Petition urges Trades Council to think again

A petition http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/to-the-members-of-the-notts-trades-union-council.html was launched yesterday in an attempt to make the Nottingham Trades Council listen and act on the views of the wider activist community about Mayday speakers, something they abjectly failed to do last year with the invitation of expenses scandal Labour MP Alan Meale.

This year the Trades Council has a speaker who is much closer to home, 'Richard B (Nottingham) UNISON', who is openly one of the Notts Socialist Workers' Party members who has opted to support the SWP Central Committee's position on a rape incident, as highlighted here in this list of signatures,

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/support-for-swp-central-committee.html

The SWP Central Committee have been widely condemned on the broad left for their stance both inside and outside the party. The actions of the CC and supporters of its positions, like Richard B, has led to SWP members leaving the party or at least leaving the room at various national meetings in large numbers.

As for the rest of the parties who are involved with the Trades Council, nationally a member of the AWL has argued against a No Platform position as explained in their paper http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/04/10/swp-criticise-don%E2%80%99t-%E2%80%9Cno-platform%E2%80%9D

Some may consider a petition of this kind to be opportunistic or unnecessarily confrontational against an individual, the Trades Council in general, or party factions within it. But this would be to miss the point that inspite of previous decades where feminism came to the fore and influenced the left through direct action and uncompromising positions on rape and dominance by men, it seems that not enough has changed. The abuses of the late Gerry Healey of the WRP are common knowledge. We have the more recent incident of George Galloway defending Julien Assange. The SWP rape is not the only example of sexual abuses in radical movements in recent years.

Libertarian/anarchist activists, who have a critique of how hierarchical organisations fundamentally work to maintain systems of dominance, are nonetheless in the midst of intense discussions of the need to organise for 'safer spaces' with the knowledge that the anarchist movement is not immune from sexual predators whether or not it ultimately intends to free itself from power structures in their entirety. It is in this context that women in Nottingham are making their demands.

The Nottingham Trades Council is not an island, nor does it 'own' Mayday. Women are demanding to be taken seriously and the TU must act.