It’s sometimes worrying to observe the amount of times Nick Griffin can crap on the members of the BNP and continue to get away with it, particularly where money is concerned. It seems that, as far as the membership is concerned, he is golden – as in King Midas – and money disappearing into the ether (such as the Trafalgar Club dosh) doesn’t seem to bother any of them, their devotion is so complete.

Even the never-ending late submission of the party’s accounts to the Electoral Commission and the consequent fines seem to be ignored by the complacent, gullible or just plain stupid BNP member in the street. In fact, BNP members never seem to worry about having money stolen from them by clearly fraudulent behaviour – witness the ‘Truth Truck‘ scam, the Boudica ‘battle bus’ scam (almost identical to the Truth Truck fraud) or any number of other schemes that appear to be designed solely to keep Porky Griffin in the manner in which he is determined to become accustomed, which makes one worry about the mental health of BNP members in general. Though not for long.

One issue that does seem to be driving a lot of BNP members bonkers at the moment is that of the opening up of the party to non-whites – though in many cases they will deny it for fear of being labeled racist (too late – being a member of an openly racist party has already proven that much). Instead, they will blame their anger on any number of other problems within the BNP – financial shenanigans usually, though the fact that Nick Griffin runs the party as a support group for himself, his family and his friends occasionally gets an airing too.

One such person is very close to us here at Lancaster Unity. No, not in that way – just because we have the joy of having him living here in Lancaster. Chris Hill, for it is he, is a former star of the BNP, having stood for the party in local elections on no less than five occasions (and won on no occasion). He has, up until now, been a Griffin-loyalist, with a slight hiccup during the Sadie Graham debacle, where he joined the rebellion, was told off by Clive Jefferson and promptly returned to the fold, chastened and ready to do whatever was needed to get Nick Griffin into 10 Downing Street. A couple of weeks later, he recanted (again) and rejoined the rebels, though he remained a member of the party. Clearly not a man to be trusted.

One of his great ideas was to emulate Lancaster Unity and start up his own Lancaster BNP blog. It was a complete washout, as witnessed by the fact that his average readership is currently 3.9 per day, one of whom is me and one (I’d hope) is Hill himself, leaving less than two visitors per day from the real world. Funny but tragic, really.

Maybe it was the realisation that he had failed at everything BNP-related that forced the worm to finally (and publicly) turn. The Lancaster BNP site has been closed and all posts have been shifted to a new site with a very conspicuous lack of ‘BNP’ in the title. Hill explains himself thus:

‘After much soul searching, the author of this blog regrets that he can no longer support the BNP.

This withdrawal of support for the British National Party is in no way connected with the current proposed constitutional change, which will allow non-white members into the party. It is in fact a result (at least in part) of the long-standing and ongoing financial skulduggery of the leadership.

Here is what the party’s official accounts auditors said of the most recent set of accounts the party submitted to the electoral commission: (Accounts which were late again for the third year running, costing the party yet another £1000 fine)

“Accordingly in our opinion the financial statements do not:

1.Give a true and fair view of the state of the part’s affairs at 31st December 2008.
2.Give a true and fair view of the results for the year the ended.

In our opinion the financial statements have been properly prepared in accordance with the accounting policies set out on pages 18 and 19.

In our opinion it cannot be said the accounts comply with the requirements of the political parties, Election and referendums Act 2000, as adequate record have not been made available.”

The full accounts are available from the Electoral Commission here: (Auditors statement is on Pages 11 & 12)

This, along with the totality dictatorial nature of the current leadership, were the causes of this withdrawal of support for the party in its current state.’

If, as Hill states, the removal of his support is ‘in no way connected with the current proposed constitutional change, which will allow non-white members into the party’, why make the change now? The party has always been a dictatorship and its accounts have always been a disaster. If his statement had any truth to it, Hill would have resigned years ago. Like many others, he is obviously leaving the party for one reason and one reason only – because it will soon be forced to take in non-white members.

Hill’s farewell sideswipes at Griffin’s dictatorial control of the party and the financial skullduggery are views shared by many of his compatriots on the far-right, though they seem capable of being a tad more brutal than Hill. Here’s a quote from a reader of the acerbic GriffinWatch blog:

‘Gri££in’s judgement has always been incredibly poor, as a party leader he has made one to many cocks ups, ‘fundamentally errors in his analysis,’ ‘childish stunts,’ ‘ridiculous statements,’ ‘nonsense written in begging letters,’ ‘gross hypocrisy,’ ‘putting people in jobs that they were not up to or were completely incompetent,’ ‘associating with convicted criminal scum,’ ‘treacherous u turns,’ ‘misappropriation of party funds’ the list of errors is endless.’

But as they tell us, Hell hath no fury etc. Sharon Ebanks, former leading light of the now more or less moribund Birmingham BNP, has turned out to be one of Nick Griffin’s most vociferous opponents after the party dumped on her personally, refuses to beat around the bush. Just a couple of days ago, she came out with this little masterpiece of invective over at the NWN forum:

‘Griffins entire management of the BNP is a disgrace. His ego and what he wants goes before all else. We recognise that Griffin cannot be removed, and for me personally that means nationalism as a political force is fucked. He concentrates purely on Muslims and immigration without offering any solutions which makes him look a laughing stock amongst the so called political elite. He won’t even form a shadow cabinet out of fear someone might upstage him or prove they have more knowledge on a given subject than he has.

The BNP will not be taken seriously because it does not take itself seriously. Its loaded with people on the payroll and non of them are prepared to sacrifice. £700,000 wage bill for pities sake, where is the sacrifice and the £700,000 spent on elections?

He’s a greedy, debauched, self centred, lying, two faced wanker whose real power lies in preying on the uneducated, the working class, and the poor. Griffin isn’t there to help them, he’s there to help himself, just as he’s always done.’

Around 12:30… I went walking down, with an old friend and a new acquaintance, to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem so that we could take a closer look at the Palestinian homes Israeli settlers had taken over (denoted by the giant Israeli flags hung from each of the buildings). As we approached the road leading to this flashpoint – settler youth sprinted towards us on their way out of the area up toward Nablus Road (in our direction). They were being chased… apparently by police.

Settlers running toward Nablus Road. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

We walked into a scene of angry Palestinians shouting up the side road toward two of the settler buildings. From the bottom of the road, we could see some religious settler children staring down. We began asking questions. The explanation we received was that the Palestinians had been attacked by the settlers who were throwing stones at them. Sure enough, I noticed one man lifting another man’s shirt to examine his bruises. I noted how calm and patient he was after being hit in the back with stones.

Examining the bruises after a settler attack. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

Later I discovered that earlier that morning settlers had broken into the As-Sabbagh family’s home and attacked them. As we heard more of the story, media began to show up in small numbers. I ran up the side road a bit toward the homes (Israeli settlers & Palestinians now living side by side) and took photos of the commotion that ensued higher up. Then I noticed an angry Palestinian man screaming as he came down. He was limping badly and was blood red in the face. The first policeman on the scene spoke perfect Arabic and calmly reassured the residents, but did nothing else, making no efforts to apprehend any one of the settlers. The limping Palestinian man shouted something to the effect of “You ask us to do nothing, but then they attack us and YOU do nothing. This is what you want from us? You’re not going to protect us? Then don’t complain when we protect ourselves!” I thought this was rather brazen as I couldn’t picture myself shouting at a policeman holding such a large semi-automatic weapon.

Confrontation with the Israeli police. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

He was visibly angry, and when I asked about photographing his leg where he was hit, he brushed me off and continued yelling… uninterested in media attention (I couldn’t blame him, it appeared he was really having trouble walking and clearly the police were doing nothing). Another young policeman, not older than 18 I imagine, sat by idly watching. Each Palestinian resident repeated the same theme “For how long can we sit by while they attack our children and you do nothing? HOW LONG?” or “If we had attacked them, one of us would be in handcuffs if not more… and yet here you sit doing nothing when they attack us. This is the police huh?”

That was when I heard a child crying, and as I walked over to him, I saw why he was crying. At his feet was another child, not more than 12 or 13 but possibly 10 or 11, lying on the ground. As I listened, I realized he too had been hit. At a minimum, I could see his knuckles were bleeding, but I knew there was more to it than that as he wasn’t getting up. He didn’t cry, didn’t shout, he just lay there waiting for help.

An injured Palestinian child waiting for help. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

That was when I heard what I couldn’t believe… honestly, you read about this kind of thing, but you never realize how serious it is until you hear it for yourself. The policeman called for an ambulance. The ambulance, over the radio, responded by asking in Hebrew “Is it an Arab or a Jew?” Immediately an angry woman (presumably the injured boy’s mother) shouted “OF COURSE! OF COURSE That’s what they ask… Because if he’s an Arab, WHY SHOULD THEY COME?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t understand… Why would an ambulance dispatcher ever pause to ask the ethnicity of an injured child before rushing to pick him up? At that moment, I was overwhelmed and had to step away from the situation. I imagined my own son lying in pain and bleeding, no matter how severe, with an ambulance dispatcher asking in the background for clarity on his religion or ethnicity. I believe that the original dispatcher who asked the police officer about ethnicity was from the Magen David (the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross). In the end, two ambulances came, the Red Crescent Society came first (The Red Crescent Society is the Red Cross equivalent in the occupied Palestinian territories). I returned to take photos as the Red Crescent Society arrived to carry the child away.

The Red Crescent Society attends to the child. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

An old man shouted from the sidewalk about the racism and the theft of Palestinian land and buildings, asking how much longer they would have to endure this and watch as their buildings are taken one by one without any repercussion. I believe he was also shouting about the settlers stealing electricity from Palestinians’ lines, rather than paying for it themselves. On the other side of the road, a settler couple casually walked toward the side road leading up to their (or their friends’) new homes, until a Palestinian man intercepted them and appeared to be threatening them (my friend translated for me). They immediately turned around back toward the main road looking shocked that he would speak to them in such a fashion. In my mind, I condemned him for threatening them, in my heart I realized if I had witnessed all of this and watched people lose their homes, or lost my own, I might not be as kind as him to have used only words.

The settler couple (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

As the settlers stepped out of their homes for the sabbath, the media rushed them for photos and questions, and the settlers responded with empty phrases, some of which I understood, such as “We are only here for peace.” Of course the police stood between them and the media protecting the settlers and pushing media back.
The settlers began leaving their homes and heading to the main road with a significant police escort.

The settlers leave the settlement with the help of a police escort. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

Eventually, a settler my friend said was fingered as the one responsible for starting much of the trouble, was being escorted out as Palestinian children and the media ran toward him. However, at no point did he appear to be detained and at no point was he handcuffed in any way, shape, or form.

A settler leader gets attention from the media. (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

Another of the settlers walked by me with his son, seemingly upset by being photographed (my friend translated his statement to me) and asked why I do not write down the settlers’ side of the story. My friend responded in Hebrew “We will photograph and write down what we want, thanks.”

Further up the road, the settlers had gathered at a certain point with a police car and police protection. They interacted as friends, nothing less.

Afterward, my English colleague asked me “Who would voluntarily subject their children to this kind of thing?” (referring to the Israeli settlers). I couldn’t answer… I didn’t know.

Israeli settlers and police socializing in Sheikh Jarrah (Photo: Andrew Kadi)

Andrew Kadi is a human rights activist and a member of Adalah-NY: the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East who has written for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Electronic Intifada, and other publications.

Twelve million low-energy light bulbs were posted to households over Christmas by an energy company as part of its legal obligation to cut carbon emissions, despite government advice that many would never be used.

Npower sent out the packages last month to escape a ban on issuing unsolicited bulbs, which came into force yesterday. The German-owned company saved millions of pounds by giving away the bulbs. Alternative ways of meeting its obligation, such as insulating homes, are much more effective but up to seven times more expensive.

It faced a fine of more than £40 million, or 10 per cent of its turnover, if it failed to meet its target for improving efficiency in homes under the carbon emissions reduction target scheme.

Households have received more than 180 million free or subsidised low-energy bulbs in the past 18 months. A survey in July by the Energy Saving Trust found that the average home had six unused ones lying in drawers and cupboards.

In 2008 the Government ordered the big energy companies to invest in measures for improving energy efficiency and cutting fuel poverty.

Companies can choose how to meet their obligations. Each measure they fund is given a score for the lifetime carbon savings that it achieves.

The scheme made assumptions about the usage of light bulbs that turned out to be wildly optimistic.

Companies were allowed to register immediate carbon savings from every bulb issued on the assumption that all recipients instantly installed them in some of their most intensively used light sockets. In reality, many people either stored the bulbs or threw them away, often because they were the wrong fitting or wattage.

The companies can also meet their obligations by paying for homes to be insulated. This guarantees energy savings but is much more expensive.

According to the latest government estimates, each low-energy bulb costs an energy company £2.97 and saves 0.04 tonnes of carbon over its lifetime. Insulating the external solid walls of a three-bedroom semi-detached house costs £8,760 and saves 18.08 tonnes. A company can achieve the same score of 18.08 tonnes by posting 452 bulbs, costing only £1,342.

In the first 18 months of the scheme, companies issued 182 million bulbs but insulated only 17,000 solid-wall homes. Britain has 6.6 million solid-wall homes requiring insulation.

Companies can pass on all the costs of the scheme to their customers. Over three years it is expected to add more than £100 to the average household’s energy bills.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change quietly admitted in June that the scheme was flawed and resulting in significant wastage.

In a paragraph buried in a 30-page “impact assessment”, the department said: “Government is increasingly concerned that the number of lamps already distributed has been so high that it may work out at more than the average number of highest-use light fittings in a house.

“As such, there is an increasing risk to carbon savings under the scheme where lamps are not used, are installed on low-use light fittings, or replace existing [low-energy bulbs].”

It said that direct mailouts of bulbs would be banned from January 1, 2010, allowing six months for companies to wind down their schemes.

Npower, which had a turnover of £427 million in 2008, initially focused on home insulation but was named a few months ago as the energy supplier that was farthest from achieving its green energy target. Companies that fail to meet their obligations by 2011 will be fined up to 10 per cent of their turnover.

It began posting 12 million bulbs on November 27, five months after the ban had been announced and just as the postal system was struggling to cope with the volume of Christmas mail.

A spokeswoman for the energy company said that the scheme was designed to be completed on New Year’s Eve, hours before the ban came into force at midnight.

She admitted that Npower did not know how many of the bulbs would be used. “There is nothing under [the carbon emissions reduction target scheme] that means we have to get evidence that bulbs are being used. It’s up to the customer,” she said.

Times On Line

Over 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel and several dozen Jewish Israelis demonstrated this morning outside of the Erez Crossing, demanding an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Organised by the Arab High Monitoring Committee, the demonstration coincided with the one year anniversary of Israel’s military attacks on the Gaza Strip, which resulted in 1,400 deaths and thousands wounded.

“”The Israeli war against the Palestinians of Gaza continues one year later,” said Knesset Member Jamal Zahalka (Balad) at the protest. “We demand an immediate end to the Israeli siege, and that the Israeli criminal leaders who implement this dirty war be brought before international tribunals before they start another war,” he added.

A demonstration on the Gaza side of the border was conducted simultaneously, joined by over 80 delegates from Gaza Freedom March.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told activists on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the Gaza border that their presence strengthens the Palestinian people

The protest on the Israeli side was attended by grassroots Palestinian activists from throughout Israel, with particularly large delegations from the Naqab (Negev), Jaffa and the Galilee area. A busload of activists from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, which has suffered from Israeli ethnic cleansing activity attended the demonstration, in addition to three buses of international and Israeli activists from Jerusalem organized by the Alternative Information Center (AIC), also attended the demonstration.

“It was important for us to encourage and assist international and especially Israeli activists to support this initiative of the Arab High Monitoring Committee,” noted Michael Warschawski of the AIC. “While a mass mobilization against the Israeli siege on Gaza is planned for this coming Saturday night in Tel Aviv, it is important that Israelis stood in solidarity and partnership alongside Palestinians here beside the Gaza Strip.”

‘I heaved and strained, my body wouldn’t move an inch. Those pressed tight around me were heavy, some were unconscious. I began to float away, taking in the final seconds of my life’

On Saturday 15 April 1989, eight of us set off from Nottingham for Sheffield under a beautiful blue sky. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, and our two cars – one carrying four Forest fans, one four Liverpool fans – made short work of the motorway. We had made a loose arrangement to meet up after the game (no mobiles back then), but when our driver parked the car a mile or so from Hillsborough, we realised we’d come in at the west end of the ground, behind the Leppings Lane stand – the Liverpool end.

I’d been a Liverpool fan since I was six years old. I went to my first cup final at 16, and had my first season ticket on the Kop before I’d left school. But in 1988-89, aged 19 and in my gap year, I couldn’t afford one. Two weeks before the semi-final, the phone went. My brother, a Forest season ticket holder, had a spare. “It’s for the Forest end, mate,” he said. “Come and educate yourself.”

Now, as we approached the stadium on Leppings Lane, we split up – I’d only met the other three lads for the first time that day – and I set off for the Forest end. The residential streets around the stadium were barricaded at each end, so I approached two policemen and asked how to get round the ground. “You don’t,” they said. I moved on to the next street, where a senior officer, wearing a flat hat, was talking to a constable. I asked again. “You a Liverpool fan? You’re not going up the Forest end. Forget it.” They turned away.

I hid any trace of my colours and gave it one last try. Fifty yards on stood another senior officer. He stopped me before I got within five yards of him. “I’ve just seen you,” he said. “You’ve already spoken to four of my men and I know what they’ve told you.” He pointed at the entrance to the Leppings Lane stand. “Now get to that turnstile right on the end. The fella there is letting in fans with Forest tickets.”

Strangely, I turned to walk away. That fella wasn’t going to let me in with a Forest ticket. But I hadn’t walked a few steps before the policeman shouted at me. I’ll never forget his words: “This is your last chance,” he said. It wasn’t an offer. Two minutes later, I was through the turnstile. As I made my way towards the tunnel that led to the terrace behind the goal, I didn’t dare look back. I couldn’t believe my luck.

It was 2.15pm when I walked into pen 3 on the Leppings Lane and took up a spot just to the right of Bruce Grobbelaar’s goal, about 10ft from the perimeter fence. I had travelled to matches alone since I was 15, and today, as always, I made for the liveliest spot, right among the choir and the comedians. For 10 minutes I stood in the sun, taking in the sight of a big old stadium slowly filling up on FA Cup semi-final day, leaning idly on one of the crash barriers that stood like staples on the terraces to limit a crowd surge.

By 2.30pm it was getting strangely uncomfortable. Looking around, I could see that fans older and clearly more seasoned than me were getting edgy. I shrugged two people off my back and pushed my way under the crush barrier, so that it was now behind me, and not on my chest. Ten minutes later, it would have been too late. By then, 20 minutes before kick-off, the crowd around me was wheezing and sweating and settling slowly, grudgingly, like cement. I had been in tight crowds before, but this was different. A silence was falling over the people around me. Some were hyperventilating, others were fainting. I was starting to panic now, but I was stuck. The pressure was tightening like a vice. My eyes began searching for police, or stewards, but no one was coming. Slowly, my legs, my backside, my arms and finally my chest went numb. One ear was folded in against my cheekbone by the head of a man to my right. I could move my head, my eyes and my mouth, and no more. My right foot seemed to move involuntarily, until I realised it wasn’t on the ground but planted on the calf of a man in front of me.

I had never felt anything like this before: not on the Kop, not at Wembley. And it was about to get worse. Behind me, Peter Carney, a 30-year-old fan from Liverpool, was one of hundreds of people now being swept into the packed central pens from the concourse. “We were walking through the tunnel at about 10 to three when, whoosh, this surge came and I was off my feet,” he remembers. “I actually entered the stadium with my back to the pitch.” Just as Peter thought he would be OK, a crush barrier went down. “I knew there was a gap in the crowd, which was odd – it was like: ‘What the fuck’s that?’ The people pressed against the barrier had fallen as it buckled, the people leaning on their backs fell on them, and a third row went down, too. There was a stack of bodies.”

That crush barrier was a few feet to my right, but I didn’t see it. Because the light was slowly closing around my head. By now I was gasping for breath, and worried that my neck wasn’t moving freely. Within feet of me people were standing dead, bolt upright. Three men had long stopped breathing and were now staring, with a fixed, almost disinterested expression, into the distance. Their faces were bleached white, but turning blue, their lips a cold violet. The only comfort I could find was that thousands of people who were still alive were now shouting for help, screaming, “There are people dead in here!” There were CCTV cameras trained on us. And there were police just a few feet in front of the fence who must have realised that metal crush barriers in our pen were bursting out of the ground.

Unbelievably, at 3pm, the match kicked off. I remember the roar of the crowd around the ground, and the stillness that followed in pen 3 as people gave up screaming for help to save the air in their lungs. By this time my lungs were burning and freezing with alternate breaths. I was paralysed from the neck down. Rival chants were bouncing the length of the ground, and I thought of my brother, watching from the opposite end of the stadium, where I should have been. Two police officers were sharing a joke, nervously, on the cinder track, 10ft away. No one was coming to help.

Behind me, Peter Carney was about to have a near-death experience. “Whenever I see a fish come up to the surface, that’s how I must’ve been,” he remembers. “My head was tilted back, gasping for air. Then I lost consciousness. The sky became white cloud, the white cloud became a tunnel shape, and I went down this tunnel. It was like looking down a pipe. It was never-ending. Then I’m looking back at the pens, me in the middle of a perfect circle of people, and heads, and I’m going down, and I’m looking at the top of my head.”

Eight feet or so in front of Peter, I was about to have my own moment of reckoning. I had been crushed on that terrace for over half an hour. I was exhausted, and stiff with shock. Incredibly, two people to my left had managed to climb above the crush, and were now crawling on all fours over the shoulders and heads of people around me, to the fence at the front. Unable to move, too exhausted now to shout, I wondered how they had managed to get out. And why it had been decided that I wouldn’t.

It was then that I caught the eye of a policeman just the other side of the fence. It was an unmistakable, meaningful moment: because for four or five seconds, across the heads of scores of people, we looked each other in the eye. I lost him when I mouthed the words, “Help us.” He smiled to himself and shook his head at me, and walked on, a little uncertainly.

At that point I thought: “We’ve been left to die.” Many people already had. People bigger than me, smaller than me, and smarter than me were gone. Now it was my turn. Fifty seconds, my brain was telling me: you’ve got 50 seconds left. I don’t know where the figure came from, but there wasn’t a moment of doubt in my mind: just a calm, orderly voice telling me to hurry up and take in the final minute of my life. As the seconds ticked down to 45, 40, 35, my lungs began to falter. I screwed up every ounce of strength left in my body – to lever myself into the air, climb on to someone’s shoulders, escape. But as I heaved and strained, my body wouldn’t move an inch. Those pressed tight around me were heavy, some were unconscious; others were gibbering, trying to black out what was happening.

I counted down to 20 seconds, and then at 15, or 14, I gave up. At 10 seconds, nine, eight, I floated away for a moment, briefly euphoric. Then I settled into my body, opened my mouth towards the sky and sucked what I could out of it. And then I closed my eyes. Five seconds later, they opened. The sky was still blue. And the police had finally opened the gate in the fence and were swearing at us. And I had survived.

The people on the Leppings Lane who didn’t survive were daughters, husbands, sisters, sons. The oldest victim was 67, the youngest a 10-year-old boy, the cousin of a then eight-year-old Steven Gerrard. Many of them died standing up, of traumatic asphyxia. Others, in their last moments, were borne across the pitch on advertising hoardings, towards ambulances that never came. Some of the dead had lost their footing in the crush and had been trampled. Others, unfortunate to be leaning against the crush barriers, were killed by a weight on their chest equivalent to a small car.

In his interim report, Lord Justice Taylor concluded that the main cause of the disaster was overcrowding, and that the main reason was “a failure of police control”. As the police neglected to manage the build-up of fans on the streets outside the Leppings Lane stand, the senior officer, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, ordered a large concertina gate leading into the ground to be opened. More than 2,000 people moved through the gate and into the Leppings Lane terrace, straight for the two packed central pens behind the goal: no one thought to direct them to the two outer pens, which were lightly populated. Swept along a narrow tunnel by a growing swell from behind, the fans ploughed into pens 3 and 4, unaware that their fellow supporters were being ground into the barriers, the fence, and each other.

Lord Justice Taylor stated of the senior officers on duty that “neither their handling of problems on the day nor their account of it in evidence showed the qualities of leadership to be expected of their rank”. To this day, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for the deaths of 96 people at Hillsborough.

Written by Professor Phil Scraton, Hillsborough:

The Truth is recognised as the definitive analysis of the disaster, and all that followed. Commenting on the updated edition, Scraton says: “Twenty years on, many bereaved families and survivors are remarkably resilient. Yet beneath the surface lies unimaginable grief, compounded by an overwhelming sense of injustice. Brought together by an avoidable tragedy, they were treated appallingly on the day, then betrayed by a flawed investigation, inadequate inquests and a criminal justice system that protected the authorities. All police statements were reviewed and, in many cases, altered by a team of senior officers. Anger is understandably directed towards those responsible, those who made deceitful allegations against fans, and those who perpetuate the myth of hooliganism.”

That the very act of surviving a major tragedy changes people’s lives and personalities is obvious. But to what extent is not. Family and friends who knew me then and now will tell me I’m the same person. I think they’re right, a few psychological bumps and bruises aside.

After escaping through the gate in that fence, I carried two people across a football pitch to a gym that had become a mortuary. One was barely alive when, along with six or seven other fans, I picked him up off the grass and laid him on an advertising hoarding. By the time we had run the length of the left wing, he was dead. We went back for another: there was a row of bodies by the goal-line. Help yourself, the police seemed to be saying. We kicked another board over, but as it lay flat on the ground a policeman walked over and stood on it. “You can’t just vandalise the stadium,” he said. So we picked up this lad by his arms and legs. As we ran his big, heavy body along, bumping his head on the grass in the vain hope of reviving him, I gazed down at the little ring of blue marks now swelling round his belly, like a baby’s footprints.

We stopped in the corner of the pitch, at a bottleneck by the football club’s gym. People were waiting for orders, ambulances, oxygen. There were dozens of fans there, holding the injured and the dead – on boards, by the arms and legs, in their arms. I stood there looking up for my brother, wondering how he was dealing with this. As we entered the gymnasium, there were medics going to work on people; policemen and fans with their heads in their hands, priests administering the last rites. The man we were holding now was dead when we picked him up, but I found it hard to let go of his hand. Eventually his body, coated in a gelatinous sweat, slipped from my grasp and on to the shiny floor.

A few bumps and bruises? The truth is that I will never know if the person I am today, nearing middle age, was the man I was always likely to be – the result of my genes, my schooling, my childhood friendships – or whether I am the reconstructed remains of that traumatised teenager. This leaves me something of a mystery to myself – a problem common among survivors. Peter Carney has never discovered who saved his life in pen 3. “Between passing out and being found lying out the back, I can’t find any footage or witnesses to confirm what I think went on,” he says. “This has been part of my struggle for my sanity, to find the people who carried me out.”

It would take a psychologist to unlock parts of my mind that have been numb for 20 years, and some that I have surrendered. If in a sense I have come from Hillsborough, I am not prepared to go back. What I have long suspected is that, emotionally, the clock stopped at 19. Since holding death at arm’s length I’ve held the advancing years there, too. I was a mature teenager, but I haven’t grown up since at the same pace as my friends. I haven’t had kids. I won’t let my own youth go just yet. I will turn 40 next year, but to most people I seem to be around 30.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realised I’d suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. It lasted for four years. I cried a lot, and randomly. I felt cold and angry, and empty. I’d never felt like this before. At times I felt overjoyed to be alive. The next day, I might wake up feeling half-dead. I woke up one day on the kitchen floor, after blacking out. (Get up, make a cup of tea, don’t tell Mum and Dad.) I drank heavily, but socially, and verbally abused police officers in the street, and I spent two nights cooling off in a police cell, in the early 90s, for my troubles. (Still haven’t told Mum and Dad.)

Then, strangely, one day it was over. Since then, since my mid-20s, I have never begrudged Hillsborough its place in my life. If I had lost someone that day then I would feel differently. But it is such an integral part of my life, and I have to live with who I am.

Perhaps the most important thing Hillsborough taught me is honesty. There is so much about 15 April 1989 that is wrong, and false, and dishonest, that survivors cling to what they know to be true. Lord Justice Taylor described the Liverpool fans’ reaction at Hillsborough as “magnificent”. But to experience something so terrible, to be accused of thieving and pissing on police officers when you were in the process of trying to save lives, or comforting people in their final moments, is an insult so deep in the psyche that honesty becomes the key not just to remembering but to anything that really matters in life. And it’s honesty that allows me to look other survivors in the eye and know that we did what we could.

Some of this will be news to my friends and my family reading this. And to my girlfriend, too, who was my girlfriend that day. But then, there are many secrets to a disaster – not to surviving one, but to living with one. Today, 20 years on, thousands of people still bear the scars of Hillsborough – some more visibly than I do, others inevitably less so.

So what is it like to lose your son in a disaster watched by millions on television?What was it like to be the only ambulance attendant to reach the chaos of the Leppings Lane end? What was it like to be one of the players on the pitch? Few of the surviving victims of Hillsborough have been heard outside of a courtroom in Sheffield in 1990. Below, some of them tell us how that beautiful spring day changed their lives for ever.

The ambulance man: Tony Edwards

The only professional ambulance attendant to reach the Leppings Lane, Tony left the ambulance service in 1995 now lives on the Isle of Bute

We were at the Northern General when we got a 3-9 call to an incident. They told us there was a fatality, but when we got to the ground there were ambulances from everywhere, even Derbyshire. As we pulled up a policeman came to my window and said: “You can’t go on the pitch, they’re still fighting.” A senior ambulance officer came to the door, and it was him who put the horns on. We said: “The policeman says they’re fighting – we can’t go on.” And he said: “I don’t give a fuck who’s told you you can’t go on. You get on that pitch and you don’t stop until you get to the end.”

As we went along, the police were starting to form a wall across the pitch. We went through them and then saw people running towards us. As we got to the goal there was an absolute sea of people. I’ll never forget the sound … it was like a large swimming pool; there was screaming and shouting, it was deafening. People were banging on the side of the ambulance, shouting “Help!” and “Over here!” I didn’t have a clue what was going on. We’d been told there was one fatality, that was it. We had these walkie-talkie radios and we tried to see if there was anyone I could report to, but the radios were useless. I was being pulled in different directions, people were shouting for oxygen, all sorts of demands. And I thought: “I can’t help everybody.” I was looking back up the pitch for other ambulances, but nobody was coming.

There were two girls on the grass, getting CPR. I decided to take one into the ambulance, but when I got back there were three bodies on board: one on the stretcher, and two piled on top of each other on the floor. There was a woman got into the vehicle doing mouth-to-mouth on a guy in the bulkhead. There was a young girl’s body with a guy bent over her trying CPR, but he was blowing vomit into her chest. I got the girl on the stretcher and then I looked down … and it wasn’t the girl I’d wanted to take. This is the problem I’ve lived with ever since.

I asked again to be put in touch with ambulance control, but the radio wasn’t working. I went to get my oxygen mask and bag, but they were gone. I looked up the pitch again and no one was coming. And I said to the driver: “We’re gonna have to fuck off here,” and we asked a policeman to close the door.

We weren’t doing any good. You’re used to having one casualty in the back, but there were too many bodies to deal with. We just didn’t do a very good job that day. We left people on that pitch who were being worked on, and there were no professionals there to help them.

A few years later we attended an accident on the A1M. There are people alive today because of the treatment we gave them; we were just so good, as a team. But we were never given the chance at Hillsborough. There were 44 ambulances waiting outside the stadium – that means 80-odd staff could have been inside the ground. But they weren’t allowed in. There was no fighting! The survivors were deciding who was the priority, who we should deal with. The police weren’t. We weren’t. Can you imagine a rail accident where all the ambulances wait on the embankment while the survivors bring the casualties up? I took away the wrong people.

I was the only professional ambulance attendant to reach the Leppings Lane, but I was written out of the disaster. I was given a commendation (which I ripped up), and I represented the South Yorkshire ambulance service at the memorial service, but I wasn’t called to the Taylor inquiry. I didn’t exist. You look at the Taylor report – I didn’t exist. When I was interviewed by the West Midlands police I questioned the whole thing: why was I put in that position, you know? They didn’t want that aired in court.

I know I dealt with it wrong. I know that. But I should never have been put in that position.

The Taylor inquiry was told my ambulance never got on to the pitch: it would’ve contradicted evidence given in another case. But I was there, in the police CCTV videos. All these questions they would have had to ask me are key to the mismanagement of Hillsborough. If they had asked me, it would have been disastrous for the police and the ambulance services.

Afterwards I blamed myself so much. I still do. I still get angry with myself, for not stopping and taking a deep breath, for not changing the course of things. I couldn’t deal with it afterwards. I ran marathons, triathlons. I took it out on my partner at the time. I went on holiday to Dallas in 1992 and I came back and I realised I wasn’t in control. I split up with my partner. But who’s to say I wouldn’t have done that anyway?

In the summer of 1995 we got a call to a suicide in Rotherham. Nothing unusual in a suicide. But he had a T-shirt, jeans and trainers on. That’s what almost everyone was wearing at Hillsborough, in that makeshift mortuary. I just went to pieces: I was hyperventilating, I could hear the screaming again. And I left, I went off sick that day, and I never returned to the ambulance service. By October I was living here, on Bute. My partner joined me and we’ve been here ever since. I needed to get away, and this felt right straightaway. It was the turning point. People here know about Hillsborough, but they are very good – no one talks about it.

I’ve had two children since we’ve been here, and I have two from my first marriage. For the first nine years I ran a bicycle repair shop, but I’ve been a community recycling project manager since 2004. We’re a social enterprise; we employ people who’ve had difficulties. We’ve won awards, and people have come up from England to have a look at us. I’m very busy, and it’s a very positive part of my life. It’s very therapeutic here. Everything here is positive.

The ex-wife: Angela Woolfall

Her husband survived, but their marriage broke down as a result of the mental and physical injuries he had suffered Michael was 32 when he went to Hillsborough. He was a steward at Anfield and had got into pen 3 at around 2.15pm. He leant on a crush barrier to read his programme and before he realised, he found he was trapped. The crush became so bad he began to pass out. Two lads in front of the barrier had a bit more room, and they kept slapping his face to keep him conscious. But the pain was too much, and he couldn’t breathe. The next thing he knew he woke up in the Northern General in Sheffield.

The hospital phoned me at 6.30pm to say they had Michael. I said: “I had a feeling I was going to hear from you.” I just knew. I had been glued to the television, but my daughter, Sam, who was two at the time, kept saying: “I want to watch Thomas the Tank … Thomas the Tank, Mummy!” I was going out of my mind. My brother’s wife drove us over the Pennines. The thing I remember most was all these half-empty coaches coming back.

Michael had ended up hanging over this barrier. He severed the nerves in the top of his leg, which has left him partially disabled, and he suffered broken ribs – one of these fans had been hammering on his chest to revive him. He only found out what had happened three weeks later, when he went to the rearranged match at Old Trafford and bumped into these lads. One of them said: “Last time we saw you, you were dead!” They had been giving him the kiss of life when a policeman came over and said: “You’re wasting your time, lads, leave him there with … ” (there was a line of bodies, you know). These lads got the fright of their lives when they saw Michael on his crutches, but they were overjoyed because their efforts hadn’t been in vain.

Nine months later, there was a TV documentary about Hillsborough, and the camera zoomed down the tunnel and on to the terrace. Michael went into a trance, watching it; he relived it all, there on the sofa. He was saying: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going to die!” And he had stopped breathing. He was speaking, screaming, clutching his trousers … I witnessed what he’d been through, but when he came round he couldn’t remember.

It was about 18 months later that he learned his injuries were permanent. Michael had been a scaffolder, but although he gave it a good go he had to call it a day in 1990. He hated not being able to work, and I had to work full-time as a legal secretary. He’s not on crutches any more, but he says it’s like having toothache in the top of his legs.

We were assigned a family counsellor, and that helped, but Michael became a very selfish person. He began to go out a lot – he was out all the time – and he was drinking more than he had before. His excuse was that it was the only way he could sleep. He was frightened to go to sleep, and frightened that he might not wake up.

Everyone loved him; he was just an outgoing, good bloke. But he would never speak about the fact that he was left for dead. When he was having counselling I was sitting there thinking: “I’m suffering too, you know.” Because he was shutting me out – there was no way of helping him, and that upset me a lot.

Our second child, Ben, was born in 1991, which was a lovely surprise, but Michael just couldn’t snap out of it. I was thinking: “If Hillsborough hadn’t happened, I’d be really pissed off with you.” But it was like: “What will people think of me if things don’t work out? It will be my fault.” I was burnt out trying to support him, and it became one-way support. He just wanted to go into his own world.

The eldest knew by the time she was six or seven that Daddy had been through something terrible, and the kids began to dread Saturdays – match days. I began to sense things weren’t going to work out in about 1994 or 95, but it took me two years to pluck up the courage to end it. We went to the pub and I said: “This isn’t working any more.” He looked quite relieved, actually. We split up, and then divorced in 1998. He remarried in 1999 or 2000.

It’s only in the past 18 months I’ve started to feel like I’m my own person again. Sam is 22 now, and Ben’s 17. None of us blames Michael for what happened, and we’re all still friends. The most important thing is that he’s alive. But I lost my husband at Hillsborough, and that gets overlooked. I’ve found it hard to commit to a new relationship, but when you have kids you have to get on with things, and as a mother they come first.

The Liverpool player: Peter Beardsley

Peter was playing for Liverpool when the game was abandoned. He is now based in Newcastle, doing PR for Newcastle United and also working in the community Four minutes into the game I had a shot that hit the crossbar. Naturally, at the time I was disappointed. In hindsight, it was good that I didn’t score, because people outside the ground heard the roar when I hit the bar and tried even harder to get into the terraces. They were just excited; they didn’t know what was happening at the front. If I had scored, the fans would’ve been even more excited and more people could have been crushed. But as soon as I hit the bar I turned round, and from even way up the pitch I could see there was trouble behind the goal. There were people climbing over the fences. We didn’t have a clue what was going on.

A policeman ran on to the pitch and told the referee to take the teams off. We sat in the dressing room, waiting. Graham Kelly, the chief executive of the FA, came in and told us he would get the game back on as soon as possible. He came in every 15 minutes or so and said that. We didn’t have a clue that people were losing their lives outside. But the dressing rooms backed on to a car park, and we could hear the sirens. There were players in that dressing room who had been at Heysel, so they were fearing the worst. We were still sat in our kit at 4.30pm. We didn’t know what had happened until we left the dressing room and met our families.

I went to a funeral of one of the victims, in Burnley. The family were magnificent with me, but I found it really hard. I’d only been to one funeral before that, but this one was for a teenage boy. I can go to funerals now, of young children who I’ve met in hospital and who’ve died. And as sad as it is, I can cope with it now. But I couldn’t then. It was terrible. The likes of John Barnes, Alan Hansen and Kenny Dalglish were better men than I was. They went to so many funerals. Kenny and his wife Marina went to over half of the funerals. They went to three in one day on more than one occasion. From the moment the disaster began, right to the end, Kenny was unbelievable. Many of the players feel that the reason Kenny left the club in 1991 was because mentally he’d had enough. The whole Liverpool ethos changed when he left, in terms of the managers. It’s taken them a long time to get back in contention for the title.

We had a two-week break from football after the disaster. We went and visited survivors in hospital, here, there and everywhere. But I couldn’t wait to get back on the field and play: it took my mind off things. Barnesy couldn’t face it for a while.

We lost the league title decider to Arsenal a few weeks later. I wasn’t too bothered, to be honest. My wife Sandra had gone into labour and I went straight from the match to hospital. After what had happened at Hillsborough, people had lost children and I was just about to have one. Our son was born the next morning. Hillsborough made me realise how lucky I was.

I was a fan myself in the 70s and 80s, watching Newcastle at St James’s Park, and I’d been in some uncomfortable situations. It made me realise what the fans had to go through to follow the team. Meeting some of the families who lost their children that day made me realise that I was born lucky. No money in the world could buy the memories I have of playing for that team. I’m just so relieved I didn’t score that day.

The widow: Jenny

Her husband Ian committed suicide two years ago. He had never been the same since suffering post-traumatic stress disorder following his experience at Hillsborough I met Ian when I was 14 and he was 15, and we married five years later. At the time of Hillsborough, we had two children, both under eight. Ian was a psychiatric nurse at a high-security hospital and I’d just started a degree course in criminal justice.

He went to the match with a group of workmates: some had seat tickets, but Ian and his best friend Joe were in the Leppings Lane. They had been swept into one of the pens behind the goal by the surge. It was so strong it carried them two-thirds of the way down the pen. Ian was right in front of Joe and they were squashed together. He could always feel Joe’s hands on his shoulder, and he kept up a discussion with him, saying: “We’ll get out this way.” When he got out of the pen Ian was still talking to Joe, and he could swear Joe was talking back. But at the inquest Ian was told this was impossible, because Joe was dead before Ian even got out of the pen. He couldn’t get over the fact that their conversations hadn’t happened. Ian got out through a hole in the fence and he assumed Joe was with him. He wasn’t.

I didn’t hear from Ian until 9pm, when he called to say Joe was still missing. They’d been to the mortuary at the stadium several times, and there were Polaroids of the people they had there. But Joe’s face was so contorted Ian couldn’t recognise him in the photo. It was a logo on his shirt they noticed, then they went to check the body, and it was Joe. He was very tall, which put him at a disadvantage: his chest had been damaged by the heads of so many people around him.

Ian was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder just a few weeks after. He wasn’t seriously injured, but he was a wreck. He was a man’s man and he said he didn’t need help, so he went straight back to work. Two weeks later he came home from his night shift, went upstairs and smashed the bathroom up. He wasn’t an aggressive person, but he couldn’t handle the emotions.

Ian agreed to have counselling. Being a psychiatric nurse didn’t help him, because he didn’t want to be seen needing the support he was giving other people. He saw it as some kind of failure. He was prescribed Prozac, was on it for three months, and it helped. But he had a lot of nightmares. I thought he was through the worst, but Hillsborough was like a spectre. He never went to football after that: our son lost so much bonding time with his dad because he wouldn’t go to the game.

About two or three weeks before Ian died, there was all this stuff about Kelvin MacKenzie being on Newsnight, and Ian got really angry. I didn’t realise just how much it bothered him. His sleep was being disturbed, but he was also worrying about his business. He gave up nursing 10 years after Hillsborough and he set up a computer company. For seven or eight years it went well, then it started going downhill.

Ian died on the Tuesday. The weekend before, we’d gone up to the Lake District and had a lovely time; there was no hint of any anxiety. He said everything at work would be fine. On the Monday night he was a bit tetchy, a bit tired. In the morning I remember him getting up before the alarm and turning it off. I’d just rolled over to where he’d been sleeping, and I thought, “Ooh, I’m glad he’s not coming back to bed,” because where he’d been lying was lovely and warm.

Ian got up and had a shower and put his work clothes on. He did everything he’d normally do: he had a cup of tea, went into the garage and fed the rabbit. At about quarter to eight my daughter came up and asked me something and I said: “Oh, ask your dad,” and she said: “Dad’s gone,” and I said: “He hasn’t gone this early; he hasn’t even said goodbye.” She said: “He has. He’s not downstairs.” So I came down and his van was still on the path. I called his mobile and it rang in the living room. We went out into the kitchen and the garage door had the key in, so my daughter ran out to the garage. And Ian had hanged himself in there. She started screaming.

My daughter was barely a teenager. Luckily she didn’t see his face. Ian was on a small ladder; he was still standing on it. At first she thought he was standing on it to reach something, so she started to talk to him, but then she noticed that he had something round his neck. When I went in I saw his face.

Sometimes I feel angry, and I think: “Why didn’t you talk to me? I could’ve helped.” In the weeks after Ian’s death I felt that if my youngest hadn’t been there, I’d have taken an overdose. Sometimes I think he didn’t mean to do it; it was a cry for help. Then I just think: “He’d gone into the garage to feed the rabbit and thought: ‘I can’t go back, I’ve had enough,’ and he snapped. He’d seen a way out.”

Ian was never the same after Hillsborough. He was like a coiled spring. The least thing, he would get worked up. He was always on edge. He’s been gone two years now. We had his funeral in the church we got married in, and it was lovely, really comforting. But his death has made us all a lot more insecure. I do have faith, and I have to believe there’s an afterlife. There’s just nothing that’s worth taking your life for. Nothing will ever be the same again.

All names have been changed.

The mother: Anne Williams

Anne, who lives in Chester, has spent 18 years campaigning for a new inquest into the death of her son, Kevin, at Hillsborough I didn’t go out to take the system on. I just wanted to find out what happened to Kevin. But the jury at the inquest never heard the true story of how my son died. He would’ve been 16 in May 1989, and he’d been working really hard for his GCSEs. He was due to go to the match with his friend Andrew and Andrew’s dad. But the night before, Kevin told us Andrew’s dad had to work, so he couldn’t take them. Steve, Kevin’s stepdad, said: “Well, you can’t go.” Kevin went upstairs looking so sad. Steve said: “Poor little bugger, all he does is study. Shall we let him go?” And I said yes.

We never got a call to say Kevin was missing. There was a young lad up the road, Stuart, who’d gone to the match, too, and his mum had just heard that Stuart was dead when I called in on her. She was in floods of tears, but she said: “Don’t worry, Anne, Kevin will be OK.”

I phoned the hospital in Sheffield, and eventually I got through to the mortuary at the ground. And I said to this guy: “Can you look for a little boy with a horn of life around his neck?” He said: “You best stay where you are, the police are coming round.” I put the phone down and said to my mum: “I know why the police are coming.”

Kevin had been pulled out of the crush in pen 3, but he died not long afterwards. When we got to Sheffield we weren’t allowed to touch him. He was behind a pane of glass: “Property of the coroner”. When the coroner finally released his body I was really excited, it was like: “Kevin’s coming home!” He was in his little coffin, but he looked lovely. He was just Kevin.

At the inquest in March 1991, the coroner ruled that everyone who’d been killed at Hillsborough had died of traumatic asphyxia, and that they were all dead or brain dead by 3.15pm. This ruling was crucial, because it meant there could be no investigation into the actions of the South Yorkshire police after this time. Questions like why were over 40 ambulances not allowed into the ground, and why did the police not activate the major accident plan until 3.55pm couldn’t be examined because everyone was meant to be dead at 3.15pm. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

But an off-duty policeman at the match, a Mr Bruder, gave a statement that he gave Kevin the kiss of life at 3.37pm, as he still had a pulse. There had also been a WPC at the game who said she’d held Kevin in her arms when he died, and that it was a few minutes before 4pm. She gave Kevin heart massage, and his ribs were moving. He started breathing, and he still had colour. He opened his eyes and murmured the word “Mum”. Then he died. How could Kevin have opened his eyes and called for me if he’d been brain dead for 40 minutes?

In 1991 Dr Iain West, a leading pathologist (he’d worked on the King’s Cross fire, the Brighton bombing and the Clapham rail crash), looked into Kevin’s case for me. The inquest had ruled that Mr Bruder had mistaken Kevin’s pulse for his dead body twitching. But Dr West told me that a body simply won’t twitch from 3.15 to 3.37, so at that point Mr Bruder must have been dealing with a live body. From the autopsy report and post-mortem photographs, Dr West concluded that Kevin hadn’t died of traumatic asphyxia, but of neck injuries, which closed down his airways. (Dr Carey, the pathologist who worked on the Soham murders, was of the same opinion.) Kevin, and others who died, could have been saved, he said. A tracheotomy (a quick incision into the windpipe), or even the insertion of a rubber tube down the throat, would’ve reopened Kevin’s airways. An ambulance attendant would have known how to perform a tracheotomy. But the police wouldn’t let the ambulances on to the pitch.

In 1997 Jack Straw appointed Lord Justice Stuart-Smith to review whether the Hillsborough inquest should be reopened. Both Mr Bruder and the WPC told Stuart-Smith that they had come under pressure to change their statements about finding Kevin alive after 3.15pm, but that they stood by them. Other witnesses said that statements and CCTV footage of the disaster had been suppressed. But Stuart-Smith ruled there was insufficient new evidence to reopen the inquiry.

Kevin’s case is now being heard in the European Court of Human Rights, under Article 2, the right to life. Kevin died in the hands of the state, and it’s his right to a thorough investigation into how he died. We’ve also gone under Article 6, the right to a fair trial. My solicitor has told me that if they rule in my favour, we’ll get that inquest. That would open 3.15pm till 4pm for everyone.

I’m really tired of it now. Sometimes I wake up and think: “No, I don’t want Hillsborough today.” I grow my flowers in memory of Kevin, marigolds and asters and lobelia. It’s helped me a lot. But if Europe doesn’t rule in my favour, I’ll carry on, because I know that the only answers I can get are in court.

• Thanks to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.

What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

1984 George Orwell

Blah blah blah Alain Badiou blah blah blah anarchism blah blah blah…

Through a Glass Darkly: Alain Badiou’s critique of anarchism
Benjamin Noys
Anarchist Studies, Vol.16, No.2 (2008)

ABSTRACT

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is one of a number of contemporary theorists whose work has been identified as a source for postanarchism. This essay questions that identification by focusing on Badiou’s sustained criticism of anarchist and libertarian currents for their failure to engage fully with the difficulties of political power, and in particular their failure to break with capitalist and statist political forms. Although problematic, these criticisms converge with existing debates in the ‘movement of movements’, which have started to address the difficulty of finding egalitarian forms of practice to sustain the movement. These debates lead us towards the often elided problem of the relationship between postanarchist theory and anarchist practice.

It has become a commonplace to argue that we have witnessed the resurgence or renaissance of anarchism in recent years, particularly with the emergence of the ‘movement of movements’ after the Seattle uprising of 1999 or the earlier Chiapas uprising of 1994. David Graeber has poetically summarised the case: ‘Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of what’s most new and hopeful about it’ (2002: 62). This new attention to anarchist practice has been accompanied by a renewed interest in anarchist theory. In this, important parallels have been noted between the work of leading thinkers and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciére, and anarchist themes and approaches. What is striking in both cases, especially the second, is the general absence of anarchism as an explicit reference point. It seems as if anarchism is the politics that dare not speak its name. One of the results of this absence has been the significant effort by anarchists or those sympathetic to anarchism to re-establish the anarchist credentials of the present. As Saul Newman, one of those responsible for this effort has put it: ‘perhaps anarchism can be seen as the hidden referent for contemporary radical politics’ (2007: 12). In fact, as Newman himself stresses, this is one way to define postanarchism: as the production of a synthesis that will establish that both contemporary radical political practice and political theory constitutes a new form, or new paradigm, for anarchism.

To make good on this argument postanarchist thinkers have typically made a double move. First they have argued that many contemporary theories, which are usually identified as post-structuralist or post-Marxist, are better understood through the lens of a revised anarchism. While these theories often remain attached to a residual Marxism or are vague about their political implications, integrated into anarchism they can become truly radical. The ways in which these theories challenge the primacy of class explanation, attack the dominance of the state and attend to the micro-politics of power, converge with anarchist thought and practice. The second move is to argue that these theories allow us to purge ‘traditional’ anarchism of its humanist, naturalist, and positivist residues. Post-structuralist or post-Marxist thought allows us to shift anarchism away from its supposed reliance on a set of ‘essential’ human qualities or norms that would then dictate a natural, or true, politics. In this way, it is argued, these theories open anarchism up to a new thinking ‘that embraces contingency and indeterminacy and rejects essentialist identities and firm ontological foundations’ (Newman 2007: 16). The postanarchist synthesis is then often linked to the new forms of decentered and dispersed practice in the movement of movements, to this new political and social inventiveness that remains unconstrained by the limits of traditional anarchism. In this way a narrative has been constructed in which the ‘hidden referent’ of anarchism is explicit: our moment is anarchist in theory and practice if we fundamentally revise what we mean by anarchism to become postanarchist.

Critics rightly argue that this seemingly persuasive narrative tends to flatten the depth of traditional anarchism into the cliché of ‘essentialism’ (Conn 2002). Yet my concern is the way in which postanarchism operates with a smooth and trouble free narrative of its emergence as a new paradigm, while claiming to inject into politics conflict and antagonism. I want to suggest that the making of postanarchism is considerably more problematic by focusing on the case of one thinker who has started to be assimilated within postanarchism, the French philosopher and political militant Alain Badiou. My reason for selecting Badiou is that despite having much in common with anarchism and postanarchism he is also highly critical of anarchism, claiming that it is unable to deal with the complexities and practicalities of power. In this way Badiou raises crucial issues for both anarchist theory and anarchist practice, questions which remain unsettled.

First I will consider the reason why Badiou has been considered attractive to postanarchism. This will involve a discussion of Badiou’s own political and theoretical evolution. In particular I will focus on his discussion of the Paris Commune of 1871, in which his arguments concerning this workers’ uprising converge with anarchist arguments. Secondly, I will consider in more detail Badiou’s criticisms of anarchism. These are not so much directed at anarchism per se but they do take in many of the currents of thought that have influenced postanarchism. Finally I want to examine how Badiou’s criticisms have found an echo in recent discussions within the anarchist and anti-capitalist milieu. Here we can see emerging a new debate concerning the practical means by which we might achieve and sustain egalitarian and anarchist social forms. My approach then is not to confront directly postanarchism, nor is it to answer the question of whether we can really consider Badiou to be a postanarchist. Instead, by taking a detour through Badiou’s criticisms of anarchism, I want to return to consider the difficult question of the link, often elided, between postanarchist theory and anarchist practice.

BADIOU, ANARCHIST?

At first glance Alain Badiou appears as an unlikely candidate for assimilation into postanarchism, especially if we consider his intellectual and political formation.[1] In the 1960s he was a student of the leading Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and his early work was concerned with developing theories of aesthetics and of mathematics from a Marxist persepective. Like many others Badiou was radicalised by the events of May 1968, but he did not take up a libertarian or anarchist position. Rather he was one of the founder members of the Maoist organisation Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist (UCFML). This group was never slavish in its attitude to the ‘official’ Maoism of the Chinese Communist Party and it was sceptical about the possibility of building the Party at that time in France, making it an unusual far left formation. Yet it retained a quite typical Marxist attitude to anarchist or anarchist style activity – one of condemnation and unremitting criticism. The group dissolved in 1985 and several of its militants, including Badiou, formed a new group Organisation Politique (OP). This new group continued the path of political militancy, but defined itself more firmly as a post-party formation.

In terms of his theoretical work Badiou published his magnum opus Being and Event in 1988, translated into English in 2005. This dense work defended the modem project of philosophy through the deployment of the mathematics of set-theory. As the title of the book suggests Badiou was not simply concerned to describe matters as they are but also the possibility of events: radical ruptures with the rules and structures of existing situations. In the field of the political – one of the four fields in which events can take place, alongside art, love and science – this means that he retains a fidelity to the event of revolution, signalled for him by 1917. At the same time, in his own political practice and in various books, essays, and interventions, Badiou has both insisted on the need to revise old political models and the need to constantly contest the politics of the present. His short book Ethics (2001), which forms the best introduction to his work, engages in a violent polemic against the ideological abuse of ‘ethics’ to provide justification for the domination of capitalism and the state. Unusually for a philosopher, Badiou has maintained a dialogue between his theoretical work and political militancy that has persisted through the waning of the political hopes invested in May 1968 and the context of an increasingly reactionary intellectual turn following September 11 and the ‘war on terror’. It is this political intransigence which, in part, makes Badiou such an influential and attractive figure for re-thinking contemporary radical politics.

While Badiou’s own political practice has been hostile to the anarchist tradition there are strong points of convergence between his work and anarchism. The most obvious, which stems from his political practice, is his increasing scepticism towards the party form. Badiou regards this form as one that is now exhausted and that must be replaced by a new post-party politics. Another point of convergence is that Badiou has always retained his hostility to the state and to what Deleuze and Guattari identified as ‘State thought’ (1988: 24). Finally, Badiou has always insisted on a radically egalitarian notion of the potential for everyone to be engaged with radical thought and practice. Although Badiou’s thought has shifted and changed he has always maintained these central tenets at the core of his work. It is for these reasons that Saul Newman has drawn on Badiou’s work (amongst others) to define postanarchism, arguing that Badiou ‘veers quite close towards anarchism’ (2007: 12). While this is true, we might also note that Badiou also violently veers away from anarchism. To further study this matter of proximity and distance I want to consider a more detailed case of Badiou’s veering towards and away from anarchism in his discussion of the Paris Commune.

In his essay “The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics’ (2003) (in Badiou 2006: 257-290) Badiou takes issue with classical Marxist and Leninist interpretations of the failure of the Paris Commune. As Badiou points out the classical Marxist position was ambiguous: on the one hand stressing the dissolution of the state and, on the other hand, the formation of the party as the body capable of seizing and organising a new state (Badiou 2006: 264). He goes on to argue that the Marxist interpretation of the Commune embodies this ambiguity, in which the Commune, which dissolved the state, is taken to have failed because of the lack of the party. The solution proposed by Marxism to the conundrum is ‘the figure of the party-state’ (Badiou 2006: 264). For Badiou this ’solution’ is an evasion of the political truth of the Commune: the truth can only be reached by reactivating the Commune as the figure of the dissolution of the state without the party, rather than burying it in a narrative of failed revolution. Considering his past, it is unsurprising that Badiou turns to the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution as an example of such a reactivation. What he suggests, however, is that this represents the point at which Maoism tried and failed to think outside of its Leninist and Stalinist inheritance. While the Chinese proposed the Commune as experience to learn from, the attempt to take possible forms outside the domain of the party was reined in ‘by the tutelary figure of the party’ (Badiou 2006: 269). This failure leads Badiou to pose the question of how, today, ‘we have to take up the challenge of thinking politics outside of its subjection to the state and outside of the framework of parties or of the party’ (2006: 270). Anarchists might well reply this has been exactly what anarchism has been doing for at least two hundred years . . .

What is Badiou’s answer to this challenge? First he insists that the Commune should be understood as breaking with the context of the ‘Left’, which Badiou reads as those who translate a political movement back into parliamentary politics (Badiou 2006: 272). This vehement rejection of the existing ‘Left’ places Badiou in proximity to those anarchists who have articulated ‘anarchy after Leftism’ (Black 1997), as a critique of the statist residues in Marxism. Unlike the post-Leftist anarchists, however, Badiou is still loyal to the anti-statist elements of Marxism. Rejecting the ‘Left’ interpretation he holds to his own complex political ‘ontology’ of the Commune that can articulate a truly anti-state analysis. Badiou uses the tools of his own philosophy, which itself deploys the discourse of contemporary mathematics, to articulate the features of the Commune. I will not reproduce the detail of this analysis but, in summary, Badiou sees the Commune as a particular site of revolutionary politics involving a particular range and organisation of forces. From this site emerge those who have not been considered to count within the political situation – the workers. This appearance of the workers ruptures the existing limits of politics. In Badiou’s technical sense the Commune is an event, which is a rupture of such intensity that it rearranges the terms of a situation and allows us to draw out new egalitarian political consequences (similar to what is commonly called a ‘revolution’).

Those who did not and could not appear yesterday – in 1871, the workers – now come into existence in all their subversive force. The Commune consequently realised a new possibility: the emergence of an independent workers’ movement. In other words, what the Commune announces is the possibility of another world (Badiou 2006: 289). What is striking in this conclusion is how close Badiou’s analysis comes to anarchism, especially contemporary anarchism: his rejection of the state as object of political power; his vehement criticism of the existing ‘Left’ and his articulation of an independent political power of the excluded that questions the very concept of ‘democracy’. Badiou even appears to be moving towards the slogan ‘another world is possible’.

Nevertheless, in a companion piece on the Cultural Revolution Badiou makes clear his continuing hostility to anarchism:

We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’, and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag (2006: 321).

As we will see, behind this rather lamentable critique of anarchism is something more serious. We might regard Badiou’s outburst as a symptom of defensive anxiety: he rejects anarchism because anarchists had been elaborating a politics without party and an anti-statist position long before him. But rather than develop this diagnostic strategy, I want to analyse further what might explain his animus. My contention is that some of the scepticism Badiou directs towards anarchism is echoed by anarchists themselves.

BADIOU’S CRITIQUE OF ANARCHISM

Badiou’s critique of anarchism operates indirectly; it attacks what Daniel Bensaïd describes as ‘[a] neo-libertarian current, more diffuse but more influential than the direct heirs of anarchism . . . [which] constitutes a state of mind, a “mood”, rather than a well-defined orientation’ (Bensaïd 2005: 170). One of Badiou’s examples of this tendency, which he identified when he was still a Maoist, is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus (1972). This book, with its vision of a flux of desire that can escape the constraints of both capitalism and the ‘prison’ of the Freudian Oedipus complex, not only had a significant influence on the libertarians of the movements after May ‘68 but also on later anarchists and postanarchists. Where anarchists have tended to celebrate their theories of the uncontrollable fluxes of desire Badiou sarcastically comments: ‘Unforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift, my son, and you will make the Revolution’ (2004: 76). This point summarises Badiou’s general scepticism towards what he regards as the anarchist faith in the ‘pure’ movement of resistance, a movement that seems to operate without the need for aim or direction but will somehow still result in revolution.

Badiou refines this general scepticism in making a series of more precise criticisms of the ‘libertarian current’. He argues that the central problem of this current is that it sets up a simple-minded opposition between power and resistance (or revolt, or rebellion). The result is a sterile set of ’static dualisms’, from which is derived ‘the catechism of the System and the Flux, the Despot and the Nomad, the Paranoiac, and the Schizo’ (Badiou 2004: 80). In this case Badiou is explicitly referring to a number of oppositions that structure the text of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, in which the second term is valorised at the expense of the first. The problem with such dualisms is that they fail to grasp the ways in which politics actually operates: ‘power’ is not one monolithic whole, and neither is ‘resistance’. Instead the task of ‘doing politics’ involves a closer analysis of different forces and contradictions as well as, for Badiou, the formation of the party as the form to handle and organise these contradictions. Whatever we might think of the second point we can, I think, accept the first is well made. While there may be a polemical or motivational gain in presenting politics in terms of a grand opposition, and there may well be times where struggle operates in this form, more often matters are considerably more complex.

For Badiou these kinds of oppositions reflect the limits of the French political scene in the 1970s: namely the opposition between the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, which finds its model in the French Communist Party, and the philosophy of desire that Deleuze and Guattari gave voice to, and which finds its model in the dispersion of the little groups of libertarians (’groupuscules’). In the first we find the relentless and paralysing insistence on the power of structure and, in the second the celebration of ‘pure’ revolt. We can see here the origin of Badiou’s later contention that the anarchist model mirrors the communist party model. Anarchists oppose their small groups to the supposedly ‘monolithic’ style of the communist party. What they fail to recognise are the fissures and contradictions that run through both power and resistance. In this period Badiou, and the UCFML, are groping towards a new party-form that would be able to negotiate a dialectical reading of politics that could engage with force and place, disruption and structure, without reifying one of the terms against the other.

The irony is that defenders of Deleuze and Guattari, or Michel Foucault, whom Badiou also attacks, will argue that they present a model of power and resistance as multiple, fluid, and unstable – precisely not a binary. Badiou, however, is correct to note a tendency to re-constitute new binaries in these modes of thinking: ‘Schizo vs. Paranoid’ (Deleuze and Guattari), ‘Pleb vs. Power’ (Foucault), or ‘Multitude vs. Empire’ (Negri and Hardt). In each case the attempts at anti-dialectical thinking risk becoming merely un-dialectical. Badiou himself certainly changes the terms of his own thinking, but he retains the mistrust of what he regards as this fundamental libertarian or anarchist schema. So, in the later Being and Event (2005) Badiou will critique what he calls ’speculative leftism’, which believes in the ‘pure’ event of revolt – the miracle of revolt appearing out of nothing.[2] Again his point here is that there is a faith in the emergence of a force of revolt posed against a static sense of power, without any real attempt to analyse the possibilities and limits of the forces that would compose this ‘revolt’. This faith in the miracle of the event of revolt is coupled, Badiou argues, with a sense of the inevitable defeat of such revolts by power. The result is that we are left in the situation of fighting an endless (losing) war – alternating between the eruption of revolt out of nothing and then its inevitable return to nothing.

More recently Badiou has focused his criticisms on the [debunking?] of Antonio Negri (co-author, with Michael Hardt, of Empire (2000)), and his influence on the ‘movement of movements’. Badiou tends to conflate Negri with the ‘movement of movements’, and while it is true that the language and thinking of Negri has had considerable influence, it has by no means passed uncontested. Badiou modulates his earlier general criticisms of anarchism / libertarian positions but stays within the same general frame: Negri is not truly opposed to capitalist ‘Empire’ but instead romanticises the power of capitalism:

As is well known, for Negri, the Spinozist, there is only one historic substance, so that the capitalist empire is also the scene of an unprecedented communist deployment. This surely has the advantage of authorizing the belief that the worse it gets, the better it gets; or of getting you to (mis)take those demonstrations – fruitlessly convened to meet wherever the powerful re-unite – for the ‘creation’ and the ‘multiform invention’ of new petit-bourgeois proletarians (Badiou 2006: 45).

Therefore Negri cuts the ground from under any truly anti-capitalist politics by being overly fascinated with the mobile power of capital. At the same time he is also overly hopeful about the powers of resistance on this ground, offering only a ‘dreamy hallucination’ (Badiou 2003: 126) of the power of the ‘multitude’, which lacks the discipline to properly detach itself from the state.

Badiou’s critique of anarchism ranges across a number of repeated and modulated criticisms. At the fundamental level it involves a constrained sense of the possibilities of politics that remains in a dualism of resistance versus power. This monolithic conception prevents a properly political assessment of the complex arrangements of political power and the means by which capitalist and state power might not only be resisted but also overthrown. This static dualism often leaves the origin of revolt unexplained or undetermined. It seems to come from nowhere and also to go nowhere; the ‘miracle’ of revolt is always doomed to defeat or recuperation. Also, this dualism leads to a structure of mirroring between anarchism and state or capitalist power. The invocations of drift and liberation found in the libertarian current are dangerously close to the ideological forms of capitalism itself. For Badiou, this means that anarchism lacks the ability to ‘construct new forms of discipline to replace the discipline of political parties’ (Badiou 2003: 126). Of course anyone knowledgeable of the history of anarchism will recognise this line of criticism, particularly as it has often been advanced by Marxists. But it is the vehemence with which Badiou poses these questions in the present context, and his choice of theoretical targets that make them worth considering as critical questions – especially since, as we will see, some voices within the movement have arrived at similar conclusions.

THE RETURN OF STRATEGY

Daniel Bensaïd is rather more generous than Badiou when he credits the ‘neo-libertarian current’ – he has in mind Antonio Negri and John Holloway – with ‘relaunching a much-needed strategic debate in the movements of resistance to imperial globalisation’ (2005: 171). But instead of sorting through Badiou’s misapprehensions about anarchism, I want to consider how his reservations about strategy dovetail with discussions in the ‘movement of movements’. I will begin with Badiou’s argument that Negri, and the ‘movement of movements’, remain overly fascinated by and linked to state and capitalist power. In their text Barbarians: disordered insurgence (2004) the anarchists Chrissus and Odotheus provide a critique of Negri that is very close to the arguments of Badiou. Like Badiou they question whether Negri has really escaped the schemas of a teleological and mechanistic Marxism, in which the supposed ‘advance’ of capitalism will form the conditions for communism. While Negri hymns the power of the multitude – his name for the new dispersed but common subject of resistance – Chrissus and Odotheus query how we can imagine that ‘this being … has power even when everything would seem to bear witness to the contrary’ (Chrissus and Odotheus 2004: 17). They argue that Negri forms the left-wing of contemporary capitalism, supposing only reforms based on the supposed ‘communist’ power of the multitude.

Alongside this critique, we can also see other signs of the rejection of the tendency of the movement to mirror the power that it opposes. Recent discussions in the journal Voices of Resistance from Occupied London, subtitled the Quarterly Anarchist Journal of Theory and Action from the British Capital after Empire, raise the question of the limits of the counter-summit – precisely because it remains locked into shadowing the summits of those in power. The article ‘For a Summit Against Everything’ by the Comrades from Everywhere asks the question: ‘Sure we need to meet – and our counter-summits are an excellent opportunity for doing so. But why follow them around in their summits, why give them the tactical advantage of selecting where and when our battles are to take place?’ (2007: 44). Arguing for a new form of counter-summit, autonomously organised, they note: ‘Rather than waiting for them to decide where and when to meet, no longer running behind them, we’ll jump on the driver’s seat and decide this for ourselves’ (2007: 44). This suggests a strategic recognition not only of the successes of the anti-globalisation movement (which Badiou does not recognise), but also its failures or limitations. The limitation of the counter-summit is being answered with the proposal that a new independent and autonomous form of summit take place. Whether or not this is successful the suggestion implies the recognition of the problem that Badiou had earlier identified: whether ‘anti-capitalist’ politics finds itself mirrored in its own self-definition as a movement of opposition (’anti-’). One of the strategic questions posed to anarchism, or anarchist practice, will be its negotiation of this different form of autonomous ‘power’, especially in distinguishing itself from more usual ‘leftist’ or ‘radical’ forms of organisation or ‘counter-power’.

The second point to consider is Badiou’s claim that anarchism takes up a position of perpetual opposition without really believing or acting in such a way as to change the existing situation. The journal-cum-newspaper Turbulence (2007), developed for reflection within the movement of movements, titled its first issue ‘What would it mean to win?’ Thus it posed to the movement the question Badiou suggested that libertarian or anarchist thought has tended to evade. What is interesting is that some of the articles in the issue do reflect a sense of crisis or failure in the movement that links to the problem of ‘organisation’, or the development of struggles. Ben Trott posits the need for ‘directional demands’, which ‘aim to produce a point around which a potential movement could consolidate’ (2007: IS). Similarly, the group The Free Association argue that what is required are ‘problematics’, shared problems that involve ‘acting and moving’ (2007: 26). The Argentinian group Colectivo Situaciones argues for the need to develop a ‘non-state institution of that which is collective’ (2007: 25). While it would obviously be foolish to take [these?] as representative of ‘the movement’, even less as particularly anarchist, it is a sign that the problem of ‘winning’ seems to point to the fundamental criticism Badiou poses: how would anarchists go about achieving their desired egalitarian collective social forms?

To ‘win’ is, of course, not only a matter of proposing alternative social forms, but also of the means by which these might be achieved. Of course this problem arises in part because Marxist or ‘leftist’ critics often cannot identify what anarchist practice does as having ‘real’ effects because it does not conform to their idea of what politics is or should be. Anarchist thought and practice has always been concerned with the critique of politics, as the separation of one realm of human activity from all others and a separation which helps create an expert political class and professional politicians or militants. That said, as the ‘movement of movements’ starts to look beyond the limits of the counter-summit it begins to encounter the problem of strategy and practice outside of the ‘mass’ protest or ‘temporary autonomous zone’.

Although not coming from an anarchist position, but rather from the tradition of post-autonomist thinking, Sandro Mezzadra and Gigi Roggero raise the problem of organisation directly in their article in Turbulence. They point to the difficulty that the ‘movement of movements’ has had in intervening in relations of production and that there is a danger of simply repeating statements concerning the exhaustion of the party form and the promotion of the new form of the network. Taking the case of EuroMayDay, they point out that although it posed problems, especially concerning migration, and transmitted ‘explosive images’, it ‘did not manage to generate common forms of organisation and praxis’ (2007: 8). This raises the question of the relation of movements to institutions – not only in terms of existing institutions but also in terms of the creation of new institutions (Mezzadra and Roggero 2007: 9). In particular they consider the case of what they call ‘laboratory Latin America’: the multiplicity of movements and institutions emerging in a range of countries, especially Venezuela. That complex situation offers some insights about how we might form a space in common and how we might answer the question: ‘how can one employ the relations of power without ‘taking power’?’ (2007: 9).[3]

We should note that the wider ‘left’ does not speak with a unified voice on these matters; nor has it promoted any successful solutions even in terms of its own models of ‘revolution’ or ‘reform’. At the moment the struggle is to find a way between what seems like a sterile opposition: between ‘changing the world without taking power’ (as suggested by John Holloway) and ‘taking power to change the world’ (a more ‘traditional’ left position). Anarchist sympathies rest with the first ‘option’. But if anarchists are to answer the type of criticism posed by Badiou and acknowledge the limits currently being experienced by the ‘movement of movements’, the implication appears to be the need for new strategic thinking that can engage with and against power to make a new world.

CONCLUSION: THE TIME OF THEORY

We may seem to have wandered far from our starting point concerning postanarchism and Badiou’s critique of anarchism. However, the advantage of considering Badiou’s criticisms of anarchism is that [it] has pushed us towards reposing issues around postanarchism in terms of the relation of theory to practice (to use an unfortunate binary). That debate has often been a sterile one: with activists bemoaning the inactivity and mystificatory role of ‘theory’, and theorists criticising the supposed naivety of activists. It would be difficult enough to settle such matters in what is, after all, a work of theoretical reflection. However, we can say that Badiou’s work poses important questions about revolutionary change and his criticisms of anarchism allow us to sharpen what anarchist thought and practice might have to offer and what resources it might have to develop. It also requires that we interrogate the alternative models of anarchist practice that have often been linked to postanarchist thinking, such as the network or the temporary autonomous zone. While these forms aim to escape the supposed limits of ‘traditional’ or ‘humanist’ models of anarchist practice we have to be aware that concepts like the ‘network’ are hardly politically neutral. In fact, the ‘network’ model has been a central legitimating trope for many forms of contemporary capitalist work practice and activity. While much is made of the ‘paradigm shift’ to postanarchism for facing up to the contemporary realities of power, much more work needs to be done in [fleshing] out the implications for practice.

As Badiou notes even the category of ‘movement’ is problematic, ‘because this category is itself coupled to the logic of the state’ (2003: 126). The very right to movement is one that is dominated by the state and capitalism and the question becomes whether it can be wrested from this logic or whether it must, as Badiou indicates, be abandoned. The journal Turbulence chose its name to indicate the re-interpretation in movement terms of non-linear dynamics, popularly known as ‘chaos theory’. While the emphasis on instability and chaotic flow may appear congruent with anarchist or libertarian modes of life, we have to note the ambiguity in which capitalism and the state also deploy such logics. Israeli Defence Force theorists have shown an interest in the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and chaos theory to create non-hierarchical, non-linear, tactics of ’swarming’ as a mode of military intervention (see Weizman 2007: 185-218). The new doctrines of the American military have shown a parallel interest in borrowing from the models of non-hierarchical activism to develop a flexible battlefield response to the chaos of war (Monk 2007). Our enemies are learning from us.

This kind of recuperation is nothing new, and it does not simply imply abandoning such tactics for hierarchical forms. It does suggest that anarchist practice must find new inventive ways to engage with such problems, rather than simply invoke concepts like ‘movement’ or ‘network’ as a mantra. In the text “The Call’ (2007) the French group La Rage write, ‘[a]ll in all, we would rather start from small and dense nuclei than from a vast and loose network. We have known these spineless arrangements long enough.’ This suggests a felt need to re-think fundamental concepts of strategy to answer the problem posed by Daniel Bensaïd: ‘In the end no crisis has ever turned out well from the point of view of the oppressed without resolute intervention by a political force (whether you call it a party or a movement) carrying a project forward and capable of taking decisions and decisive initiatives’ (2005: 180). Of course this way of putting things already loads the dice against anarchist practice, but then we will have to re-think what is meant by ‘resolute intervention’ outside of hierarchical arrangements, or of what Badiou calls ‘discipline’ outside of connotations of sacrifice and repression.

The very bluntness of Badiou’s criticisms, which lumps in ‘postanarchist’ currents with ‘traditional’ anarchism, suggests that these matters are far from being resolved. This is not simply a question of theoretical mastery, i.e. the idea that once we have discovered the correct theoretical orientation then our political practice will smoothly unfold from it. Instead we might recognise what Guy Debord usefully stated:

But theories are only made to [die] in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they’re needed. They have to be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete – by their decisive victories even more than by their partial defeats. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey (2003: 151).

While anarchists might object to the military metaphor the point is, I think, a valid and useful one. It suggests, and this has been one of the merits of anarchist thinking, the need for critical revision and suppleness in thought and practice, rather than the proclaiming of theory as a dogmatic truth. Rather than beginning with a theory, postanarchist or otherwise, we might better begin with ‘a game, or a conflict, or a journey’.

NOTES

1. The interested reader should refer to the accounts of Bruno Bosteels (2005), Peter Hallward (2003: 29-47), and Jason Barker (2002: 13-38), to which I am indebted in what follows.

2. Badiou’s implicit target here is the comparatively little-known work L’Ange (1976) by Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet. This work offered a model of perpetual spiritual revolt, contained in the figure of the ‘Angel’, which combined elements of early Christian asceticism and the extremes of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. For further discussion of this work, and Badiou’s critique, see Alberto Toscano’s article ‘Mao and Manichaeism’ (2005).

3. If we want a more anarchist opinion on the situation in Venezuela we can turn to the work of El Libertario, the voice of the Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas (CRA) of Venezuela. I would refer the reader to their website, which has an English language section, to gain a fuller picture. See http://www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/english.html.

REFERENCES

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=12086

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Debord, Guy (2003) Complete Cinematic Works, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Oakland, Ca and Edinburgh: AK Press.

Graeber, David 2002. The New Anarchists. New Left Review 13: 61-73.

Hallward, Peter 2003. Badiou: a Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Mezzadra, Sandro and Gigo Roggero 2007. Singularisation of the Common. Turbulence Ideas for Movement 1: 8-9.

Monk, Daniel Bertrand 2007. Hives and Swarms: On the “Nature” of Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Ecological Insurgent In Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds.) Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, pp.262-273. New York and London: The New Press.

Newman, Saul 2007. Anarchism, Poststructuralism and the Future of Radical Politics. Substance 113 36.2: 3-19.

The Free Association 2007. Worlds in Motion. Turbulence Ideas for Movement 1: 26-27.

Toscano, Alberto 2005. Mao and Manicheaism. Institute for Conjunctural Research, November 30 2005.

Trott, Ben 2007. Walking in the Right Direction? Turbulence Ideas for Movement 1: 14-15.

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Benjamin Noys teaches in the department of English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg 2005) and The Persistence of the Negative: a critique of contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

Tuesday 29 December I awoke put the radio on and as I lay there in a warm bed the news that Akmal Shaikh, 53, a father-of-three from London, was executed in China after being convicted of drug smuggling despite claims he was mentally ill, having Bipolar myself I very much disagree with the name mentally ill, it is an ugly illness agreed.

I am not in favour of the death penalty, not even for mass – murderers. After all, did Jesus of Nazareth not tell us to spare the sinner, or cast the first stone if we have never sinned? The Chinese authorities take a different view; after all, did the British and French imperialists not seek to weaken their society by selling them hard drugs not so long ago? The memory of the opium trade may still be fresh in the minds of their officials. I find it a crime that a Akmal Shaikh who may had Bipolar is being made to pay the price of those past wrongs.

It left me cold inside, what must it be like? for the thousands on Death Row across the world, and here is the grand hypocrisy..

Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis told the ambassador “China had failed in its basic human rights responsibilities.”

Just the same as Briton has done in the illegal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan where the working class have lost there life’s, meanwhile we still not condone The Israeli apologists who say, in yet another desperate attempt at diversion that there are victims on both sides, and that is undoubtedly true, but lets state the obvious, what’s fortunately becoming obvious for quite a few people these days: Israel is the aggressor. Israel is the BAD GUY here. So let’s focus on Israel’s numerous atrocities, on Israel’s utter disregard for anything resembling humanity..

One year on from The Mass Murder of 1417 people were killed, including at least 318 children, we remember Gaza Iraq and Afghanistan, as Iran hits the news we need also to raise some concern of events happening there, we need to ask is this an uprising? from the people or one that is been orchestrated from the same imperialists who 30 years ago to this date was over in Afghanistan was helping the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fight the Russian invasion and Ivan Lewis says “China had failed in its basic human rights responsibilities.” for hundreds of years capitalism has failed the working class perhaps we need to make it history?

Ian Bone has no hesitation in nominating those working class heroes who smashed SIR FRED’S window as committing the RADICAL ACT OF THE YEAR. The Daily Mail headline ‘FAT CATS IN TERROR AS ANT-CAPITALISTS SMASH BANKERS WINDOWS’ glimpsed a hopeful future. That future did not happen – people whinged and moaned but failed to act. Sir Fred’s smashed window remained in isolation. But that was not the fault of the window smashers..they lit a spark that could have turned into a flame. Their act reminded me of the Angry Brigade in many ways – ‘we’ve acted now its down to you- we aint gonna do it for you’. Sometimes a smashed window – a small act of defience – can act as a catalyst. There’ll be other windows in 2010 -other opportunities in a Class War election – other possibilities taking different forms. Whatever the spark the flame will have to be mass action on the streets – The Fire Next Time. WINDOW SMASHERS OF EDINBURGH – Ian Bone SALUTES YOU.

Here is our top five of course

No One Iran

(but let us think out the box is this an uprising?)

No two it has to be Greace

fuck thay want Anarchy not Anarchism

Not until we see the streets burn with rage fury and anger at the death of the working class shall we rest, Ian Tomlinson’s MURDER at G20 protests anarchism uk failed the working class once more we want anarchy not bureaucratised anarchism.

No Three Copenhagen

I sit here, in a friend’s house, writing this down in a fairly relaxed manner. They round up a lot of my friends right, now, in Liberty City, attacking them and dragging them off to The Cage, but I am fairly safe, since my friend isn’t on Gestapo’s list over my friends or even acquaintances (I hope). My arm is in a sling. It hurts, and the painkillers cloud my mind, but I am pleased to say that the Burning inside is still there, stronger than ever.

No four Weds 1st April: G20 protests london

No five We Love The Earth Center

A group of activists took apple action and liberated a haul of delicious fruits from the abundant forest gardens at the derelict earth centre. Weeks of meaningless promises and blatant lies from Doncaster Council led the group of harvesters to take action This may seem like a small feat but as numbers and support grows the move to reclaim the land at the earth centre is getting closer!

Meanwhile there is talk of a hung parliament next election leads us to a thought lets hope in the true meaning, and while there can we begin with the parasites of The Middle Class and hang them along the side of all MPs as said hate is far to polite for how we feel about The Middle Class lets make 2010 the year we begin to make them history?