Article on Con Lehane
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https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/con-lehane-irish-labor-activist
“…In 1904, Lehane joined the Social Democratic Federation but would later leave that organisation to become a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and he became its first general secretary and editor of the Socialist Standard.
In 1906, Lehane and the majority of the Islington branch were expelled from the party following its annual conference. The Bexley branch tabled a motion for the party to adopt a policy of socialist industrial unionism. It was voted down and the Bexley branch was expelled. Lehane, who led the Islington branch, became vocal against the expulsion of the Bexley branch and he, along with members of his own branch, also got expelled…”Con Lehane died from pneumonia in Bellevue Hospital New York 100 years ago on New Years Eve 1919 at the age of 42.
Howdy! Backslidery reformist trollboy here. No idea where the writer got their info on Lehane. Lehane was vocal *for* the expulsion of the industrial unionists. Indeed so much that he wanted to have the Bexley branch minutes censored (after they had been expelled on his jackboot orders). And when the EC refused to do this, he wanted to have them removed (expelled and shot) as well. His lot got the boot instead. Bit like the Peckham dispute of 1914-15, when a newsagent signing a petition against restrictions on paperboy’s hours led to everyone who wasn’t in favour of him being charged and expelled were themselves charged and expelled. And then anyone who wasn’t in favour of those blokes being charged and expelled were themselves threatened with being charged and expelled. And so ad infinitum. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the editor of the Socialist Standard either. Anyway. SPGB dispoots. At least it weren’t about transies in the toilets back then. Have you got any transies? You could gender the toilets just so your jolly femmos could have something to talk about. The slightly nicer upstairs one for ladies. The slightly more unpleasant downstairs one for laddies. And transies. Unless they’re f to m. In which case, they have to go upstairs. You’ll need a toilet committee.
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Oh yeah and Lehane was probably responsible for the pages of the EC minute book what have been stuck together. Something in there he didn’t like I reckon. That or someone found the Party porn stash. This is not so bad as it sounds as Edwardian porn shows naked lady ankles. Only gensec to have his name engraved on the party seal he was.
Yes, I thought they got it the wrong way round (according to Barltrop’s account in The Monument, pages 29-30). They make him sympathetic to “industrial unionism” whereas he was very much against it. Labelling James Connolly “Catholic Connolly” was good — and prophetic.
I suppose we will need to send them a correction. I see they have a comments section.
Mind you, the Party didn’t think much of him, denouncing him in 1915 as a “fakir” (a common word at the time instead of “faker”):
“Fakir” is I believe a De Leonism. Short for Labour fakir. A wordplay on fakir – popularly an Arab wonder worker (although a faqr is actually an ascetic Sufi monk). Sarcastically playing on the resemblance to faker as you say. De Leonisms. No one gets them. Because they’re shite. Or it could be a phonetically rendered cockney swearword. Which would be appropriate given his post Rebellion activities.
I had always assumed that a fakir was someone who did the Indian rope trick or was a snake charmer etc ie some sort of conman or to be charitable a magician. I can’t imagine that those influenced by the SLP of America likened the Labour bleeders of their day to Sufi monks. I imagine that at the time fakirs were common in the US in circuses and the like. Does anybody know?
You are right ALB,
Rather than have its roots in some sort of Eastern mysticism, more likely it derived from travelling carnival slang.
“The Fakir,” an old slang expression for the carnival shill or the street-corner pitchman.
https://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/2015/11/charles-kenna-street-fakir.html
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) now accepts as standard English the use of “fakir” to mean an impostor or a swindler.
Merriam-Webster’s gives two examples of the usage: “a traveling carnival that was run by fakirs preying on small-town rubes” and “a fakir peddling patent medicines that were mostly liquor and sugar.”Yeah, obviously the Scrotey isn’t referring to mendicant wonderworking monks. Just saying (badly) that is the derivation of the term (ultimately from the Arab word for poverty). The street or circus fakir used the “mysticism of the east” to sell his wares. Some even put on fake turbans and smeared their face with brown to give that impression. MW is an American dictionary and this supports my theory that the term “Labour Fakir” is a De Leonism. I question whether “fakir” used to refer to a seller of nostrums or a trickster was in widespread use in England even at that time. However, I do not have a handy Edwardian around to interrogate.
The SLP, under De Leon, had always been wrong on the union question. In 1896 they had set up “socialist” unions in opposition to the pure and simple unions of Samuel Gompers but they did give the working class movement such expressive phrases as “labour fakir (or faker)” and “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”.
Who did done say that? It do be one of them Soshy blokes. Back in ’68. Knew I’d got it from somewheres.
And James Connolly used the phrase as well:
The “labour fakir” full of guile,
base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we’ll see the day
when, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
to seize its own, the earth.That’s from Songs of Freedom that is. Dated 1907.
That dates from 1907 before Catholic Connolly became one himself as one of the founders in 1912 and leaders of the Irish Labour Party along the same lines as its British equivalent.
There’s a better poem than Connolly’s turgid stuff here called “The Labour Fakir”:
Oh, he preached it from the housetops,
And he whispered it by stealth,
He wrote whole miles of stuff against
The awful curse of wealth.
He shouted for the poor man,
And he called the rich man down,
He roasted every king and queen
Who dared to wear a crown.
He clamoured for rebellion,
And he said he’d lead a band
To exterminate the plutocrats,
Or drive them from the land.
He fumed, and roared, and ranted,
Till he made the rich man wince
But he got a Cabinet job and
Has never shouted since.It appeared in An Phoblacht, which supports Sinn Fein, themselves another bunch of Labour Fakirs, aspiring to be Cabinet ministers in Northern Ireland as well as in Eire.
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