PROTEST MOVEMENT OR TOURIST ATTRACTION?

 

We are told the Occupy movement started last summer in the USA on Wall Street. Whilst that is probably true the fact is the mass protest movement started in Spain under the 15-M banner.
 
Pictures were flashed around the world as there were mass occupations of plazas in Madrid and Barcelona. Whilst the former was largely peaceful there were accusations and indeed evidence of secret police infiltrating the crowds in Barcelona and fermenting violent confrontations.
 
The 15-M movement, which took its initials from the date of the municipal and some regional government elections in Spain (May 15), was protesting over the financial crisis and unemployment but also about the all pervasive political corruption in Spain.
 
Whilst 15-M still exists it has been joined by other mass movements one of which deals with the plight of those who have lost their homes through repossessions. The story invariably starts with the victims losing their jobs so they cannot keep up the mortgage payments, and then the bank or mortgage lender has them evicted so now they have no salary or home. The property is sold off cheap and the former householders finds they are responsible for the difference between their mortgage and the forced sale price. Hence not only have they no job, no home but now they owe over 100,000 euros to the bank.
 
What both the 15-M and other action groups have in common is they are an integral part of the local community. So whilst the world watched Madrid and Barcelona I signed the 15-M petition in Ronda, which has around 35,000 residents then marched in Jerez, the bankrupt Sherry city, with the unions and local protestors. It was the people who were on the streets, young, middle-aged and old, the unemployed, those in work and on pensions, children in arms and in prams, all classes, marching against the injustice that surrounds us.
 
Which brings me to my native London. At the end of November I was back in town and it was suggested I went to take a look at the Occupy movement outside St Pauls. Given my experiences with the 15-M in Spain I needed little persuading.
 
In the ‘Fabian Review’ Tom Hampson reveals a new poll carried out by the society and the TUC. In his opening paragraph he writes: “Quietly and without much fuss the British mainstream has shifted. Across the nation, worn out political territory has been vacated and tents have been pitched on the new centre-ground, and middle England has unfurled polite and new placards and banners that read ‘people before profit’, ‘narrow the gap between rich and poor’ and ‘protect the workers’. Tea has been brewed and hardier souls are even sleeping out overnight. Only the new radical fringe – mostly Tory voters – have stayed away from the party.”
 
Well the 15-M and other Spanish movements would certainly endorse those sentiments but what I found outside St Paul’s was sterile in the extreme. In Spain we marched and the mainstream political parties took note largely because elections were in the offing and they tried the clothes of the protestors on for size. The far left Izquierda Unida found they fitted best but socialist PSOE and the centre-right Partido Popular looked like scarecrows as both parties are the problem not the solution.
 
I sat on the steps of St Paul’s and listened to one of the speeches and was immediately aware that the audience was largely young foreign tourists – next stop the Tower of London and Madame Tassauds. The woman protestor addressing the crowd even had to appeal for help with her tasks as she was doing the work supposedly assigned to others. I saw nobody rush forward to volunteer to help her.
 
So here I was in the centre of the City of London, to one side the empty tents of the protestors, to the other tourists taking in the sights, yet nowhere to be seen where the people of Britain displaying their anger over the injustices meted out by the greedy Capital of capitalism.
 
When I say the people of Britain I don’t mean those in the tents or those who wrap scarves around their faces to destroy property during riots. I mean the angry “young, middle-aged and old, children in arms and in prams, all classes, the unemployed, those in work and on pensions, marching against the injustice that surrounds us” – the same people I stood amongst in Spain.
 
It is an empty protest outside St Paul’s. It receives a nod from the clerics inside the cathedral, from some politicos and the public’s recognition that they are there. Yet they have failed to capture the mass support of the British public and until or unless they do the Occupy the City movement will be nothing more than a passing tourist attraction.

(The above article appeared in the London Progressive Journal on January 14 2012)

LONDON MEMORIALS TO THE FIGHT AGAINST FRANCO

In January of last year I read an article in The Morning Star about a memorial garden to British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War in London. However it wasn’t till this May that I decided to visit my native ‘old smoke’ from Spain to try and find it.

Google was no great help but did point me to another memorial by County Hall, the former GLC council chamber on the Thames opposite Westminster. I did eventually track down the memorial garden, or patio to be more correct, but I will come to that later.

To go back in history the memorials are to the British volunteers who joined the International Brigades. These were made up largely of socialist, communist and anarchist volunteers from numerous countries to went to Spain to defend the Second Spanish Republic in the 1936 – 1939 Spanish Civil War.

It is claimed people from 53 nations took part. The total number of volunteer combatants could have been as high as 35,000 although it is estimated that only around 20,000 were on the battle front at any one time. In addition up to 5,000 were engaged in non-combatant activities. They fought against the Spanish Nationalist forces under Franco which in turn were supported by German and Italian forces.

Some 2,000 people from Britain joined the International Brigades plus another 250 from what was then the Irish Free State. The Irish were in the main divided between the British Battalion and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Britons also served in both as well as the Tom Mann Centuria – a small group who operated as part of the largely German Thälmann Battalion.

It is well known that the English writers Laurie Lee and George Orwell served in the International Brigades alongside the trade union leader Jack Jones. However I was intrigued to find the name of the actor James Robertson Justice also listed amongst the combatants plus an “English upper-class communist” Esmond Romilly.

There are actually a number of memorials to the International Brigade volunteers throughout Britain. However the main one is without a doubt in Jubilee Gardens by the London Eye and County Hall – or rather it normally is. It consists of a bronze statue by Ian Walters that was unveiled by the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot in 1985. Unfortunately you cannot visit it to next year. The gardens are being revamped, the statue is in storage and when they re-open the memorial will have a new location away from the Eye’s queue.

Every year the International Brigades Memorial Trust holds a ceremony to commemorate those who felt compelled between 1936 and 1939 to travel to Spain to fight against fascism. As I stated previously around 2,000 made that journey with 500 paying the ultimate sacrifice and dying in Spain.

The 2010 commemoration ceremony in Jubilee Gardens was the first held by the IBMT at which no veterans of the conflict were present but needless to say their children and grandchildren were.

Now to the second London memorial. Whilst Jubilee Gardens is visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year the memorial garden has to be viewed by appointment. The reason for this it proudly stands at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell.

I made the short walk from Farringdon Station along streets I hadn’t trod for over 45 years. I presumed the library would have a garden at the front in which would be placed the memorial. I found myself standing outside a building in Clerkenwell Green and noticed there was an exhibition inside dedicated to the Wapping Newspaper Strike. It soon occurred to me this was Marx House, a former 1738 Welsh Charity school, but garden there was none.

I had pre-arranged my visit and went up to the library which apart from holding Marx’s own library also houses the definitive archives related to the International Brigades. I was then led back through the building and out through a door which led to a small patio at the rear of the building. I was in the International Brigade Memorial Garden.

The official inauguration took place in January of last year and was presided over by Les Baylis and Tony Burke, the assistant general secretaries of Unite the Union. It was they who unveiled the striking statue of an International Brigade volunteer which had previously been at the Unite training centre in Quorn in Leicestershire.

At that ceremony Les Baylis had said: “It is entirely fitting that Unite Graphical Paper and Media Sector has sponsored this garden and chosen to relocate the magnificent bronze statue of an international Brigade fighter within these walls.”

The reason is that by trade more printers went to fight in Spain than any other. Three of that number George Hardy, Leslie Maughan and Walter Tapsell gave their lives for democracy and are honoured by a commemoration plaque on the patio’s wall which also includes the name of journalist Ralph Fox.

Bill Alexander, the commander of the British battalion and a member of the union, was the president of the Marx Memorial Library up till his death. The brigade veterans left their archives to the library in perpetuity in 1975. Today they are the finest source for the conflict in the British Isles and can be viewed by researchers and historians along with the numerous other important document collections at the library.

Perhaps this memorial garden is best summed up by Tony Burke who said at the ceremony: “We would want Unite members, and trade unionists and printers, to visit the archive and also spend a few moments at the memorial to remember those brave printers who risked and gave their lives as members of the International Brigades and fought against fascism. We well always recall that ‘freedom was never held, without a fight, without struggle there can be no victory’!”

(A version of the above article appeared in The Morning Star on July 14 2011)