Letters

Gay-bashing

The death of David Morley following a gay-bashing attack must be a wake-up call to the government, police and Crown Prosecution Service to treat homophobic violence more seriously and urgently.
His murder comes in the wake of months of controversy over eight reggae singers who have put out songs urging the killing of lesbians and gay men. One of them, Sizzla Kalonji, is in Britain for a UK concert tour. However, three of Sizzla’s five UK concerts - at Milton Keynes, Birmingham and Bristol - were cancelled following protests by Outrage, which organised hundreds of our supporters to blitz the venues with emails. We lobbied police chiefs and council leaders in the five cities where Sizzla was due to perform and one of the remaining two concerts - in Bradford - now looks likely to be halted.

We are appalled that the Stratford Rex venue in east London is insisting on going ahead with Sizzla’s concert on Saturday November 6. It is sick the way the Stratford Rex is making money out of promoting murder-music singers like Sizzla, whose songs promote the murder of gays and lesbians. Many of Sizzla’s fans share his violent homophobia. There is a real danger they may attack gay people innocently passing by.

Reggae singers who encourage and glorify homophobic violence are allowed to perform in London and in venues around the country. Yet no club would host a singer who promoted killing black or Jewish people or attacking religious minorities or the disabled. We ask the venues to adopt the same stance towards singers who incite the murder of white people and lesbians and gay men.

The government and police in London have not stepped in. Incitements to murder gays are freely sold in high street record stores like HMV, Virgin and Tower Records, and are given air time by some radio stations. Why aren’t the laws against incitement to murder being enforced? The CPS investigation of these singers has stalled, with delay after delay preventing decisive action being taken against those who promote gay-bashing.

Sizzla’s 2004 album Red alert has the lyric, “Boom boom! Batty boy them fi dead” (Boom boom! Queers must be killed). He will be performing in London at a time when the gay community will be mourning another victim of homophobic violence. It is inappropriate, insensitive and macabre that Sizzla’s concert is going ahead in the wake of this queer-bashing murder.

Outrage is urging the police to use their powers under the Criminal Justice and Police Act of 2001 to stop the performance. Under this legislation, the police are able to cancel concerts or close venues if they believe there is a likelihood that an entertainer could provoke public disorder, encourage violence, threaten the safety of a section of the community, or undermine good community relations.

Outrage is also demanding that urgent action be taken in other areas of the law to make life safer for lesbians and gay men. The government is creating a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights. It will place a legal duty on public bodies to combat discrimination based on race, gender and disability - but not discrimination based on sexual orientation. As a result, local councils and other public bodies will remain free to do nothing about homophobic prejudice, harassment and violence.
The home office has repeatedly neglected to crack down on anti-gay attacks. It vetoed an amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill 1998 that would have extended the tough new penalties for race-hate attacks to homophobic hate crimes.

People learn from a young age that attacking and harassing lesbian and gay people is tolerated. Over 90% of schools have no specific anti-homophobia programmes. Section 28 may have been repealed, but little is being done to undo the damage it caused.

Gay-bashing
Gay-bashing

Refused

For comrades’ information, there is a critique of the centrist politics, incoherence and sporadic bureaucratism of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker over the Iraq war/resistance and the Respect coalition, now available on the What Next? journal’s website as part of a preview of the paper edition. The article, which was refused publication in the Weekly Worker, is available at www.whatnextjou-rnal.co.uk/Pages/Next/CPGB.html. The corresponding paper edition of What Next? (No29) will be published hopefully in early November.

Refused
Refused

Abortion Rights

It has been pointed out to me that in my article, ‘A question that won’t go away’, I omitted to list among the aims of the Abortion Rights campaign the commitment to defend the 1967 act’s upper time limit of 24 weeks (Weekly Worker October 28).

Secondly I described Finn MacKay as a “radical feminist”, whereas she wishes to be described as a ‘radical lesbian feminist’. I stand corrected.

Abortion Rights
Abortion Rights

Language Rights

I wish to make a few points on the comments by Lewis Jones on the question of the Welsh language (Letters, October 28).

Firstly, I share some of the legitimate concerns Lewis has made about the lack of affordable housing in parts of Wales and how this is a factor in encouraging young Welsh speakers to move out of their community. But what should supporters of Welsh language rights advocate as a solution to counteract this?

The response of the Welsh language pressure group, Cymuned - or at least that of its speaker at the ESF (and, by the way, he was not from England originally, as Lewis claims: he described his roots as being from north Wales) - was, from my perspective, in danger of stirring up anti-English sentiment. I repeat: Cymuned’s talk of “some possible restrictions” on English people moving into Wales is farcical. How can this be policed? Perhaps all those outside Wales wanting to buy property here should be means-tested? That’d go down well with non-Welsh-speaking families relocating to Wales with job commitments. Come on!

And how on earth can talk of “colonisation” of Wales by the English “place Cymuned in a broader anti-imperialist camp”? If there was talk of the British state and its establishment’s historical assault on the Welsh language then I would have had more sympathy perhaps with Cymuned’s wider aims. By there wasn’t. There was no mention or hint whatsoever of class politics in his speech and thus there was an inherent danger of appealing to nationalist politics as the way forward. As Lewis points out, “Cymuned’s solution is a reformist one … with many deficiencies.”

Lewis also states that my own “analysis offers no solution”. Leaving aside that a small, approximately 250-word report can hardly constitute an “analysis”, where is Lewis’s solution? He correctly points to the necessity of fighting for the provision of affordable council housing, but what else? What are his political demands on the question?

Lewis concludes his letter by saying that “Cymuned wants Welsh to survive as a living language - a progressive demand that all socialists should support”. Well, I agree. But what about raising other democratic demands? What about the demand for a bilingual Wales with the Welsh language having full equality with English and for both languages to have an ‘official’ status in Wales? What about the right of people to speak Welsh should they choose, to be educated in the language and have access to a multi-culture in Welsh? What about the fight for legal, public and private bodies to provide facilities for use of the Welsh language?

Language Rights
Language Rights

Insane abuse

The interesting thing about the continued ‘anti-semite’ insane abuse is that it makes the political challenge undermining the fake ‘left’ so clear (Letters, October 28).

A world of six billion is in a historical systemic crisis such as a dying mode of production (via unresolvable accumulated internal contradictions - K Marx) has never before seen, and all we get is a tiny bunch of religious freemasons screaming for their own particular colonially degenerate interests, regardless of the fact that this is only helping to drive the world to World War III, and hate-filled abuse against those that point this out.

Modern science declares : “The slice of diversity linked to traditional notions of ‘race’ is startlingly small. For example, population geneticists have found that there can be greater genetic similarity between an African and an Outer Hebridean than between two Africans. This counter-intuitive finding, and many more like it, renders a genetic view of race meaningless to most scientists.”

And to this selfish-‘racial’ self-determination freemasonry fiction is now deliberately acted out the knowing insanity that random desperate ‘terrorist’ groups are the real threat to world civilisation on a planet where 40 million children die needlessly annually from malnutrition; and western imperialist greed, warmongering and arrogance fills the world with hatred.

And the US-‘Israel’ reply? ‘Kill them all until people follow our orders and behave themselves’ - just to get your own illegal real estate. Sick.

Insane abuse
Insane abuse

Draft programme

Amidst some fairly drastic policy suggestions in the ‘Immediate demands’ section of your draft programme - such as the right to bear arms, which I find positively terrifying - how is it you do not have a separate section for racial discrimination as a tool of state control, and the subsequent exploitation of the situation by the extreme right?

You also seem to have left out what stand you take on the real issue of terrorism, as advocated by the extreme right of the islamic world, and also exploited by the most reactionary elements of our society, either through the advocacy of restrictions on our freedoms, or in the growth of anti-semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism (I am not referring to Palestinians here).

Lastly, what is your stand on that most important litmus test of proletarian solidarity, the banning of foxhunting?

Draft programme
Draft programme

Valid

You might have some valid points about Respect. But these debates on secularism, women’s rights and so on should come from activists which represent real forces within their community. You are an irrelevant little sect who represent nobody but your tawdry little rag.

Your organisation has contributed little (if anything at all) to the growth of Respect and it would therefore be quite wrong for your group to be leading the debate or setting the agenda on these issues.

Valid
Valid

What's the rush?

The Republicans are making noises as if the election should be decided by a Kerry concession speech. What’s the rush? The president only takes office on January 20 and Bush is already there. The only delay would be to a possible John Kerry administration.

Baseball teams don’t concede in the 8th inning. Football games don’t end at minute 45. Basketball games don’t stop at half time. There’s no need for Kerry or Bush to concede before every ballot is counted. The electoral college actually votes in the new president on the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December.

In many other countries, when the government loses an election, the new administration takes over in a matter of days, not weeks. If Republicans are really in a hurry for a judgement that is fast rather than accurate, they could ask Bush to concede!

Let’s count all the ballots. How would you feel if you had waited in line for hours to cast a provisional ballot, and then had it thrown away without being counted?

What's the rush?
What's the rush?