Is the mystery buried forever ‘neath the sucking flush of the grimpen mire, or is it blatantly before our eyes?

February 4, 2008 at 10:53 am (Far Left)

I may be on a hiding to nothing here, but can someone please explain to me what John Rees thinks he’s doing? I ask merely for information.

Let’s start by going back to the Great Miners’ Strike. You will recall that at the time the Daily Mirror (R. Maxwell prop.) ran a pretty vicious smear campaign alleging Arthur Scargill to be corrupt, a campaign moreover that went on for years after the strike was defeated. Remember also that Paul Foot was at the time a star columnist on the Mirror and thus dependent on Cap’n Bob for his salary. Now, Footie could not stop the Mirror printing smears against Scargill, but he did refuse to take part in the campaign, and nothing of that sort ever appeared in the Paul Foot column. If it had, one assumes the SWP would have looked askance. In fact, one assumes Cliff would have gone through Foot like a dose of salts.

So we turn to Cde Rees, a clever man when it comes to writing Marxist theory but as a practical politician… well, let’s just say that if you sent him out to sell the family cow, there’s a fair possibility he would come back with a bag of magic beans. Certainly, his dealings with the press, and how he’s getting away with them, are enough to boggle the mind.

One thing that has struck me over the last few months is that, to the extent the press has covered the Respect split at all, it has tended to lean very much to the SWP side of the equation. This seems quite odd – you don’t, for instance, expect the Evening Standard to be particularly sympathetic to the SWP. Even more surprising has been the coverage in Private Eye, given that the Eye‘s point-man for this sort of thing is Francis Wheen. Now, we know Wheen of old. We know his history of red-baiting, his particular hostility to the SWP, and his place in the Euston Manifesto camarilla. So why would he be puffing up John Rees, of all people?

It’s all a question of priorities. If you went back ten, fifteen, twenty years you would often find witch-hunting of the SWP in the bourgeois media. These days, that’s quite rare. The same goes for the state – if Annie Machon is right, MI5 still runs interference with the SWP, but on a much smaller scale than it used to. The powers that be, it is reasonable to infer, may not like the SWP but are not really all that bothered by it, and they certainly don’t care much about John Rees.

George Galloway, on the other hand, is quite a different kettle of fish. I have my own serious reservations about George, but there’s no gainsaying the fact that the media are out to get George, and for reasons that have nothing to do with my reservations. Indeed, they’re after him for his good points. Let’s be honest, George, whether we like it or not, is just about the most recognisable face of the antiwar movement. He’s one of the most articulate critics of New Labour. He has that extremely important connection with the working-class Asian population in the East End. Lord help us, he’s a serious asset to our side as well as being an incorrigible loose cannon.

All this should be fairly obvious. If the SWP side in the split is getting puff jobs in the media, not to mention acquiring the critical support of Harry’s Place and the Alliance for Workers Liberty, that’s not an accident. These guys have a clear sense of priorities. There are of course other factors – Private Eye‘s repeated snarky references to the Asian element of Respect gel with the sort of casual racism one expects from the Eye – but in the end it comes down to priorities. Using the SWP as a cat’s paw against Galloway is using a sprat to catch a whale.

You would think the SWP leadership would be aware of this, and maybe at some level they are. But then one would expect the proponents of the united front (even “of a special type”) to be working out strategies for avoiding falling into this trap. One would certainly not expect Rees’ fingerprints to be all over anti-Galloway articles in the media. The most stunning example of this is the Private Eye article before Christmas on the dodgy Dubai cheque. Now, it was pretty clear that George did the right thing, sensing the cheque to be a provocation. It was also clear that getting dodgy Middle Eastern money alongside George Galloway in an article would be the probable outcome. So far so predictable. But what of the lengthy verbatim quote from “Mr Rees, who denies any wrongdoing”?

It’s possible, of course, that the Eye contacted Rees rather than vice versa. Be that as it may, he still wasn’t under any obligation to supply anti-Galloway quotes. And while this may be unfortunate in the case of Private Eye, when Rees’ fingerprints start popping up in the Evening Standard and the Independent, and when the man himself is going on Newsnight to attempt to link the Galloway faction to political violence, it begins to look like a deliberate pattern. In that case, I think Rees deserves to be scandalised throughout the labour movement for his actions.

Rud eile: I can’t help noticing that Respect (Renewal) has been sluggish in its rebuttals, and hasn’t come back on this with as much energy as I would have expected. What RR really needs, of course – and this has been discussed several times – is a serious press operation. It’s true that the old Respect didn’t have a functioning press office, nor does the SWP. (The Socialist Alliance did, though, before Rees buggered it up, but let’s not get into that.) But, when your leader is faced with the sort of media hostility that GG generates, I would have thought it would be an urgent necessity.