On Charlie Gilmour and the protest movement or, in defence of in-fighting
Talk
it’s only talk
Babble
burble
banter
bicker bicker bicker
Brouhaha
boulderdash
ballyhoo
It’s only talk
(“Elephant Talk” by King Crimson)
Some may argue that disagreements on the internet – illustrated nicely by this popular meme – are unimportant, and thus shouldn’t be given any more time than necessary. But there is one recent online disagreement which I think deserves wider reading.
Charlie Gilmour, the step-son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, recently received a sentence of 16-months for violent conduct – a sentence, some believe harsh, as he is only a danger to himself, punishment of which will not necessarily be helped by a prison spell.
In response to this Laurie Penny has written a piece where the overarching message is:
Really? Sixteen [sic] months for going on a bender and attempting to damage some property? Sixteen [sic] months for setting fire to some newspaper and jumping on the bonnet of a car?
The point of contention has been in her personal attack on Charlie Gilmour. She points out:
We had an altercation on the smoking steps whose content is now lost to memory but which ended in me storming off, and Charlie staggering after me, grabbing me in a half-headlock and demanding that I sign a piece of paper on which he had hastily scrawled ‘Charlie Gilmour is not a misoginist [sic]‘.
I, too, had the misfortune of meeting Mr Gilmour on the evening of December 8 – and can attest to his pratishness. But is it appropriate for Laurie to be relaying this stuff when the Left should be grouping to add pressure on such harsh sentencing? Of course it is. Admittedly the “character attack” seems slightly extraneous to the message, but she has a grievance that is worth voicing.
The rebuttal which can claim to have the most relevance is the one from Jacob Bard-Rosenberg here. In it he blames Penny for having perpetuated the right wing press binary between the good (passive) and bad (active) protester (an accusation she denies in the comments thread). His piece ends by driving home:
Whatever you may think of Charlie, he needs our support now. And our support is more important than getting a few more hits on a blog or your next writing contract. This is a plea for Laurie Penny’s piece to be taken down, and for all activists who are writing to think about these issues when reporting or responding to criminal sentencing.
This immediately strikes one as saying since the Right will take no small pleasure in throwing accusations at the protesters, the Left therefore becomes unable to criticse the Left. Such censoring will be very unhelpful indeed, not least because it gives the illusion that protest has no formal conduct, and that the Left is involved in cover ups that could be counterproductive later on.
I’ve met nobody who identifies as Left because they want to protect dirty behaviour in its own tribe, but rather for the preservation of a protest movement we should be free to criticise at will, counterrevolutionary elements. To promote otherwise is a nonsense.
Penny has since edited her article, but has (apparently) failed in removing it completely, owing to the final say by New Statesman editors. She has committed to making an apology on her own Penny Red blog.
Though she should not be bullied into distancing herself from the piece altogether. In a comment on Jacob’s piece she noted:
As a movement we need to be truthful and honest as well as robust. I take on board [the] point that personal attacks hurt, and I will be tonight [sic] the piece down, but I’m not prepared simply to say ‘charlie is one of us so we protect him’ and erase the real harm he has caused the movement. It smacks of censorship and is unhelpful.
In brief, ad hominem argument is a distraction, but mindless censorship is the really harmful element.
Right. So now you may be asking why does this concern me? It is, after all, chit-chat on a web forum. Though it awakens the wider argument that the Left should not spend so much time in-fighting, instead dedicating all their resources to smacking down the political Right. But whereas some say we cannot do this without a unified Left, I would argue that we cannot do this without a robust Left – and the steps towards building a robust Left will necessarily include in-fighting. To be sure, the “Left” is not a group of people with a homogeneous set of beliefs, they disagree and rightly so. The pressure for Laurie Penny to ease off “one of us” is absurd for this very reason, it harms the movement in the long run. I was convinced we’d sorted this out after the sentencing for Edward Woollard – I was obviously wrong.
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Point of note: Jacob Bard-Rosenberg commented earlier on his blog comments that Laurie Penny was perpetuating the good/bad protester binary in, what he refers to as, the mainstream press (the New Statesman). All journalism, in one way or another, is communicated through some kind of ideology – he assumes we all accept this, which I think we probably all do – but “The problems come when the reportage of bourgeois ideology claims to be radical”. This chimes with his previous comments on Laurie working in the MSM, and relaying mainstream (i.e. right wing) views. But we know Laurie is no bourgeois ideologue, as well we know Max Hastings is no bearded leftie when he writes for the Guardian. Just as Hastings is still no bearded leftie when he states something which happens to relate neatly to a nominally Left narrative (let us imagine, say, that Hastings opines something on which the Left and High Tories both agree, namely that monopolies of power in a society are inherently problematic), so Laurie is no bourgeois apologist when she happens to say something on which a right winger may, partially, agree.
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