Black Lives Matter distance themselves from activists who attacked women at Speakers Corner

[DJLippy]

Make More Noise were contacted by a person proported to represent Black Lives Matter to distance themselves from the actions of those present at Speakers Corner and express solidarity with women and their right to free assembly

twitter.com/Aja02537920/status/1300846048131375106?s=20

@Abhannmor

Perhaps the membership of the SWP has changed in composition then? When I knew them they were mostly white males. Dialectical materialist who dismissed sexual politics as bourgeois deviation.

Are you thinking of a different left wing group? Because there is loads of stuff about women’s liberation in the SWP’s publications

socialistreview.org.uk/tags/womens-liberation

You are free, of course, to disagree with their analysis, theoretical framework, positions or practices.

The mysterious thing with the SWP is the way it has done a 180-degree turn from opposing postmodernist nonsense in the 1990s to embracing it today. I guess that is down to opportunism.

The SWP member I know is full on TWAW and tried to persuade me to attend a zoom conference so I could be educated
He's also a misogynist
He told me respecting that someone believes themselves to have an internal fender isn't enough, I have to actually believe they are women

@ThousandsAreSailing

The SWP member I know is full on TWAW and tried to persuade me to attend a zoom conference so I could be educated He's also a misogynist He told me respecting that someone believes themselves to have an internal fender isn't enough, I have to actually believe they are women

Does he also expect you to believe that the holy communion is actually the body of Christ or is he limiting his metaphysical beliefs to the bodies of those with an internal gender?

I have to actually believe they are women

This is precisely what I was talking about, I cannot understand how anyone can reconcile this with dialectical materialism.

Escapeplanning
The hypocritical fucker is anti religion. I was brought up with a religion, I don't actually believe in God but I do find elements of it comforting at certain times. I like to light a candle on my parents birthday for eg
He went all out to prove there was no god to me. Sending me books to read and stuff. Flogging a dead horse as I don't believe anyway
The SWP had a crisis didn't it? Weren't there allegations of sexual misconduct which split the party? He stayed with the main group who ignored the women's accusations if I remember correctly

I just realised I put internal fender😅 it's as good as an internal gender I guess

...or an infernal tender.

Lots of different people / groups seem to be more than happy to advance their own agenda via BLM.

A few years back some members of a group called 'Plane Stupid' had a demo against the environmental damage caused by low-cost airlines. A couple of years later, many of the same protesters blocked a runway (and were arrested) but this time under the name of BLM (think the claim was that black people suffered most from air pollution).

All of which makes me wonder how much crossover there is between BLM and Extinction Rebellion as they both seem to have a fair few members who see ending capitalism as the key part of their mission.

All of which makes me wonder how much crossover there is between BLM and Extinction Rebellion as they both seem to have a fair few members who see ending capitalism as the key part of their mission.

Earlier this year there was some mention of XR being included as an ‘extremist’ group on the government’s Prevent programme. At the time I had a look at he organisations mission statement and there was a lot on there about overthrowing capitalism and disruptive protests. There was also a fair bit about dismantling the patriarchy, cis-heteronormativity and elevating queer and trans voices. Very similar language is used as part of the US BLM aims. XR have since removed much of this from their ‘about us’ part of the website.

I mentioned this on the now deleted thread and it got an honourable mention as a ‘tinfoil hat’ theory by Penis News.

@stumbledin

Interesting! But as the notice says BLM is not one group.

And in fact it is a shame that anybody named them as it was quite clear that the march was not organised by them (as a quick google would have shown).

Also, irrespective of who organised it, being central London any march if bound to be piggy backed on by the SWP who are so over the top in needing to be shown as woke. (You can tell by their mass produced placards when they are around.)

And there is nothing they like more than to have an online example of them being woke, so the police directing marchers past the women speak out event must have felt they had won the jack pot. Of course they would want to be seen attacking women who have the nerve to say women are biological females.

And 99% of the march just walked past.

So this was more like a real world enactment of a vertual twitter spat ie a tiny % of people (twitter is one of the least used social media platform) picking a fight on twitter. Just self aggrandising egos.

Lets hope the next event is free of other events so that it can be an opportunity to make direct contact with other women - surely the most important aim.

Not getting derailed by self publicists.

Ugh, they're the absolute worst. After Comrade Delta, they don't deserve to call themselves feminists.

If they really want to be woke they should stand in solidarity with BLM and not make it all about themselves.

@ThousandsAreSailing

Escapeplanning The hypocritical fucker is anti religion. I was brought up with a religion, I don't actually believe in God but I do find elements of it comforting at certain times. I like to light a candle on my parents birthday for eg He went all out to prove there was no god to me. Sending me books to read and stuff. Flogging a dead horse as I don't believe anyway The SWP had a crisis didn't it? Weren't there allegations of sexual misconduct which split the party? He stayed with the main group who ignored the women's accusations if I remember correctly

Yep, Comrade Delta. Martin Smith, I think his name was. They didn't want to get the ~bourgeois courts~ involved so they dealt with it in-house and it went as well as you'd expect.

A few years back some members of a group called 'Plane Stupid' had a demo...

I misread that as ‘planet stupid’. Yup, I’d sign up for that!

Hi everyone, I was at the Standing for Women Speakers Corner event on 30 August. We were almost packing up to go when the police routed the BLM march past us, and their transactivists decided to abandon their march and confront us.
It took their stewards and the police 20 minutes to move them on to their rally. The reason they were routed past us is the police were trying to avoid them clashing with a giant Muslim Prayer Day event at Marble Arch, only 200 yards away, which had been going on all day. The confrontation was accidental: any other Sunday, they would not have been marched past us, and 15 minutes later, we would have been gone, and in the pub!
I've just published my own cartoon review of the year ( it's on your suggested GC Chrissie presents thread) which references the event.

I just want to say, Kellie-Jay is one of the bravest women I have ever met. She is not afraid to put herself in harm's way to get the message out to the public. She is a total inspiration.

@BoomBoomsCousin

The Morning Star is most closely aligned with The Communist Party - who, while supporting the struggle against racism, sexism and homophobia, have taken a stance against identity politics and “LGBT ideology” (by which I assume they mean queer theory). So I doubt they’re TWAW as an editorial position.

Identity politics have never been really compatible with a communist position, so it should be no surprise. They borrow certain concepts but they aren't materialist, and they utterly undermine class analysis, and instead they create a new essentialist set of castes.

Progressives thinking id politics are left is a lot like them thinking liberal economics are left.

@StellaCartoonist

Hi everyone, I was at the Standing for Women Speakers Corner event on 30 August. We were almost packing up to go when the police routed the BLM march past us, and their transactivists decided to abandon their march and confront us. It took their stewards and the police 20 minutes to move them on to their rally. The reason they were routed past us is the police were trying to avoid them clashing with a giant Muslim Prayer Day event at Marble Arch, only 200 yards away, which had been going on all day. The confrontation was accidental: any other Sunday, they would not have been marched past us, and 15 minutes later, we would have been gone, and in the pub! I've just published my own cartoon review of the year ( it's on your suggested GC Chrissie presents thread) which references the event.

I just want to say, Kellie-Jay is one of the bravest women I have ever met. She is not afraid to put herself in harm's way to get the message out to the public. She is a total inspiration.

Thanks - off to look at that thread.

Actually, I think maybe part of the issue is that a lot of these people, in BLM, in ER, etc, are really anticapitalist but not marxists or communists as such.

What they are is anarchists of one kind or another. And a lot probably don't recognise that about themselves.

But as the notice says BLM is not one group.
contacted by a person proported to represent Black Lives Matter

Surely if BLM is not one group it can't have a spokesperson, it must have multiple representing any of the groups.

There's also a pacifist CND anti-nuclear element of older women that are increasingly becoming anti-capitalist due to the continued refusal of the establishment (Press, Government, Corporations) to look at the damage being done to the planet in the name of progress.

”I had a look at the UK movement’s website and there doesn’t seem to be any ‘Aims’ listed whatsoever. The GoFundme page still lists all the original aims along with one about getting rid of the ‘hostile immigration/border policy’.”

(Sorry - forgot who I am quoting there!)

There are two BLM organisations at UK level with completely different aims.

The key thing is that Black Lives Matter UK (the one that has had a website for years) is NOT the same as “UK Black Lives Matters” with the UKBLM Gofundme Page.

This is about to get even more confusing BTW!

UKBLM The group with the Gofundme Fundraising page organises protests and is linked to the original Black Lives Matter organisation based in the USA. (UKBLM has just rebranded - see below.)

Black Lives Matter UK aka BLM UK, whose Twitter account included repeated pleas to UKBLM to sort out the social media links on their Gofundme Page - because they were linked to the wrong organisation - has this website:

blacklivesmatter.uk/

When I first checked these organisations out during the summer there were black twitter users calling out both organisations for lack of transparency about finances but especially UKBLM, with questions about where the money was going, was it a personal bank account, etc.

UKBLM closed donations to the Gofundme page today, having raised £1,221,600

I suggest you do an internet search to find that page.

UKBLM (the one with the Gofundme page that it has just closed) has only just established itself as a legal entity and has rebranded as “Black Liberation Movement UK”, ie. BLM UK (same initials now as Black Lives Matter UK).

I told you this was going to get even more confusing!

So . . . UK protesters supporting BLM are now supporting the Black Liberation Movement UK (rather than the aims of Black Lives Matter UK).

However, it is the Black Liberation Movement UK that is associated with Black Lives Matters (the USA and global organisation) - not Black Lives Matter UK.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/blm-uk-gains-legal-status-with-renaming-as-black-liberation-movement-uk

Apparently Black Liberation Movement UK is also going to register as a political party. I could not find a website but there is this:

mutuals.fca.org.uk/Search/Society/30740

All a bit of a long way around to say that if one of the two BLM organisations at UK level does not know Dodge Lewis then maybe he is a spokesperson for the other one?

I thought the fact that 3 people who may or may not be in any way part of BLM any more than anyone else, have been allowed to capitalise on a grass roots movement to gain money very, very dubious. They all seem very academic commentators which was not what bought people onto the street. They are now presuming to say who can or cannot have this money. I suspect they are about as representative of BLM as Women's March is of feminism.
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/blm-uk-gains-legal-status-with-renaming-as-black-liberation-movement-uk But no doubt the white middle class media will listen to them as they know how to play the game.

Obviously others weren't happy about how they have put themselves forward as somehow representing a movement which was originally about local grassroots groups acting on their own initiative. Not people who are playing the system. www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/27/uk-black-lives-matter-activists-not-behind-attempt-to-use-name-for-political-party

What a shame that no one in the British media every got off their backsides and talked to local organisers at the time there were protests etc.. But how inconvenient for them to have to talk to a number of people rather than one self promonting group of individuals.