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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jul 24

Stand Up to Racism has a long and murky history - it's much more than just a protest organisation 'funded by trade unions'.

It's been acknowledged for years that Stand Up to Racism it is a front for the communist Socialist Workers Party. After a rape scandal erupted in the leadership ranks of the SWP in 2013, the organisation, in true revolutionary fashion, has been keen to keep its true identity out of the public eye. Instead, it presents itself as a noble grouping of anti-racists.

In various forms, the organisation has been around since the 1970s. Here is that history... 🧵

(Buckle up, a long thread...)

But first, some background. What is the SWP and what are its aims?

- in short, communist revolution, the overthrow of the parliamentary system and market economy, and its replacement by a workers' republic.

Never lose sight of that fact. All the SWP's many antics need to be seen in that light.

The SWP bills itself as a Trotskyite "revolutionary socialist party", loyal to the principles of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.

At least not that horrible Stalin who sent millions to the Gulag, you say, so surely they can't be that bad?

Hold my beer...

All three, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the hallowed heroes of the modern SWP, believed that the only route to the Communist Utopia Marx predicted was by wiping out the capitalist class which owned property. (They believed that private property was the source of all evil in the world).

Yes - 'wiping out'. It could only come about through slaughter - in a gigantic scale. They spelled it out:

"Violence is the midwife of every new society" (Marx) -i.e. the only way it can come into being.

"We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action." (Lenin)

Of course, they overlook all these quotes (there are dozens more) today. Inconvenient.

Read 11 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Feb 8

Everything about the reparations campaign is based on lies. Those pushing it from the Caribbean end, especially, are peddling fake history.

Only someone as politically and intellectually challenged as Lammy could swallow them.

Here's how those claims don't stack up to close examination. 🧵

https://x.com/GilesUdy/status/1850510339839795299

A key figure in this is Sir Hilary Beckles, the leader of the Caribbean #reparations campaign.

A supposedly eminent historian and university vice-chancellor, the 'facts' he presents to support his case don't stack up to close examination. Here's how...

https://x.com/GilesUdy/status/1850510339839795299

https://x.com/GilesUdy/status/1845751181974360431

When you do a deep dive into some of Beckles's output - in this case his accusations against the CofE, including the charge that it was the biggest slaveowner in Barbados - you wonder if he just plucks his figures out of thin air.

Check this out...

https://x.com/GilesUdy/status/1845751181974360431

Read 4 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jan 3

Do you know that the death rate for sailors on the famous Brooks slave ship was higher than the death rate for slaves?

Because that statement is true, but it isn't the whole truth, it shows how deceptive statistics can be when taken out of context.

Here's the story... 🧵

In 1788 the Plymouth chapter of ‘The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ published an engraving of the slave ship Brooks (or Brookes) which graphically illustrated the horrific conditions in which the slaves were packed, shoulder to shoulder, for the infamous ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to the Americas.

Possibly the first example of a really successful mass advertising campaign, the print marked a turning point in the public perception of the trade, as copies were distributed up and down the land and were hung on walls in homes and inns.

Further stories of slaves being thrown overboard alive from the slave ship Zong to save drinking water for the remainder only added to the public revulsion the Brooks revelations had sparked.

It so happens that crew and slave mortality figures for many of voyages of the Brooks have been recorded. The figures make interesting reading.

The Brooks made the three voyages of the round trip eleven times between 1781 and 1804 when the trade was banned. The first one took almost a year and a half. The voyage from England to Africa lasted three months and eleven days. The vessel then spent almost exactly six months sailing up and down the West African coast picking up slaves. The life chances of those boarded at the beginning of this section would have been far slimmer than those taken on board at the end.

A typical crossing to Jamaica then took one month and 28 days, the ship departing from Jamaica three months and ten days later to make final the two-month voyage home.

This was the 'triangular trade' - Britain to Africa to the Caribbean and back to Britain.

Read 5 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jan 1

Yesterday I returned to the British Museum for the first time in a number of years.

I reached a number of conclusions, primarily that @britishmuseum appears not only to hate Britain and British history but also, paradoxically, to really rather dislike the museum itself.

The bookshop open shelves face everyone who passes through the central Great Court and this is the message they give the hundreds of British visitors and tourists who pass them every day…

Decolonisation, Dalrymple, and, of course, Edward Said, the founding father of postcolonialism.

From the shelves you’d think David Olusoga was one of Britains preeminent modern historians.

(His endorsement is on the cover of the last book)

Read 14 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Dec 30, 2024

Education has always been a target for those seeking to create the utopian Socialist society of their dreams.

Bridget Phillipson's latest plans to 'refresh' and 'decolonise' the national curriculum and force those but the richest of privately educated children back into the clutches of the state and its propaganda are no more than the latest in a line that stretches back to Marx...

...who taunted his readers in the Communist Manifesto as follows:

‘Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. Communists seek to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class’
and, as his first comment makes clear, from the family.

Unlike Phillipson, earlier Socialists have been quite open about their aims...🧵

Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, was quite clear about it, condemning the ‘bourgeois approach to raising children’:

‘Socialist society cannot remain indifferent to the fact that the family shapes the child's attitude, and this will not coincide with [socialist] norms of society’

=> Socialists want to take children away from the influence of their parents.

Socialists want to destroy the strength of the family unit/bond because it is harder to capture the minds of children while they are under the influence of their more worldly-wise parents.

Trotsky, one of Lenin's closest associates had predicted that the ‘socialist organisation of economic life’ would make it possible ‘to fundamentally reconstruct traditional family life’ and early Bolsheviks pursued that reconstruction with extreme vigour: the bourgeois (ie middle class small 'c conservative) family had to be eliminated:

Read 14 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Nov 18, 2024

“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

The early Labour party openly advocated for the expropriation of privately owned land.

Now the man advising them on the farm inheritance tax is doing exactly the same. 🧵

Read this. It’s from an official Labour publication, The Case for Socialism, published in 1933

“Socialism is an attack upon the institution of private property in land and capital. We advocate the expropriation of the landed and capitalist class.”
“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

And then this is Labour’s farm tax adviser today, in 2024.

Advani advocates for “the state taking part-ownership of land and becoming the landlord to tenant farmers.”

Straight back to Stalin (much admired by the Labour Party of the 1930s) and his expropriation of kulak farmers.

order-order.com/2024/11/18/lab…

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

And this is where it began - Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, which the 1948 Labour Party acknowledged as its inspiration on inheritance tax.

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

Read 4 tweets

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