Friday 19 May 2017

MISS MURIEL MATTERS by ROBERT WAINWRIGHT


MISS MURIEL MATTERS

ROBERT WAINWRIGHT
ABC Books, 2017, 376 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

In 1909, Miss Muriel Matters planned to rain on the parade of King Edward V11 to the ceremonial opening of parliament by dropping a shower of ‘Votes for Women’ leaflets on his head from a chartered airship balloon trailing streamers in the white, gold and green of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).

As Robert Wainwright notes in his biography of Matters, the Australian-born women’s suffrage activist, fickle winds foiled the plan but, with megaphone in hand, Matters found her vocal mark and got the message across loud and clear to the crowned dunce who had referred to suffragists as ‘those dreadful women’.

Police had banned leafleting on the streets, so the WFL had naturally taken to the skies.  It was a typically imaginative leap that characterised the WFL’s campaigning style.  The year before, Matters had delivered the first speech by a woman in the British House of Commons after dramatically chaining herself to the metal grille which kept the ‘Ladies Gallery’ observers separate from the political menfolk (women could neither stand for election nor vote in Britain) at work on the floor of the chamber.

The Honourable Member for Holborn, a Mr James Remnant (the delightfully-named representative of a dying era of male-only suffrage), was stopped mid-drone by Matters as her clarion call to ‘give women a voice in legislation which affects them as much as it affects men’ rose above the angry tumult below, forcing the closure of parliament and the removal of the hated grille, with Matters locked to it, as the only way to stop her voice.

Born in Adelaide, Matters, when aged 14, was given a copy of Henryk Ibsen’s proto-feminist play, The Doll’s House, whose heroine, Nora, leaves her husband and children to discover her independence outside home and family.  Matters often used Nora’s passages in her captivating public recitations along with such fare as “the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning or marathon odes set to music by Richard Strauss”.

Like Nora, Matters insisted on making her own life choices, often against her father’s will - she took up acting, and scuppered her first romance to an Adelaide music celebrity when his views on women turned out to be unenlightened.

In London, Matters became the darling of the leisured class with invitations to shooting weekends on country estates.  But what was it all for, she asked herself, after a searching encounter with the exiled Russian anarcho-communist, Peter Kropotkin.  When she looked behind “the applause and the bouquets of Covent Garden … and the salons of Bloomsbury”, she saw a city of women in poverty and deprived of equality.  She had to choose – the salon or the slum, wealthy women or working women.

Matters chose the reform of society rather than to perform to ‘society’.  She would use her vocal talents on behalf of the voteless by campaigning for women’s suffrage as a first step towards broader social reforms that benefited women, including working conditions, housing, health, education, prison reform and equality in marriage.  Matters was determined to make Britain follow the suffrage path blazed by New Zealand and Australian women in the 1890s for the democratic right to make the laws which governed their lives.

Her chosen vehicle, the WFL, stood somewhere between the militant suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the moderate suffragists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).  The left-wing WFL also went beyond the middle class WSPU and NUWSS by seeing women’s suffrage as a means to wider rights and equality for all women, including working women - “it was a feminist, not just a suffrage, movement”, says Wainwright.

What the smaller WFL lacked in members and money, however, it made up for with creative stunts, and the fearlessness of its leading activists like Matters who toured the country by horse and cart, organising, recruiting and fund-raising, and facing down, with wit and composure, the leering hecklers and violent yobs with their arsenal of eggs, flour, tomatoes and stink bombs.

Their biggest obstacle, however, was the Liberal government of Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, a man of primitive sexist prejudice (women were ‘hopelessly ignorant of politics’, ‘flickering with gusts of sentiment’, he said) but also coldly calculating that his party, wedged between wealth (and its party – the Conservatives) and the working class (and its party - Labour), would lose the votes of enfranchised women to both.

It took post-world-war political expediency to act as the catalyst for change.  Forty per cent of British men were still disenfranchised by property restrictions.  This included most of the soldiers on the hellish WW1 battlefields.  All political parties had electoral skin in the militarist game of khaki patriotism and they competed to reward working class men for their service to empire by giving them the vote.  As the men would, however, favour Labour, it was necessary to enfranchise only the ‘right’ (middle and upper class) kind of women as a counterbalance.

Property, wealth, age and educational restrictions were the class strings attached to the partial women’s suffrage law of 1918 which enfranchised only a quarter of British women.  Nevertheless, the suffrage levee had been breached and the right to vote spread to all British women over the next decade. 

Matters died in 1969, aged 92, having put in many solid decades of bread-and-butter, left-wing, feminist activism, some as a Labour Party candidate, but it was those early toppings (the first woman to make a speech in the British parliament, and the world’s first aerial protest) that were memorable – and justly historic.

Saturday 13 May 2017


TRUE BELIEVER: Stalin’s Last American Spy

KATI MARTON

Simon & Schuster, 2016, 288 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Breadlines, mass unemployment and Nazis made Noel Field a communist in the 1930s.  This gentle, intelligent son of American Quaker pacifists, however, was to be betrayed by Stalin, the man Field thought embodied the socialist vision, writes Kati Marton in True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy.

 

A progressive but, as Field reflected, ‘typical middle class intellectual’, he worked in official government channels (the US State Department and the League of Nations), trying to influence international affairs away from war.  This strategy proved frustrating to the young Field whose skills and idealism were being squandered by politically self-interested diplomacy and institutional ineffectiveness.

 

An Ivy League graduate of ‘good breeding’ and ‘distinctly a gentleman’, as his government examiners put it, with boundless talent (he completed a four year Harvard degree in just two), Field was marked by Moscow’s agents as a suitable intellectual for recruitment to their undercover spy network.  At the same time, Field finally figured out whether he was ‘a Socialist, a Liberal, or a Radical, or a Democrat’ and threw in his lot with the only ones – the communists – who had the political inspiration and energy to overthrow all he detested – war, inequality, class exploitation, racism.

 

Field was thus recruited in 1935 to Stalin’s intelligence network (the NKVD), providing them with classified US documents.  Stalin, being Stalin, however, was more interested in his secret police keeping in check potential political opponents than learning of Hitler’s military designs on Soviet Russia.  Field, an unquestioning Stalinist, was ineluctably drawn into the dictator’s Great Terror – first, as enabler, and then as victim.

 

Amongst Field’s Soviet control officers was Ignaz Reiss, a Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin - ‘Our paths part … [you are] a traitor to the cause of the working class and socialism’, Reiss rashly but bravely wrote to Stalin himself, guaranteeing his liquidation.  Field willingly agreed that, should Reiss get in touch with him in Geneva, he would alert the NKVD.  Although other Stalinist plotters got to Reiss first, Field was an aspiring accessory to political assassination.

 

As guilt-by-association spread in ever-widening circles amongst Stalin’s intelligence periphery, the paranoia inevitably lapped against Field, too.  Even though his war work in Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Vichy France for a non-government humanitarian aid organisation rescuing refugees trapped by fascism was skewed towards the saving anti-fascist communists for repatriation, this political ulterior motive counted against him in the view of Stalin.  Western communists were regarded as politically suspect by Stalin, tainted by their capitalist cultures and for having the quaint habit of seeing (Trotskyist) international revolution and Stalin’s Mother-Russia-First ‘Socialism in One Country’ as the same thing.

 

Named as a Russian spy by a communist renegade appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Field feared an FBI subpoena and sought safety in post-war ‘communist’ Czechoslovakia in 1949.  It was a fateful decision.  Handed over to the hard-line Stalinist secret police in ‘communist’ Hungary, Field was called an American spy and abused, beaten and tortured into naming all his contacts, dooming hundreds of European communists as ‘Fieldists’ (a pejorative as mortal as ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘Titoist’) to show trials and Stalinist repression in Moscow’s satellite subsidiaries in eastern Europe.

 

After five years of grim prison in Budapest, Field abjectly came to agree with his jailers that he was guilty.  His only avenue of escape from execution was as a Cold War trophy, an ‘American progressive’ who had renounced his Western capitalist wickedness by seeking asylum in the ‘communist’ east, which Field duly requested in 1954.

 

Field was a sad, broken, betrayed man, given the job as editor of a turgidly Stalinist, English-language journal in Hungary.  In its pages, he dutifully denounced the 1956 Hungarian anti-Stalinist revolt as a counter-revolutionary ‘White Terror’ plot properly snuffed out by Soviet tanks.   

 

Field died in 1970.  His state funeral would have been an embarrassment to him, as his mourners mumbled the long-forgotten lyrics to unfashionable revolutionary songs, including the Internationale which had so stirred him in his socialist epiphany decades ago.

 

Kati Marton is a line-and-length anti-communist (“Marxism curdles into Leninism, then hardens into Stalinism” is her political creed), so she fingers Marxism as the Original Sin responsible for Field “never [being able to] abandon the faith which gave his life meaning”, despite all the degeneracy of Stalinism.

 

Yet, her account of Field’s final two years shows that deep inside even the coldest-hearted Stalinist, there was no guarantee that the first flame of revolutionary idealism could ever be entirely extinguished.  When the Soviet military crushed the 1968 Czechoslovakian revolution, Field wrote no defence of the Kremlin’s action in his journal, and he stopped paying his party dues.  Field’s final gestures had rekindled the remaining embers of dissent against political injustice that had made him a “true believer” in the first place.

PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions BRAD NORINGTON


PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions

BRAD NORINGTON

Melbourne University Press, 2016, 328 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Michael Williamson, top dog of the Health Services Union (HSU), used to joke that ‘nothing’s too good for the workers - and their representatives’, as he brazenly defrauded the union to generously enrich himself.  $5 million worth of generosity – that’s an awful lot of life’s little luxuries like fine wine, retail goods, international holidays, mortgage repayments, home renovations, Mercedes, speedboats and private school fees.  Just one lavish, boozy lunch with his cronies would burn through the annual dues ($600) of one of his low-paid union members (hospital cleaners, orderlies, clerks, porters, etc.), writes journalist, Brad Norington, in Planet Jackson.

 

Williamson’s thieving was accomplished through misuse of his union credit card, through HSU business supply contracts at grossly inflated prices from companies fully or partially owned by himself or his family, and through nepotism and cronyism (he put eight family members on the union payroll whilst his mistress received $155,000 a year for two days ‘work’ a week).  For a creative flourish, Williamson claimed reimbursement for false claims of muggings and burglaries of union money.  Obviously, the poor chap must have been struggling to get by on his annual salary of $700,000.

 

Other senior HSU officials aped his example.  Craig Thomson, a protégé of Williamson, trousered $250,000 to fund his successful 2007 Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal election campaign, and embezzled $24,000 to spend on prostitutes, sporting memorabilia and firewood, amongst the dishes on offer from the smorgasbord of personal goodies supplied on other people’s dimes.

 

Kathy Jackson was a $1.4 billion financial embellisher in her mentor’s mould – her favourites from the corruption buffet were fashion, medical services, hi-fi gear, groceries, liquor, camping equipment, shopping trips to Hong Kong and divorce settlement payments to her ex-husband.  During the 2004 Boxing Day sales, Jackson ran up $7,000 in a single day on her union credit cards.

 

Jackson was the most cynical of the three, blowing the whistle on Williamson but only in an internal power struggle - so even that act of honesty was self-serving.  Noble whistle-blower was the “perfect cover” for her own corruption, says Norington.

 

The HSU thieves were all addicted to greed.  Even when Thomson faced ignominious defeat in the 2013 elections, he decided to stand again as an independent - just so he could milk the taxpayer by claiming a ‘resettlement allowance’ of $97,000 for defeated  incumbents.  Jackson, when publicly disgraced, tried to mine a new income seam by getting her hooks into a retired, dementia-suffering QC for a share of his $30 million estate, whilst having herself appointed as executor which gave her access to his bank accounts.

 

Norington examines in minute detail every sordid nut and filthy bolt of the HSU leaders’ corruption but only occasionally lifts his eyes to examine a greater corruption than that of a few light-fingered union officials, namely the industrially and politically corrupting intersection of the ALP and its affiliated unions.

 

Williamson, Thomson and Jackson bartered their union bloc votes for factional influence and potential plush parliamentary careers in the ALP whilst Labor politicians needed their factional union allies, even the crooked ones.  Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, opportunistically motivated by retaining office, publicly covered for Thomson, whilst the party paid his enormous legal bills to keep him from going bankrupt, losing his seat and bringing down the minority Gillard government.

 

The HSU Three, even whilst they were shamelessly diddling their union members, saw the ALP, the self-proclaimed ‘party for the workers’, as a suitable political home for themselves.  That tells us something, something unwholesome, about where the ALP’s loyalties really lie – with the labour elite, at the expense of the workers they claim to represent.