Kmflett's Blog

Brendan O’Neill started his political career on Living Marxism the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party. It was more libertarian and contrarian than Marxist and O’Neill moved on to Editor of Spiked, a successor on-line platform. More recently he has continued to move ever rightwards and writes in a range of right-wing outlets.

His thoughts on Danny Tommo’s blackshorts mobilisation in Portsmouth last weekend can be found in The Spectator. A sample paragraph is below.

According to O’Neill it was ‘working class self organisation’. One wonders if he has ever glanced at E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class still in print more than sixty years after its publication. As Eric Hobsbawm noted its a very long book so perhaps he hasnt.

Thompson looked at class formation and hence was careful to distinguish between activities which involved workers and an organised working class. One example of the former were the 1780 Gordon Riots in central London. A mob started out attacking the houses of religious dissenters, then freed prisoners from Newgate jail and finally marched on the Bank of England. At this point the army was called out.

The mob was influenced and to some extent directed by ruling class figures. Clearly they did not have in mind an attack on the Bank. It was a working class in the process of formation, not yet independent.

Examining Tommo’s blackshorts we can see a familiar pattern. Tommo reportedly receives funding from the US Christian right and he certainly raises money in the kind of grift familiar to the far right. He is currently ‘fund raising’ to buy his mother a new house (an entirely bogus objective of course). In short what took place in Portsmouth was not ‘self-organisation’ but the efforts of Tommo and others influenced by the US Christian right

How do we even define this? What do we call it? The media has reached for that small, familiar word “protest”, as if this were a mere outburst of public anger over government policy. It was so much more than that. This was ordinary men and women stepping into the breach left by the state’s desertion of our borders. It was working-class self-organisation in defence of our national sovereignty. It is unprecedented.