How did #Matchfest22 go (&did the fash turn up as promised)?
Here’s a look at the amazing day we had at @BowArts on Saturday.
First to join me round the table (we don’t do stages- or PowerPoints): @carolinebressey & @SuffragetteKate, on women fighting racism through history
Caroline discovered incredible new information about this woman, Catherine Impey, who set up an anti racist journal, with her mum & sister, *in 1888!* Same year the Matchwomen went on strike.
Catherine lived in Street, Somerset.
Visiting 1870s America, Catherine was horrified by the racism.
She met with Black activists including legends like Frederick Douglass & Ida B Wells.
This is our riposte to the old excuse ‘well everyone was racist THEN’!
Buy Caroline’s extraordinary book: waterstones.com/book/empire-ra…
.@SuffragetteKate illuminated the anti fascism & anti racism of Sylvia ‘more than a suffragette!’ Pankhurst.
Sylvia went to prison to protect her sources when editing paper Workers’ Dreadnought: including the brilliant Claude McKay, who wrote exposes of racism in London
HIGHLY recommend @SuffragetteKate ‘s book on Sylvia in the US- contains brand new material, & gripping anecdotes - eg Pankhurst being invited to a gala dinner by white American matrons, then furiously tearing into them over racism! plutobooks.com/9780745333229/…
Artist, author, activist & dad @Danwhite1972 spoke movingly about the (often Tory-made) struggles faced by the parents of disabled kids.
His unstoppable daughter Emily (16) worked with him on this fabulous comic book with disabled superheroes: get it here departmentofability.com
The next speaker is a superhero too.
Cait lived through years of appalling gang-abuse from the age of 14 after innocently answering an ad for modelling work.
She was failed by police & council, & almost snared by Tommy Robinson’s team,with lies & promises of help
The money raised for victims seemed to disappear; & when she challenged the racist misuse of her story (she was abused by men of all races), was told ‘kill yourself’
Her life’s still hard (we only scratched the surface) but she wants to save other girls. Hero.
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Even though this guy was at #Epping today - from SOUTH LONDON, not Epping; and he’s an old Combat 18 and BNP member.
But those are both just book clubs, right?
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DON’T CALL THEM NAZIS, THEY’RE CONCERNED LOCALS!
Even tho Phil Curson is wanted by police in connection with violence at Epping; previously in prison for years further a brutal racist stabbing of 2 teenagers, prior to which Curson’s gang threw NAZI SALUTES..
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DON’T CALL THEM NAZIS, THEY’RE CONCERNED LOCALS!
Even tho the trouble has been organised by a splinter group of Patriotic Alternative, who are led by Neo Nazi Mark Collett..
Just been told the latest desperate smear attempt against me is- drumroll please- I’M AN UNDERCOVER MET COP!
This is going to make my complaint against the Met for assault on Saturday INTERESTING!
And I suppose my support for the
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brilliant, brave women of the Spycops campaign was a cunning double bluff…Having them speak at #Matchfest 3 times- WHAT AM I LIKE🤣
I’m obviously a genius- I must have been in this role 30+ years, & never busted!
Yet these same trolls mock me for being broke (about the only
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thing they’ve ever got right) and surely the Met pay pretty well?
I should be rolling in it- over recent years I’ve been accused of working for:
The royal family
The 77th brigade
MK Ultra (had to look that one up!)
Boris Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn
‘The Muslims’ 🤣
Mi5
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BAD day for the far right, GREAT day for Jeremy Corbyn yesterday!
Violent thugs were prevented from getting into Marxism and meanwhile, Jeremy got the most rapturous applause inside.
He had to do TWO events because even the main hall, which held over a thousand, wasn’t 1/
big enough for everyone who wanted to see him.
So we had to get him straight to talk 2- it’s not easy doing two long sessions back to back, but he aced it.
As I was lucky enough to be stageside let me share some clips. 1) addressing the national shame - hungry schoolkids
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2) the SCANDAL of PFIs- ‘These people are fleecing the NHS!’ 3) the two child cap: ‘a piece of 19th century moralism… Iain Duncan Smith saying the cause of poverty is (working class people) having too many children’
was understandably anxious, but she too was a suffragette. She’d raised Dora to understand politics, teaching her to read and debating the news with her.
She could only let respect & pride win out over motherly worries when Dora said:
Let me go, Mother. I’m quite capable. 2/
I know what I am fighting for, and am prepared to go to prison for the cause. I feel that women ought to have their rights and it will be an honour to go to prison.’
Dora made it to London & was on her first protest when she was brutally arrested. You can see her torn skirt.. 3/
They said they weren’t political; just wanted to help victims.
They lied on both counts.
Soon she started to hear Islamophobic comments. Some of her abusers were (nominally) Muslim, but she knew no race or religion was to blame.
White men abused her too.
She became alarmed
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-Who had she fallen in with?
-How could she extricate herself safely?
She asked, politely, that they didn’t racialise her story, which they were exploiting mercilessly. ‘Don’t pretend it was just one group’, she said.