, but what about those WHITE supremacists causing mayhem at the train station? What, you mean the one where a protester shouts “death to all Jews.” And so it goes on…

There’s a danger that we’re all about to lose our heads and if we let it, it could get ugly.  

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that this is about to be some country vicar, Thought For The Day style piece, urging a gentle middle road, while papering over the cracks in our civilisation with kind words and a cup of tea. There is clearly a huge amount at stake. But I would at least ask everyone to take a deep breath and not assume the very worst motivations from those who find themselves on the opposite side of the fence. There lies the path to de-humanisation and all that goes with it. Rather than summoning partial evidence to prove a point that we know deep down does not represent the full picture, maybe we should look for the courage to acknowledge the flaws in both camps.

Is this image dehumanising? Owen Jones thought so but others disagreed. If we are forever re-defining words to mean whatever we want them to mean, we will lose our ability to think straight. Perhaps that’s the point. Image: Twitter; cartoon originally from Ramirez, Las Vegas Review Journal for the Washington Post.

I for one am critical of the Pro-Palestinian ‘peace’ marches. I just don’t think they represent what their supporters claim, hopelessly entwinned as they are with Islamicist influences favouring a free Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’. A recent article in the Telegraph showed six of the organisations behind Saturday’s London march had connections to Hamas including Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, a former Hamas chief who co-founded the Muslim Association of Britain. This is not a good look. To me, too many people are diving naively in with their eyes closed to the movement’s nasty antisemitic underbelly and risk turning themselves into willing tools of groups who do not share their values and who use apologists consciously and calculatingly as cover. But even I have to admit that many of the protesters clearly mean well – responding to the horrific pictures coming out of Gaza with a natural, empathic desire to put a stop to the suffering. Clearly, they hope that silencing the guns can be a first step in finding a new and lasting peace process in which all can reconcile and heal deep wounds. This is an admirable instinct and should be recognised (when it’s not premised on virtue signalling), but I’d put it in the category of viewing the world through the lens of how we want it to be, rather than how it is really is.

Palestinian leadership have rejected every peace offer that’s ever been put on the table – in 1947, in 2000, and 2008. Negotiations have swiftly been followed by rockets and bombs. Meanwhile, the Jewish settler movement, aided with a nod and a wink by the administrations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to believe it is their God-given right to continue encroaching on the West Bank. As one settler infamously explained a few years back, while attempting to take possession of a property that wasn’t his, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.”  This is religiously inspired entitlement as cover for our basest instincts.

A prized peace cannot hold in the iron grip of absolutism. For all the blood and rubble, you cannot negotiate with someone whose only vision of the future is wanting you dead and gone. Especially ones with a scripture-endorsed death wish where, as author and podcaster, Sam Harris puts it, sadism is “celebrated as a religious sacrament.” Those who have watched the raw footage of the October 7th massacre have described how the killers were elated at their deeds. Douglas Murray for the Jewish Chronicle recounts chillingly, how one Hamas terrorist called his parents back in Gaza to boast that he had killed ten Jews “with my own hands.” Ecstatic with joy he received the praise he desired - “Their boy had turned out good.”

---

“A prized peace cannot hold in the iron grip of absolutism. For all the blood and rubble, you cannot negotiate with someone whose only vision of the future is wanting you dead and gone.”

---

There is a secularist presumption at play that all people basically want the same thing – peace, security, a roof over their head, good schools, full bellies and a decent job. But what if it’s not true? Here in the West, this ‘humanistic’ presumption is mapped onto the Israel-Hamas conflict even if it doesn’t apply to all the protagonists. People calling for a ceasefire now, such as the RMT union leader, Mick Lynch end up thinking with a bit of good grace and a fair wind the Israelis and Palestinians can be convinced to sit around a table and hammer it out. As if this was a negotiation over terms and conditions. From this perspective, when confronted with the reality of suicide bombers and hideous acts of barbarity, the question is asked - how could this be? What could turn people to such extreme behaviour? And the prescription as Sam Harris characterises it, is always the same – “they must have been pushed into it…their entire society oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power. So many people, he says, “imagine that the ghoulish history of Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.” And some might argue that the extremities of the Jewish holocaust layered on century after century of cruel pogroms have had a similar effect on the Jewish psyche. But perhaps these explanations are all too neatly packaged for the contemporary western imagination. In an interview with Piers Morgan, psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson makes the point that the sins of the father are visited on their children. That we may not wish life was like this, but it is – generations of bloody violence echoing down in retribution. It’s hard to break the cycle, not impossible, but hard, especially when you add a strong dose of religious certainty that can make even good people do bad things.

Maybe, just maybe, the cries to martyrdom reveal a deeper, unsettling truth about the role belief plays in violence. Maybe the people of the region need to look deep within to question the core ideas that shape their coda.

Oops, we did it again …

---

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor and creative coach.

@thePabryan

*Main image: Mark Kerrison, Alamy

---

---

WAH! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

Paul Bryan

View fullsize

Are the Stop the Liverpool Arms Fair protests just a form of NIMBYISM?

If all it took to solve the world’s problems was a deep well of sincerity, then there can be no doubt that the latest demonstration in Liverpool against October’s planned AOC Europe 2021 Electronic Warfare Convention must be considered a stunning success.

Banners pleaded for ‘No more bloody wars’(is there any other kind?), ‘Nurses not Nukes’ (a reasonable-sounding request), and my personal favourite ‘Make scouse not war’. Although, it must be questioned whether vats of lamb stew, no matter how delicious, could form the basis of an effective defence strategy.

Of course, that sounds incredibly flippant and I don’t mean to be. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better, kinder world. And anyone on the wrong end of a drone strike or a tyrannous regime could testify to the destructive power of modern armaments. That is, if they were still alive. But as I marched with and spoke to the demonstrators, I couldn’t help feeling a little confused. What is it exactly that they are asking for? That may seem like a stupid question. After all, the answer is found in the name of the campaign – Stop the Liverpool Arms Fair. And if I was in any more doubt the noisy protestor with the megaphone did her best to clear things up - the “What do we want? Stop the Arms Fair. When do we want it ? Now!” chant filled the air all day long. But to what end? If their pressure forced the ACC Liverpool Exhibition Centre to cancel the event, would one less piece of military hardware be sold in the world? Would the total weight of human misery be lightened in some way? If so, how?

Surely, the answer to those last questions would be “no” and “we’ve no idea”. Deep-down, I suspect the protestors know that too. To uncomfortably borrow an argument from the National Rifle Association for one moment, it’s people who kill people. The weapons are just the medium. And you can buy them in a lot of places. So if your actions won’t actually reduce violence in the places you protest to care about – Palestine, South Yemen, Syria – then what’s left? ‘NOT IN MY LIVERPOOL’ as one of the speakers shouted from the makeshift fire engine-come-stage, seemed to sum up the real limit of the aspirations for many. Not in my backyard.

The “What do we want? Stop the Arms Fair. When do we want it ? Now!” chant filled the air all day long. But to what end?

---

Which I suppose makes you wonder whether this is a futile cry in the Mersey wind – a posture to salve the conscience. Isn’t that the definition of virtue signalling?

In fairness, talking to people on the ground and listening to the speakers did reveal a whole poker hand of additional desires. Stopping arms sales to tyrannous regimes seemed to be a popular demand, while many (most) seemed to want to end all overseas arms sales full stop. I met a fair few who wanted to unilaterally dismantle the UKs armed forces and adopt a smile and hope strategy to international relations. Of course, given the profile of the crowd, plenty had their eyes on an even bigger prize. Nothing but the end of capitalism which they blame for all conflict, casually forgetting that the Romans and the Vikings were at it long before private enterprise became the de rigueur method of allocating society’s resources. I dare say the cave men were knocking each other on the head too.

My main sympathies are with those who argue for an end to foreign interventions. They hardly ever seem to make things better. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan is quite the toll of failure. While the argument that it’s always about money and oil seem basic and vaguely ludicrous, surely the lesson from modern times is that you just can’t impose liberal values at the barrel of a gun in societies that don’t want them. More campaigning around that issue would, in my book at least, offer a far greater chance of easing the burden of war.

View fullsize

View fullsize

I met lots of wonderful people at the rally – union leaders, students, pensioners, a Sunday vicar, a veteran pilot of the Vietnam war, activists of different hues, and many more besides who had just come out for the day. But I didn’t for a minute think this was a typical cross-section of Liverpool society and I can honestly say, I have never met so many avowed pacificists in my life. Perhaps, this shouldn’t come as a total surprise. The Campaign Against The Arms Trade, which helped organise the event, has at least some of its origins in the Quaker movement – which has always taken the moral position that there is no justification for violence. Their’s is a utopian world where the lion lays down with the lamb. Where there is always room for talk. Where all it takes is an act of will to be better. “There is no place for war, only peace,” said an earnest Anya from Liverpool. And you can respect that view even if it feels counter to the sum weight of human history. She said there was no profit in war. Putting aside the obvious fact that there is, the forever outbreaks in conflict clearly show that someone benefits and it’s not always the obvious capitalist bogeymen.

While for many their pacifism seemed to be a point of idealistic principle, for others it was founded on personal experience, such as Anita from Wigan. I could really relate to her story. Her father served in the navy in WW2 and took part in the Battle of the Atlantic. He lost his youngest brother in the battle of Arnhem, while his two eldest brothers were captured and became Prisoners of War (P.O.W.) under the Japanese, which was generally not a pleasant experience. As a result, her father she said, “suffered from horrendous mental issues all his life and that is why I am anti-war.”

For Anita, being anti-war means laying down all of our nation’s weapons and refusing to fight. She wasn’t the only one who had this view. Far from it. Sadly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The answers to life’s questions are seldom as simple as taking a firm moral position, and laying yourself at the mercy of others can often have undesirable consequences. For every Gandhi espousing nonviolent protest, there are at least three murderous Pol Pots. Besides, in the 1980s, Labour’s flirtation with unilateral nuclear disarmament was electoral poison. Instinctively, most people are just comfortable with the idea that they need to be able to defend themselves. Barring the desperate, the zealots and those of pathological tendencies, nobody likes the idea of risking life and limb in bloody, brutal conflict. It really doesn’t have much to recommend it. But most of us know, that sometimes it’s inevitable. Sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in. Or be crushed. And I’d sooner go into a knife fight with a gun.

Labour’s flirtation with unilateral nuclear disarmament was electoral poison. Instinctively, most people are just comfortable with the idea that they need to be able to defend themselves.

---

While you could accuse the pacifists of naivety, they weren’t the only ones at the rally. In fact, they were almost certainly outweighed by the Left wing anti-war activists and their opposition to the arms fair appears to be far more tactical than moral, even if they wear all the accoutrements of offended outrage. In reality, they are seeking an altogether different type of utopia. The stars of the show included former Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, Labour MP Dan Carden, influential Liverpool Labour activist, Audrey White, and TV Actress, Maxine Peake. Unions such as the RMT were there too, and the Young Communist League and, of course, the Socialist Workers Party, who have more fronts than there are stars in the sky but whose banners are always recognisable by the use of that same give-away font. The list goes on – Black Lives Matter, CND, the Liverpool Friends of Palestine, and even a smattering of (although by no means all) local councillors. Liverpool Mayor, Joanne Anderson was notable by her absence.

Are these people pacifists? Well, some of them are certainly. The Left has a long tradition of being anti-war after all. But mostly they’re class warriors and their true beef is with the capitalist state. For them, the military is but an arm of the state and joining a campaign against an arms fair is an opportunity to turn the focus on imperialist warmongers, the profit motive and the racist ideologies that they believe underpin foreign adventurism. Hamstringing or completely eradicating the military and defence contractors is all part of the revolutionary playbook. It’s also a too-good-to-be-missed chance to prosecute their continuing and unhealthy obsession with Palestine. For them the campaign against the arms fair is but a proxy war, and that’s language they’d understand.

You can say what you want about Lenin, but at least he had some kind of plan. Granted it didn’t work out too well, but he did have the courage of his convictions. He was going to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever it took. He didn’t hide his light under a bushel. But if Saturday was anything to go by, you can’t really say the same about the left wing demonstrators. Activist Audrey White may protest from the podium about the removing of the Labour Whip from the man who ‘still carries our (socialist) hopes and dreams’ (no I’m not talking about Keir Starmer), but the main focus of the rally was less about tackling the real causes of conflict and more about plugging into people’s innate sense of humanity. If Jeremy Corbyn was to be believed the weapons sold at the arms fair would be very targeted in the people they killed … “children in Gaza, children in Yemen, children in Somalia, children in Myannmar, children in so many places.” That really is some advanced technology. But is an exploitative pulling at heart strings any kind of argument?

Is this politics without the politics? Or is it lowest common denominator stuff, fetishizing on the weapons. Forget the context, feel the hurt.

One speaker, Haneen Awaad, 24 was introduced as a Palestinian Scouser – which feels like some kind of genetic super-breed of the oppressed

---

Corbyn was by no means the only one playing that game. One speaker, Haneen Awaad, 24 was introduced as a Palestinian Scouser – which feels like some kind of genetic super-breed of the oppressed. While describing herself as ‘born and bred in Liverpool’ she went on to say that all she’d ever known was ‘rockets, bombs, planes, tanks’. While the lives of Haneen’s grandparents have undoubtedly been touched by conflict (true of almost everyone of that generation in Europe) it seems unlikely that Haneen herself has had cause to fear military attacks in the streets of Anfield. Another speaker, Sarah Ashaika – a Syrian poet from Liverpool, who it was reported, has never been to Syria, regaled the audience with a poem that consisted of the names of dead Syrian children. Their involvement pointed to something hollow and performative about the rally in which people with no experience of the effects of weaponry gave testimony to the horrors of war.

Haneen excelled herself though. After telling the crowd how appalled she was at these ‘merchants of death’ visiting Liverpool, she then went on to evoke tropes about the Hillsborough disaster and the long-dead Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to wrap up the (seemingly whole city’s) opposition to the arms fair as a typical scouse fight-back against injustice - which shows the way the region’s politicos continue to weave their own narrative of David and Goliath to forge a socially cohering, but ultimately toxic brand of localist exceptionalism. But more than that. Laying claim to Hillsborough to support your political campaign just felt ugly. But we shouldn’t be surprised – the idea that Liverpool is a continually oppressed city with a single socialist view of the world is the line we hear over and over again.

It was notable how often demonstrators talked in the royal ‘we’ to describe what they felt Liverpool did and didn’t want. Many seemed convinced they spoke for the wider community, one which was presented as uniformly ‘socialist’. When I asked Michael who lived in Liverpool city centre how he could be so sure his views were representative of the wider region, he seemed a little irked – “I know the temperature of the city,” he replied. Maybe. But there were, at a very generous count, 1000 people at the demo (most probably less) and it had been widely advertised. Maybe the Council should actually consult with the people before presuming on their opinions and bowing to the vocal outpourings of pressure groups. The local media don’t help in this regard, tending to treat the campaign with kid-gloves. Google it and try and find anything critical. It’s almost as if they are afraid that raising a sceptical eyebrow might invoke a storm upon their own heads.

View fullsize

The strongest argument I heard at the rally was the one that pushed beyond a mere repulsion at bloodshed. It goes along the lines that, we the UK, should not sell or assist the sale of arms to tyrannous regimes with a history of using those weapons on civilians. Saudi Arabia is in the dock for its military raids in the poverty stricken land of South Yemen. Israel attracts considerable ire for the overwhelming force it meets out to the Palestinians (although of course, many go much further than this in their criticism of the Israeli state), and there are other regions of concern too from the Turks treatment of the Kurds to the cruel power of the Syrian government in its suppression of internal opponents. What are we to make of this?

I’m a little torn. I am no friend of the anti-democratic Saudis and I find the concrete wall that separates communities in Israel to be offensive to every humanitarian instinct I can muster. There surely has to be some limits on who we sell weapons to – some minimum standards. But it’s most probably quite a complex calculation. Saudi Arabia is the regional counter weight to Iran, and Iran are a big part of the reason there is war in Yemen. So pick your poison. One thing I would say, is that for anti-imperialists, there seems to be a whiff of old school imperial attitudes in the presumption that it is up to the UK to determine who can and cannot be trusted with the weapons that we are content to arm ourselves with.

Regardless, countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in their own indigenous armaments manufacturing capabilities as Turkey’s development of bomber drones proves. And if not us, then the Russians, Chinese, Americans, French and more will only be happy to step in. Talk of the moral obligations of the ‘West’ is starting to sound increasingly redundant.

One thing I heard over and over again was the view that war and violence had no place in a socialist city. Yet anybody with a passing knowledge of the 20th century will know that socialism does not have a clean bill of health when it comes to oppressive violence. It has been estimated that up to 20 million Russian citizens died under Stalin’s Soviet reign of terror, possibly even more under the auspices of red China’s tyrannical Mau. Today, modern China has come under fierce criticism for forcing over a million Uyghur Muslims into euphemistically named ‘retraining’ camps. Of course, there would be a long queue of people lining up to absolve these societies as ‘not socialist’. But you can draw a line between the foundations of these states and the horrors that followed. Can we really afford to be so blasé and one-eyed about these crimes when we wrap ourselves in anti-war banners?

Besides, as I raised with a number of protestors in my interviews with them, Liverpool as a city does have a military history. Not only was it the headquarters for the crucial WW2 Battle of the Atlantic in which electronic radar technologies played a crucial role; not only does it provide significant numbers of soldiers, sailors and airmen to the British Armed Forces, but its shipyards at Cammell Lairds to this day service and manufacture navy vessels under Ministry of Defence contracts – something many locals seem to take great pride in. When the 65,000 tonne aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales docked in Liverpool in February 2020, there was no shortage of visitors scrambling for tickets for the right to board. The truth is, Socialist Liverpool has a nuanced relationship with the military, but many of the anti-war demonstrators seemed keen to airbrush that fact.

I wonder what you think about all of this if you work in the local defence supply chain? According to Ministry of Defence data for 2019/20, the MOD spent £2.2bn in North West England supporting 15,000 direct jobs and many more indirectly across the whole industry. These are not small numbers and they provide some interesting context to a conversation I had at the demonstration with Dave Walsh, the President of the Liverpool Trades Council and Daren Ireland, an RMT Union Regional Organiser. They admitted that their organisations have been burning the midnight oil for years trying to figure out what to do about the thorny issue of those union members working in the defence industry. How could they square the circle of supporting their members while fighting militarism? Dave admitted that they’d finally arrived at a position. They recognised these were skilled jobs and recommended that those skills be turned away from defence to ‘socially useful’ sectors such as healthcare or for fighting climate change. I wonder what it’s like to be represented by a union that is ashamed of your existence?

Idealism can be like a drug. It makes you feel good – you’re a good person. You’re on the right side of history. But all the while history is going on about its business without you because you’ve stopped engaging with the world as is, in favour of that quick hit of righteousness. I don’t doubt that it would feel good to kick the Electronic Arms Fair out of Liverpool. But it would be a victory of dubious benefits in favour of principled naivety and leftist entryism. Not one less weapon would be sold in this world. But at least the protesters would be able to say, ‘Not in my Liverpool’. Not in my back yard.

~

The Stop The Liverpool Arms Fair demonstration took place on Saturday 11th September 2021. To hear what the protesters had to say in their own words, listen to this special podcast, Better To Break The Law Than Cause A War.

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach.

Share this article