SPGB Meetings. (1931)

Party News from the December 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

• There is more information about Hull Branch's Dan Billany at the following link.
• J. Horner, the speaker at the Sheffield meeting, was Joseph Henry Horner. A former member of the British Socialist Party, he was a member of the SPGB from January 1930 until lapsing his membership in March 1933.
• D. Goldberg was David Goldberg. He joined the Hackney Branch of the SPGB in March 1925. He joined the armed forces whilst a member during World War II, and was killed in action during the Italian campaign. He is briefly mentioned in Barltrop's The Monument.
• David Lamond of Edinburgh first joined the SPGB in April 1926, and possibly rejoined in March 1930. (No mention of why he may have left the SPGB in between those years.) There is an all too brief obituary for him in the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard.

SPGB Meetings (1931)

Party News from the March 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

We need your help. (1931)

Party News from the October 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hull Branch. (1930)

Party News from the July 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attention of readers in the Hull district is drawn to the formation of a Branch. All who wish to co-operate in the activities of the new Branch are asked to communicate to the Secretary, Mr. V. Coupland, at 287, Beverley Rd., Hull.

SPGB Meetings and Notices. (1930)

Party News from the June 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Publications Fund. (1927)

Party News from the March 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings and Lectures. (1926)

Party News from the December 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Party activities. (1926)

Party News from the October 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

During recent months we have been able to open three new branches (Becontree, Hull, and Paddington), and there is every prospect that in several other new and old centres branches will be opened in the near future. An active campaign is being carried on in Yorkshire to make the literature of the Party more widely known. Sympathisers in Sheffield and Derby who would like to co-operate in the eventual formation of branches are urged to communicate with us. Members and sympathisers living in other districts where branches do not yet exist should consult us as to possibilities of increasing our sales of literature. Conditions now are in many respects particularly favourable, and with the active support of all members we may hope to see further gratifying results of our work in past years. It is hoped that branches which have recently not been able to maintain their former degree of activity will be encouraged to further efforts. We would again point out that the more rapid spread of our influence is continually impeded by lack of funds. London readers are reminded that Sunday evening discussions will be held regularly at the Emily Davison Club Rooms, 144, High Holborn, W.C., commencing October 3rd, at 7.30 p.m.

50 Years in the Party (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I first heard about the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1970 when I was a student in Hull. A couple of fellow students in the house I lived in were always going on about it. Until then I’d followed my parents in being a Labour supporter and saw the nationalisation of industry as the thing to support. But now I was being told that wouldn’t make any difference and I needed to look beyond it to an entirely different kind of society – and on a world scale. This was a society of common ownership and free access to all goods and services. No money, no buying and selling, no market – just production and distribution according to need. No leaders, no national frontiers, just one world – and this was to be achieved by majority democratic political action. This, I was told, if looked at closely, was what Marx had originally advocated and what socialism really meant.

I was incredulous at first and brought out all the arguments I’ve heard countless times since over the years. Human nature, need for gradual reforms, utopianism, over-population, shortage of resources, need for leaders, etc., etc. And I argued for a long time – until I no longer had any more arguments, since they’d all been answered. But I still somehow didn’t want to join a political organisation. I’d never been in one before and it didn’t seem to fit for me. Since no one actually pressed me to join, I just carried on talking and going to the meetings that the SPGB group organised and then helping to sell its journal, the Socialist Standard, in the town centre. But what then finally got me on side was the special edition of the Standard in August 1970. It was called ‘A World of Abundance’ and had articles with titles like ‘The World Can Feed Us All’, ‘Capitalism – Waste – Want’, ‘Not Too Many People’, ‘World Administration’ and a particular compelling one by Ron Cook with the self-explanatory title ‘Progress Perverted: the Technology of Abundance’. With all this it had to happen sooner or later and so, 50 years ago this month, I filled in the membership questionnaire and joined.

In the year that followed I attended meetings in Manchester, where I came from, in Sheffield and in London where, in 1971, the Party held its 66th annual conference. I found tremendous enthusiasm among members, tremendous knowledge of all things social, political and historical and tremendous optimism that the ideas were spreading and the movement growing.

Swansea

When the same year I moved into the world of employment, I found myself in a city, Swansea, with a long-standing branch of the Party, I found myself attending meetings regularly, selling Party literature on the steps of the town’s Central Library, helping to organise public meetings and going to other parties’ and organisations’ meetings to put our case there. A lot was going on at the time. It was the heyday of CND, Anti-Apartheid and Friends of the Earth as well as of those small left-wing political organisations that called themselves ‘socialist’ (IS, IMG, SLL, etc.) but, as far as we were concerned and despite their ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, at the end of the day were (and still are) just going for reforms of the system and so were just part of the capitalist furniture. I was the branch’s ‘press officer’ and often wrote to the South Wales Evening Post putting these points as well as other aspects of our case. Many of the letters I sent were published. I found all this activity educational and exhilarating and soon found I was able to give talks and engage in public debate myself.

In the late 70s and 80s Swansea Branch built a core of active members across the age range and organised regular meetings that we advertised in the local press. There were topics as diverse as ‘Marxism and Science’, ‘Thatcher and Freedom’, ‘Women are Workers too’, ‘Animal Rights’ ‘Youth and Unemployment’, ‘How Politicians Con You’, ‘Feed the World’, ‘Energy for the Future’, ‘Soap Operas and Socialism’, and ‘John Lennon’. We got good attendances too, and as a key part of our activity sold the Socialist Standard in the city’s shopping precinct and set up an outdoor platform where I was one of our speakers. I would shout myself hoarse on a Saturday morning and got a surprisingly small amount of heckling. I was also writing regularly for the Socialist Standard. We had record Saturday morning sales with an edition of the journal with the words ‘Sex, Sin and Socialism’ emblazoned across the cover. It contained an article written by me on the recently published and much talked about book by anarchist Alex Comfort entitled The Joy of Sex.

We were hawking our literature on the same pedestrian stretch as Ian Bone, a self-avowed anarchist who was later to set up an organisation called Class War. Unlike most of the others there, he really did seem to want a different system of society even if he didn’t quite know what that system was to be and thought the best way to get it was by smashing things. The People newspaper later called him ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, in which he took great pride. And, perhaps extraordinarily, when some 30 years later he wrote a book about his experiences in Swansea and elsewhere called Bash the Rich, I found myself debating with him at a packed meeting at the Party’s Head Office on Clapham High St with the subject ‘Which Way the Revolution?’. He was still the ‘one-off’ he’d ever been, but we did manage to agree on quite a few things regarding the revolution, even if we remained apart on others, for example violence and the number of classes in capitalist society.

Then there were the ‘speaking tours’ when I gave talks at various branches of the Party as far apart as Bristol, Bournemouth, Cornwall, Bolton, Canterbury and Guildford, some well attended, some pretty sparse. A ‘highlight’ for me was the debate with right-wing guru, Roger Scruton, organised by the Party’s Guildford branch. At the time Scruton, who remained a well-known public figure right up until his death earlier this year, wrote a weekly column in the Times and had raised debate with his book The Meaning of Conservatism. When we met in a pub before the meeting, I found him modest and affable. But he hadn’t bothered to find out what we were about and he asked me to tell him. He seemed to get the hang of it but then in the debate kept forgetting and referring to what had happened in Russia.

Another outstanding moment was a debate in Bolton Town Hall with local MP Tom Sackville, organised by the Bolton branch of the Party and chaired by a local cleric. It was a packed meeting and I managed to put our ‘version’ of socialism on the agenda immediately, after which the MP to his credit didn’t attempt to tar us with the Soviet brush.

I was also, together with a fellow member Pat Wilson, able to arrange a Q and A session for the Socialist Standard with a then leading figure of the burgeoning Green movement, Jonathan Porritt. It was a friendly occasion with Porritt strangely seeming to agree with most of what we said about the need for socialism.

The culmination of all this activity for me was the local election campaigns Swansea Branch ran in the late 1980s when, with the assistance of members from other branches, we knocked on every door in the local ward – twice. Even though we found a surprising amount of agreement on the doorstep, that didn’t really translate into votes, with 92 the maximum number we got in one of the three elections we ran in. An internal Party issue at the time was whether our candidate’s picture should appear on one of our election manifestos. The Party has always eschewed personalities as part of its antipathy to the idea of leaders and so a heated debate took place at the Executive Committee table about whether the candidate, myself, should show his ‘human face’. In the end the picture did appear, as it also did in the local press.

Trade union activity

The 1990s were a bit of an anti-climax in Party activity. The main thing was that the Socialist Standard kept being published and the case it propagated kept being put to readers. This was a period when I started to involve myself in trade union activity in my place of work. It was something I found extremely satisfying – and still do. That’s because you often saw quick results in terms of helping to resolve people’s problems at work, both individually and collectively, and felt you were making some kind of immediate difference, however small. For me it complemented the longer-term project of spreading socialist ideas in society at large and fitted well with the Party’s view of trade unionism as a necessary form of resistance to the tendency of capitalism to take for itself an increasingly large share of the surplus value produced by workers. It also made me fully conscious, if I was not already, of the need for trade unions to be fully independent of political parties and groups and not to succumb to the will of the union’s ‘politicos’ from the left-wing largely Trotskyist groups who were small in number but could still dominate union decision-making and use their position not for the benefit of members but to promote their own political ends. They would (and still do) constantly seek to bounce members into industrial action, even when such action is more likely to be damaging than successful.

Anti-capitalism

In the first decade of this century, as the Party celebrated its 100th anniversary, capitalism found itself facing the twin crises of terrorism and recession. The recession in particular gave rise to a phenomenon I found first surprising and encouraging but then disappointing, that is the quick spread in use of the term ‘capitalism’ with widespread discussion about it in books, magazines and the media. The Party had always freely used the term and, at a personal level, this made me feel a bit uneasy. I wondered whether people would know what we were talking about or would maybe just regard us as cranks or supporters of Russia. Now it was (and still is) everywhere. However, the trouble was, while often calling themselves ‘anti-capitalist’, critics of the system tended to propose more ‘benign’ models of capitalism via reforms seeking to achieve less poverty (e.g. universal basic income) and less waste of resources (e.g. the ‘green’ agenda) without taking into account the fact that reforms, even if alleviating things a little for some, can do nothing to change the basic profit-seeking nature of the system and the inevitable antagonism between what Marx called wage labour and capital.

While the last decade too has been full of proposals for coping with the problems of capitalism within its existing framework, disappointingly it has not seen an obvious rise in consciousness among wage and salary earners of the need for an entirely different kind of society. This is an idea that the Party and the World Socialist Movement have continued to keep alive by publishing literature, holding meetings and seeking to spread the idea in all other ways possible. For example, via our website and, in these pandemic days, the Party’s virtual ‘Discord’ platform.

Looking back over my 50 years in the Party, though a lot has happened, a lot has also remained the same. Capitalism has gone on its merry way with its wars, poverty, unemployment, glaring inequality, environmental degradation, and now a global pandemic. Many campaigns to try and improve it have come – CND, Shelter, Greenpeace, Right to Work, Anti-Nazi League, Child Poverty Action, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, just to mention a few – and many have gone. But to be fair there have been some changes for the better – racism and sexism for example are definitely on the back foot in many parts of the world, and a whole slew of recent books on human nature have shifted opinion away from the long-held notion that human beings are selfish and competitive creatures rather than naturally cooperative ones.

In addition there is widespread consciousness of the environmental destruction which Rachel Carson pointed to in 1962 but which I only found out about the year I joined. At the same time the ‘experts’ who two years after this published The Limits of Growth, predicting ecological breakdown by the end of the century and calling for population control, were proved wrong. The profit system has of course gone on despoiling the planet but at the same time managing to adapt sufficiently not to cause an environmental apocalypse. It has also given better living standards to many wage and salary workers, while however heaping misery of varying degrees on many others. And it has made a very small number of individuals massively and increasingly wealthy, with the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owning 29 times more than the poorest 20 percent. All of which will continue as long as the capitalist mode of production continues and as long as those with good intentions (and there are many) say they support our aims but somehow think capitalism can gradually be reformed into something better or even into socialism.

I’m not planning to stop any time soon. I’ll carry on helping to keep alive the idea of a society I first heard about more than fifty years ago, since nothing I’ve heard in all that time from either supporters or critics of the present system has discouraged me from seeing the World Socialist Movement’s concept of socialism as the most desirable and most feasible next stage in human social development.

Howard Moss

Hull Branch (1927)

Party News from the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when very encouraging progress can be recorded in the London area we are reminded of the special obstacles which face the more isolated provincial branches. After a very promising start the Hull Branch is for the moment carrying on under difficulties owing to the forced temporary suspension of activities by a number of active members. A special appeal is therefore made to members and sympathisers in Hull to come to the assistance of the branch and make the winter season a time of useful preparatory work for next season. To the fullest extent permitted by our resources we in London are, of course, at all times willing to assist provincial branches to carry on propaganda, but it is more important still that members should set about the task of fitting themselves for active work as speakers, writers, literature sellers, etc. It should further be the aim of every member to make use of the branch to extend his knowledge of Socialist theory and of the facts of working class history.

You are therefore particularly requested to turn up at the next branch meeting in order to perfect the organisation of branch activities and help to extend the party’s influence in Hull.

Hull Branch: Invitation to Readers (1926)

Party News from the November 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

The members of the newly-formed branch in Hull are anxious to get into touch with party sympathisers and all readers of the “Socialist Standard” in that city, with a view to making the party’s position better known. They therefore extend a cordial invitation lo all who are interested in Socialism to attend at the branch meeting-place, advertised on the back page. Friends with a desire for information and opponents with objections to raise are equally assured of an opportunity to ask questions and express their views. The branch holds its meetings every Sunday at 3 p.m., and discussion follows the ordinary business of the branch. Both the ordinary meeting and the discussion are freely open to all who wish to attend.

*  *  *

Information about Hull Branch on the back page of the November 1926 Socialist Standard.

HULL—Branch meetings, Sunday, at 3 p.m., at the Trade and Labour Club (Jarratt Street entrance). Discussion after meeting. All readers in Hull requested to attend. Communications to Sec., G. Vinecrad. 40, Brook Street, Hull.

Why Not Join Us? (1927)

From the March 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are readers of the Socialist Standard and supporters of the party in the districts around London and in the Provinces who feel too far from any centre of party activity to think it worth while joining us. There are others again who, while agreeing with us, yet have a fancy that we are “intellectuals” or “too tolerant." To such I address the following few lines:

Those who are waiting until the party grows in strength in different places would be wise to remember that not only must there be a beginning with someone, but also there may be quite a number like themselves in a district just waiting for someone else to get going. If all those who agree with us join up, we can put members in a given district in touch with each other in order to form a branch. It is much more interesting and useful to work in harness with others than in isolation.

There is no mystery about the principles, policy or internal organisation of our party; there are no cliques or job-hunters. The party’s methods are too democratic to allow of that. We are a group of working men and women who have laid down a set of principles and a policy that are clear and definite, and are carried out by methods that leave no room for the crafty to achieve either position or pelf. All our meetings are open to the public, because we have nothing to hide and no wire-pulling to take part in.

We are not “intellectuals”; we just know what we want and are determined to get it. We are neither intolerant nor bitter towards our fellow workers. We know that the mass of those who support the Labour Party, the Communist Party and others, are honest, sincere, and self-sacrificing in their efforts. It is the foundation and policy of the other parties that is wrong, and that allows groups of self-seekers to climb on the backs of their fellows and to twist the enthusiasm of the workers to their own private ends.

There are "Labour Leaders” who are sincere though misguided, but, in the main, it is the trickster who flourishes in the “Labour Movement ” and forms close corporations for the sharing of offices and emoluments. We are only intolerant and bitterly opposed to the existing order of society and the shams in which it cloaks its fierce oppression.

Where a few members are congregated in a district they have the many advantages organisation confers. For instance, bundles of specimen copies of the “S.S.”—back numbers—can be sent to help them in their propagandist efforts.

Recently, workers in Paddington, in Becontree and in Hull have been enrolled in the party and joined into branches which have enabled them not only to take advantage of the benefits of organisation, but also to get in close touch with us all and to see how democratic and above board the internal work of the party is.

We are steadily growing in strength, and hope soon to be able to record new branches in other places, such as Reading and Sheffield, Woolwich and Sittingbourne. Here and there throughout the world we have associates of a similar outlook to ourselves who are endeavouring to form parties abroad on similar lines to our own.

Now reader and fellow-worker, what about joining up with us and helping on the good work? We offer you, among other things, our comradeship in a cause that is worth your best efforts and enthusiasm.

Gilmac.

Provincial Propaganda Tour (1933)

From the August 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years ago splendid work was done in the provinces by a small party of London members touring from place to place. Apart from gaining new readers and sympathisers, and making the Party in areas where no propaganda has been carried on before, there is the very valuable encouragement such visits bring to provincial groups and isolated members.

On Friday, June 30th, a party of four—Comrades Bellingham, Turner, L. Otway and Mrs. Otway—left head office for a short motor tour, carrying camping equipment.

The first meeting was held in the Bull Ring at Birmingham, on June 30th, with an audience of 350, and literature sales of 2s. 11d.—a good start achieved against the obstacle of several rival meetings. Questions and Communist opposition were dealt with at considerable length.

Arriving at Manchester the next day, the party had to tackle four meetings, which had been advertised for Saturday and Sunday. At the Saturday meeting, although the audience was by no means large, keen interest was shown and literature to the value of 6s. 9d. was sold. All the Manchester meetings were not equally satisfactory, but the last, held in Platt's Field, drew an audience of 400. Manchester members assisted on the platform and the branch was very pleased with the results of the week-end visit.

On Monday a good meeting was held at Liverpool, and another on Tuesday at Birkenhead—two areas in which relatively little propaganda has been carried on by the S.P.G.B.

At Eccles, on Wednesday, a meeting was carried on from 7.20 to 11 p.m., amidst lively opposition from Communist and Labour Party supporters. The audience, however, listened sympathetically to our speakers.

Two meetings were held at Sheffield, on July 6th and 7th, with assistance from local comrades.

The tour ended with a good meeting at Hull on Saturday, July 8th.

Most of the time the party camped out and were thus enabled to cover much ground at a minimum cost, although, of course, the necessity of funding camping sites and making all preparations threw a great deal of work on the four members. All four assisted at meetings, either as speakers or chairmen, selling literature and taking up collections, etc.

The distance covered was about 550 miles, and the times and arrangements made in advance were kept to the letter. At a total of eleven meetings literature sales amounted to £2 3s. 10d. and collections to 18s. 7d.—a highly satisfactory result in face of the widespread unemployment and destitution in many places visited.

The members of the party greatly regretted that it was not possible to make their tour of longer duration. They, and the members of the branches visited on route, have no doubt that excellent work has been done in this short period.

It is impossible to mention by name all the local comrades who attended the meetings, gave hospitality, and helped the tour in every possible way. The four comrades greatly appreciated the welcome and assistance they everywhere received.

Spade Work in Hull

Much-needed propaganda has been carried on with good effect in Hull during recent weeks, by Comrade Cash, who is staying there at the invitation of a local comrade. In about two weeks, at the end of June and beginning of July, ten meetings were held, with an average audience of about 60 or 70, and with small but steady sales of literature. In view of the difficulty of gathering an audience almost single-handed, and in view of many unfavourable local conditions, the interest aroused has been quite satisfactory. With continuous propaganda good progress could be made here. Hull members and sympathisers are urged to give their support. 

Lost hero (2000)

Book Review from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dan Billany - Hull's Lost Hero by Valerie A Reeves & Valerie Showan. Kingston Press.

I have a confession to make before I start: this review is one of those tedious ". . . and the Socialist Party is briefly mentioned in line x of page x-ty x". Yes Billany was an ex-member - joining in 1931 and being expelled under foggy circumstances just two years later. But besides this, Reeves and Showan's biography is a fascinating study of the author of The Trap, which Ken Worpole, in his study of working class writing Dockers and Detectives, called the "finest novel to come out of the war".

Billany was born in 1913 in the terraces off Hull's famous Hessle Road, close by the western docks. Leaving school at 14 he was briefly an errand boy before starting an apprenticeship as an electrician with a local firm. As part of the training he had to attend evening classes and like many other working men found a new interest in learning. Before long he left the electrical works to become a full-time student first at the local Technical College and then at Hull University. By the outbreak of the Second World War he was an English teacher at Chiltern Street school in Hull and in the spring of 1940 he joined the army. It was at this point his writing career took off with the publication of The Opera House Murders, a rather run-of-the-mill thriller, and the acceptance of The Magic Door, based on his advanced teaching methods. In 1942 Second Lieutenant Billany was posted to North Africa, and not long after his arrival was captured at the fall of Tobruk. After months of appalling deprivation he was shipped to a POW camp in Italy. After the Armistice in September 1943 he was released by the Italian authorities but because Italy was occupied by the Germans was forced into hiding. In all probability he died of exposure in the Apennines near Rome a few months later. The Trap and The Cage, two novels relating to his wartime experiences, written while in captivity, were published posthumously.

Just for once the socialist ideas held by Billany are represented very accurately. That nationalisation is merely state capitalism (and this well before the late Tony Cliff appropriated the notion for his own sloganising purposes) and that "colonial freedom" really meant the substitution of a local boss for a white boss are both mentioned. The problems with this book lie elsewhere.

Firstly, the purpose of Reeves and Showan is to portray Billany as a repressed homosexual. This is tendentious. Billany was definitely interested in the idea of male homosexuality, as for instance in The Cage which is a rather tedious account of the obsession of one man for another in a POW camp. However the authors go too far in presenting fiction as dramatised fact. In relation to his early unpublished novel Paul they talk about Billany "fantasising" about being in love with a boy. This is practically accusing the fellow of being a child molester; an image of homosexuals not only old-fashioned but totally unjustified by facts.

Secondly, and rather more importantly, Reeves and Showan do not really address the crucial question of why Billany volunteered for service in 1940. Vaguely saying he wanted to prove himself really doesn't wash, because Billany was not politically ignorant. In The Trap he clearly refers to the cause of the war as diplomatic scrambles over "international credits, trade routes, and a steady five percent" and goes on to state that "I do not 'believe' in the war—in this or any other." Yet he was there, as an officer fighting for the cause of British capitalism. He was not forced to enlist, indeed with bright prospects as an author he had no personal reason to. The reason lies doubtless with Billany's attitude to fighting. This first crops up when, as a teacher, he inspires his class with the story of an old pupil who was a hero in the First World War, single-handedly taking a section of the enemy front line. Billany was a romantic with a romantic's desire for adventure. For heroism. And for this he went against what his logic and political background told him. This was to cost him dearly. He paid for it with his life.

KAZ