In defence of Billy Bragg and Trans Rights

Billy Bragg has fluctuated in my estimation over the years. When he first appeared on the scene, singing solo on electric guitar was more or less unknown and he had some great songs. I mean a double A side single of New England and St Swithins Day in 1984... few can top that.  Levi Stubbs Tears can still make me cry.

And yes he was on the right (left) side of the all the big battles like the miners strike. My main criticism of him in those days from my anarcho/ultraleft stance was that he was so close to the Labour Party. Must confess I may even have heckled him from this perspective when he played on a National Union of Students demo though he was great live (sorry Billy)! I've never been entirely convinced by his 'progressive patriotism' line of reclaiming icons of English identity from the far right, though I can see that it can sometimes be effective. 

That time I heckled Billy Bragg - the 'Stand up for a New Deal Now' demo and rally in Battersea Park in March 1984 where he performed with Benjamin Zephaniah and Dancing with the Dog (who were they?). That was the first time me and my friends met Ian Bone and Class War who were quite an influence

Still he has stuck to his guns politically when others have gone quiet, not to mention later nameless indie folk singers influenced by him who must be suspected of being shy Tories given their absence of anything to say. He has played countless benefit gigs for various worthy causes.

Musically he has steered an interesting path for someone from a punk background -  I actually have a copy of his 1978 punk single with his band Riff Raff, 'I wanna be a cosmonaut', which I sometimes played as part of my Disconaut Autonomous Astronauts set. He has explored Americana through his interpretations of Woody Guthrie lyrics with Wilco, and English folk music with Imagined Village. 

I might add that my partner is from Dagenham and no word can be spoken against him in our house.

Billy Bragg singing outside the Festival Hall, June 2007

But recently my social media timelines have been flooded with accusations about Bragg accusing him of misogyny and being anti-women. The reason for this attention is that he has been an outspoken supporter of trans rights, including changing the words of songs to be trans-inclusive. He now sings his old song 'Sexuality' with the lyrics “And just because you're they,  I won't turn you away' instead of  'just because you're gay', explaining 'Times changed. Anyone born since the song was released would wonder why it’s a big deal to find common ground with a gay man. The front line now is trans rights'. Bragg has also been critical of those feminists who oppose trans rights along with their far right allies. But if Bragg is a misogynist then so presumably are the Feminist Library, Sisters Uncut, Gal-Dem etc. and many other feminist projects - not to mention most left wing/anarcho/radical folks under the age of 35.

I think Bragg is braver than most because he actually stands to lose some of his livelihood for speaking out. I hate the lazy political stereotyping of generations, but I do feel there is a generational aspect at play here. The trans exclusionary position does seem to be particularly concentrated among British lefties of a certain age.  I would estimate that the majority of people I know who were involved in radical politics in the 1980s have this as a default setting. This is precisely the constituency who are Bragg's natural fan base and it would be very easy for him to just serve them up 'what did you do in the strike?' platitudes rather than challenge their current day prejudices.

And I don't feel that prejudice is too strong a word. For me the issue does come down to the simple one of  'Some people are trans, get over it'. We can debate biology, gender and ideology until the cows come home, but it is a fact that some people really do experience gender dysphoria and that their lives can be made better by having their gender identity recognised. It seems needlessly cruel to deny this, or to portray those in this position as some terrible threat.  Of course that's a simple version of the argument and there's much more that I could say, but that has to be the starting point.

The vigil in Soho Square on 18 February 2023 for the murdered Brianna Ghey Vigil. A very moving event and I couldn't believe some of the hateful stuff some people were posting about it. You know 'how do they know it was a hate crime' like every racist says about every racist murder ever. Well it sure wasn't a love crime. 

There are some comparisons here with what happened when the Gay Liberation Front and similar groups erupted in the 1970s. Then too there were plenty of older (and some younger) leftists who found this threatening and denounced them, didn't they know that homosexuality would disappear under socialism and anyway wasn't all this a diversion from the class struggle? (see for instance this Gay Left article on the experience in the International Socialists). Let's just say that history has not been kind...

I know change and challenges to accepted ideas are uncomfortable. I would just urge people to pause and sit with this discomfort for a while rather than make knee jerk responses to something they mostly don't know much about. Read some books, listen to some trans people.  People also need to look around at the company they are keeping. Globally the anti-trans movement is being driven by the far right who are also coming for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ people generally. As someone once said 'If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction' (attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Wouldn't you rather be heading along the A13 with Billy Bragg?

Part of the big crowd that turned out at the Honor Oak Pub in South London on 25 February 2023 to oppose a far right threat to a drag storytelling event. I know it's not exactly the same issue but quite an overlap and  the anti-drag mob were a motley crew of ex-Combat 18 thugs and assorted Tommy Robinson wannabes. As somebody once sang 'which side are you on?' 

[sometimes it's a lonely and painful path when you feel so many of your friends have taken a wrong turn. Anyone for a support group for 'Boomers and Gen Xers for trans rights'?]

by Neil Transpontine, written on transgender day of visibility 2023

(had some positive responses to this post including one friend saying 'I think us boomers / gen x for trans rights ARE the majority - it’s just the usual crap about those shouting loudest')

Update 31 March 2024

Nothing much has changed, though I've noticed a few left anti-trans people nervously trying to distance themselves from the openly far right associations of some of the people they previously defended (but see Bonhoeffer quote above). A 'wait, are we the baddies?' moment can't come too soon, but I don't think it's good enough. The most sustained anti-fascist movement in London in the past 12 months was at the Honor Oak pub in South London from February to August 2023 where for six months people turned up to oppose openly far right protestors targeting a drag storytelling event. The anti-fascist effort was led by trans/queer activists - see 'South London Loves Trans People' banner below. Being an anti-fascist today means standing alongside and in solidarity with trans people.

For more on the Honor Oak movement, see my article in Datacide magazine: Defending Drag - South London is Still Anti-Fascist

Police raid South London Squat Gigs, 1991

A report on a couple of police raids on squat venues in South London from 1991 - an occupational hazard of going out in that era.

The Hellhouse was a squatted factory in Borough Road SE1, near the Elephant & Castle. On 3rd August 1991 The Blaggers and Oi Polloi were playing a benefit there for Anti Fascist Action. Police came in 'with dogs and wielding truncheons' and kicked everybody out. There were clashes in the streets outside and around 30 people were arrested. Within 24 hours the place had been resquatted.

Notice for Hell Haus/Hellhouse gig - I believe from SHIP Network News

A couple of weeks later there was another gig in a squatted Midland Bank in Peckham which ended in a police raid: 'On August 17th a gig was held in the  squatted Midland bank in Peckham. As it was free about 400 people turned up and had a good time. The police called around after complaints about noise and then they disappeared. About 4 am when the crowd was down to less than 100, the riot police arrived and viciously attacked the partygoers. Many people were injured by police dog bites, and some were beaten up by the cops with batons. The cops sealed off Peckham High Street for two hours. About eight people were arrested and some have been charged with affray which is a very serious public order charge'  (56a Info Shop Bulletin, no.1, August 1991). 56a Info Shop recalled on twitter in 2023: 'At the Midland Bank police raid, a friend of ours hid under a sofa to avoid a beating but when the cops cleared the building they then sat on the sofa for an hour or more! Poor Sergio! Was then locked in to the empty building when coppers left'

 I wrote at the time in a letter: 'I spent Monday in court ready to stand bail for a friend who was arrested over the weekend. I wore a suit in order to look like a respectable member of the community and it worked - a couple of people came up to me and asked if I was a solicitor! As it turned out I needn't have bothered with the fancy dress as my friend got unconditional bail, but he had been kept in since Saturday night, so it was touch and go. Along with 12 others he was nicked when the police raided a party on Saturday night. It was being held in a squatted bank, and over 300 people were there. The police sledgehammered down the door and piled in in full riot gear. People were thrown out of the building and on the way out had to walk between lines of cops who hit them as they passed. Quite a few people got bitten by police dogs'.

Flyer for the Peckham Midland Bank free party - 'live bands, music, friendly peoples', guess the police didn't get the memo.  

 The report below are from the 56a Info Shop Bulletin, no.1, August 1991.

The address of the Peckham party was 69 Peckham High Street  Pictured below is the Street in 1980s. From left to right a co-op store, Nat West bank (still standing in 2023), then the entrance to no.69 (Midland bank) where the party was held, leading through to main building behind. The Midland Bank was demolished in 1990s, so that entrance would be in the gap between the current Nat West Bank (no. 65) and the 'spoons pub The Kentish Drovers (no.71). 

A meeting the day the Peckham raid set up joint 'Hell-bank' campaign to support those arrested at the two parties. The leaflet below about the campaign seems to have been produced to distribute at an anti-racist march which went from Peckham to Bermondsey on 24 August 1991 (this infamously faced a violent British National Party mobilisation, but that's another story).

Leaflet set and printed by RedType who operated at the time out of Clearprint at 61-63  Peckham High Street, very close to the then empty Midland Bank.  Judging by style and language of leaflet (including referring to squatters as 'homeless youth') I think it may have been written by Steve the printer who I think had been in the group Workers Power as well as Anti Fascist Action.

All documentation above found at the 56a Info Shop Archive.

[post last updated January 2024 with details of Hell-Bank campaign]

See also:

Police raid on Arlingford Road party in Brixton (1993)

Hackney Homeless Festival (1994) 

One Becomes Two: Badiou vs Spice Girls

The Spice Girls' pop ballad '2 Become 1' was the UK Christmas number one single in 1996. I loved it at the time for its melody, its video, and (working as I was in HIV at the time) its subtle safer sex use a condom message ('Be a little bit wiser baby, Put it on, put it on').  According to Spice Girl Emma Bunton they also changed the album version lyric of 'Boys and girls feel good together' to 'Love will bring us back together' to be inclusive of their LGBT audience.

The main sentiment of the song though is a familiar one in pop music: 'tonight is the night when two become one', through sex the lovers are united into a single entity.

But it is precisely this notion of love that radical leftist philosopher Alain Badiou takes issue with in his 'In Praise of Love' (2009). Badiou is critical of ‘the meltdown concept of love’ based on the fusion of lovers into the One. That may be a feature of the initial ecstatic encounter, but ‘Real love... that triumphs lastingly, sometime painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world’ is about Two not One.

For Badiou, 'Love isn't simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of the One but from the perspective of Two’. He asks 'what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view or difference and identity? That is what I believe love to be'. Again, ‘love suggests a new experience of truth about what it is to be two and not one. That we can encounter and experience the world other than through a solitary consciousness’.

This basis of love in difference rather than identity has political implications: ‘it is urgent to defend love’s subversive, heterogenous relationship to the law. At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. Reactionaries are always suspicious of difference in the name of identity’.  Love even bears aspects of communism: ‘By “communist” I understand that which makes the held-in-common prevail over selfishness, the collective achievement over private self-interest.  While we’re about it, we can say that love is communist in that sense, if one accepts, as I do, that the real subject of a love is is the becoming of the couple  and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts. Yet another possible definition of love: minimal communism!’

There is something very French about Badiou's observations, or rather something that accords with Anglo stereotypes of French radical philosophy. There does seem to be a line stretching from the Surrealists through the Situationists and beyond that posits love, desire and passion as unproblematic buildings blocks of a better world. Usually from a male perspective, the view of the objects of their desire are not usually given much thought (though not sure that criticism can be levelled at Badiou). Obviously there is something quite heteronormative in the conception of the couple (the Two) as the subject of love. And don't fascists, reactionaries and racists of all sorts also fall in love, often with people they see as being like them? Their emotional ties can strengthen their sense of identity to their imagined community to the exclusion of those they see as other.

Still we can't deny that we are drawn to stories like Romeo and Juliet where the Two come from rival camps demonstrating ‘the power love possesses to slice diagonally through the most powerful oppositions and radical separations’. Badiou observes that ‘The commonest, most exploited conflict on the stage is the struggle of chance love against implacable law. More subtly, it is the struggle of young people, helped by proletarians (slaves and servants), against the old helped by Church and State’. In these stories and sometimes in our lives,  love is 'a cosmopolitan, subversive, sexual energy that transgresses frontiers and social status'.

Cinzia Says...

'Cinzia says...' at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art is a retrospective of the work of Italian fashion designer and artist Cinzia Ruggeri (1942-2019).  It features many examples of her 1980s clothing ranges, very much of the time with their playful postmodernist aesthetic, as well as some of her art and video works.  She collaborated with Gianni Emilo Simonetti, sometime Fluxus and Situationist associate, and with Italian pop band Matia Bazar among others.

The exhibition in New Cross, London SE14 closes on 12 February 2023

Chris Killip (1946-2020): photos of punks, pits and more

Some great images of 1980s North East (among other places) in the Chris Killip retrospective at the Photographers Gallery

There's quite a few shots of Gateshead anarcho-punks in around 1985, where Killip documented nights at The Station, the venue set up by Gateshead Musicians Collective. Lots of Crass, Conflict and Flux of Pink Indians t-shirts.

The miners strike also features, with images from Easington colliery in the Durham coalfield and the 1984 Durham Miners gala (featured here previously)

At Photographers Gallery, London until 19 February 2022

 

And the Rabbit's Name Was...

Chinese New Year on 22 January 2023 marked the start of the Year of the Rabbit, reminding me of the Chinese legend of there being a rabbit on the moon. Actually there seems to have been folklore about a lunar rabbit or hare in various parts of the world, prompted by the shapes to be seen from earth on the moon's surface.

The basics of the Chinese legend were relayed to the crew of Apollo 11 in July 1969 as they prepared for the first human moon landing. Reporting a press story, somebody at NASA mission control in Houston told them:

'Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning, is one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-E has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the Moon because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported'.

The connection with space programmes doesn't end there. China's own lunar space programme is named after Change'e, and its first lunar rover Yutu which langed in 2013 is named after the jade rabbit.

All of which brings me to the A&E Dept's 'The Rabbit's name was...',  a classic slice of 303 drenched London acid techno from 1994  which starts with the Houston NASA sample. The track was written and produced by DDR (Dave Lalouche) and Julian Liberator, and engineered by 'D.A.V.E. the Drummer' (Henry Cullen) at his Punishment Farm studio. Cullen started out as the drummer in Back to the Planet, festival favourites of the early 1990s who started out at the Peckham Dolehouse squat. I believe the original Punishment Farm studio was upstairs in the Harp of Erin pub in Deptford. The track was released on Stay Up Forever records, founded by the Liberator DJs and responsible for many of the big tracks on the London free party scene in the 1990s. We may have been partying in the gutters but some of us were looking at the moon.

Prolekult - Marx, Debord, Crass and more...

London based 1990s label Prolekult was influential in popularising the hard/acid trance sound, but its visual imagery really stood out with record labels each featuring radical left icons. Their first release in 1993, Sourmash's Passport to Paradise, set the tone with Karl Marx.

From there it was an eclectic mix of the good, the not so good and the ugly of radical politics depending on your particular perspective... Let's just say I don't think all of this lot would have got along!

Bertolt Brecht

Che Guevera

Lenin

Andreas Baader of the Red Army Fraction

Wasn't sure of who this was - but reliably informed on twitter that its Russian revolutionary artists Mayakovsky, Malyutin and Cheremnykh in 1919

'No Justice, No Peace, Resist the CJB' (Criminal Justice Bill) - image from 1990 Poll Tax Riot

Rosa Luxemburg

Leon Trotksy

Helen Steele and Dave Morris - the much spied upon McLibel Two

Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party

'Welcome to the future: let me breathe'

Malcolm X

Mexico Olympics 1968

Stephen Lawrence

Zapatistas

Harvey Milk

Aung San Suu Kyi

The Clash

Crass

'Chairman Gonzalo' of the Shining Path in prison in Peru

Guy Debord - Down with the Society of the Spectacle

Tony Blair and John Major - Zero Difference

Paris 1968

Anarchist clash with police in Barcelona, before or during the Spanish Revolution (thanks to @semicoda for spotting)

Situationist Rene Riesel - confirmed by @andrew_wilson_a on twitter

Keith Narey, Bradford Socialist - featured on 1997 release Vuture  Shoque by Logique (Kult 23). I had some difficulty identifying him, but @casperpottle on twitter recognised the photo from his local pub, The Brewery Tap in Bradford. He seems to have been a larger than life figure well known in the Campaign for Real Ale as well as Militant who sadly died celebrating Labour's victory in the 1997 general election.

Prolekult was a sub label of Hooj Choons founded by Alex Simons and Red Jerry (Jeremy Dickens) in 1990. They put out a lot of big house tunes, notably Felix's "Don't You Want Me" (1992) co-produced by Red Jerry and Rollo. The thinking behind the Prolekult label, and the labels, is set out in the booklet accompanying the 1997 Prolekulture compilation:

 

"We started Prolekult up in the spring of '93 as a harder alternative to the more commercial-oriented house we'd been involved with up until then. There was never much of a gameplan involved, just a bunch of preferences and prejudices: a liking for hard, having-it, often Euro-flavoured trance and total indifference to the up-its-own-arse electronic doodling that characterised the UK techno scene at the time.

Sourmash's Pilgrimage To Paradise was a good tune to kick it all off with, emanating as it did from the UK, but packing the punch of a Beltram / F. De Wulf / Orlando Voorn record. Getting off to a start like that, we'd hoped to overcome our sense of musical Europhilia and carry on signing banging home-grown material, but it wasn't to be. Of the twelve tracks included here [on the CD], three quarters were licensed from European labels, reflecting the failure on our part to consistently find the kind of material we were after here in the UK. We're not sure what that says about us, or the UK, or both ...or neither, but we like the vibe surrounding the very up-for-it free party scene that's developed over the past few years and the producers that are now emerging from this sector of the underground are kicking arse. Proper UK acid business.

When it came to adopting a name, logo, etc, for the label, as unreconstructed lefties, we turned to socialist political history for inspiration. "Prolekult" is an adaptation of the Russian word "Proletkult" which was a workers cultural organisation set up in 1907 by the socialist exiles Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky. The theory went, in simple terms, that at a time when Russia's Tsarist dynasty was at the weakest and most vicious stage in its squalid history, the Bolshevik party was to lead the political opposition, the unions to lead the economic opposition and the Proletkult the cultural opposition. Perhaps the best known work to come out of the Proletkult was the post-revolutionary films of Eisenstein (Strike, Battleship Potemkin), but within a year of his rise to power in 1921 Stalin had effectively stripped the Proletkult of any autonomy, vibrancy or relevance, turning it, as he did all other genuine bases of working class expression, into just another instrument of state power.

Obviously, none of this has much direct relevance to the records we put out as the lack of vocals involved makes overt political statement difficult ("you gotta have house" repeated a few times on Neurodancers' Wippenburg [sic] - the only vocal on the twelve tracks - isn't exactly "Blowing in the Wind" is it?) but it made a change from the cod-futurism to be found on the sleeves and logos of so many techno/trance labels and, in terms of lefty icons over the last two hundred years, we knew we had an extensive reserve of imagery to draw upon. There was also the quiet hope on our part that by using pictures of long-forgotten working class heroes we'd be making our own tiny contribution to the rehabilitation of these political giants who have effectively been written out of our history. We thought that even if the odd person here and there asked "who's that?" then the labels and imagery would have transcended their original role as mere packaging and taken on a higher role as potential consciousness-raisers (man). Unfortunately it soon became apparent that no one gave a toss about which old trot we wheeled out next and after three years and seventeen releases I can safely say that we could put Donald Duck on our next release and no one would bat an eyelid...

...When we first decided to use socialists/revolutionaries etc we had assumed it would all pan out in neat chronological order, beginning with Marx and ending wherever, of course within three or four releases it had all gone. Last minute desperate scrabble to find someone reasonably relevant the night before label copy and image due at the printers etc. and to be frank the odd dubious character go used for expediencies sake". Nevertheless they meant it and included potted biographies in the compilation,,

(if you search prolekult you can listen to all this on soundcloud, spotify and all the usual places)