Gaza War leaflet
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Just to confirm the arrangements for tomorrow. Head Office in Clapham High Street will be open from 10.30 for members and sympathisers to pick up the leaflets and this month’s Socialist Standard. The demonstration will assemble at Hyde Park at 12pm and will depart from there to go to the American Embassy in Vauxhall crossing Vauxhall Bridge to get there for a rally at 4 pm.
Head Office (which is only two tube stops to Vauxhall) will open till at least that time with, weather permitting, a street stall outside. Members and sympathisers can come there at any time to pick up leaflets.
The leaflet has already been distributed this week. at meetings in Sheffield, Doncaster and London.
300 leaflets were handed out in about an hour (I’m afraid that was all my feet could stand) on Park lane: the march was loud, friendly and well organised, best placard read ‘This is a Love March’, although Palestine flags abounded, I didn’t see anything overtly anti-Jewish or that could be seen as such. I ran across the CWO and did a leaflet swap, theirs was a little wordy, but made some good points about other similar conflicts.
I popped over to Whitehall afterwards, and couldn’t see any sign of trouble, except some old gadgee shouting at the door staff of the Whitehall theatre saying ‘It’s our! Ours!’
Police estimate more than 300,000 (not 30,000 as reported on Spintcom) protesters marched through central London on Saturday to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Organisers believe 800,000 people attended.
The other leafletters also gave out their 300 leaflets in record time, one reporting:
“We could have got rid of twice the leaflets easily. I don’t think more than 5 people declined a leaflet. Many more came up and asked for them and several said they agreed with it, even one handing out a certain religious book (the front side anyway). Very few marchers had any other leaflets than ours.”
In all 1200 were distributed at the demonstration. A drop in the ocean of course seeing there were 300,000 demonstrators.
For the record, a further 100 were distributed outside head office and by a visitor on his way watch Millwall play Sheffield Wednesday. He said he would leave them on the train rather than hand them out at the match. Which seemed a wise decision.
Report on distribution in Yorkshire from Spintcom
Attended what was in fact public evening meetings in Sheffield , Doncaster and a afternoon meeting in Wakefield.
The Sheffield meeting attracted about 40 attendees with the advertised guest speaker a Lindsey German. Prior to the meeting starting the audience were informed that Lindsey would not be able to attend in person as she had been engaged in discussions with the Met’ Police in London regarding in the Stop the War rally scheduled for Saturday 11th.- she did however address the meeting via a link. The opportunity was taken to check out who Lindsey is and transpired she had previously been a member of the SWP for some 37 years sitting on their central committee before resigning and becoming a founder member of the Stop the War Coalition (STOC) eventually becoming the STOC convenor. This background gave a SWP flavour of how the meeting unfolded, primarily to get support for attending the rally in London with little mention of the real and primary cause of this conflict and others. When questioned on nationalism and capitalism the answer went along the lines of it was for the Palestinians’ to determine their homeland. 40 party leaflets or so were handed out.
Much the same thinking as had been outlined in Sheffield arose in Doncaster where about 25 people attended and the same in number of party leaflets handed out. The speaker in Doncaster was a Andrew Murray who had previously been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and then a member of the Communist Party of Britain and now a member of the Labour Party. On secondment from UNITE the union he had also been Special Political Adviser to Jeremy Corbyn for a couple of years and at one point Chair of STOC.
All in all the Doncaster and Sheffield meetings could well have been held by the SWP
The Wakefield meeting was a more constructive affair where the speaker a Adrian Cruden gave quite an extended history of the evolution of the origins in the creation of Israel and conflicts that had arisen for some 2000 years. The Q&A session after the address was also fruitful with a number of those present complimentary of the party leaflet of which again about 30 were handed out before the meeting reflecting the attendance.
And in Glasgow:
Had some positive reactions and interactions to the flyer, from fellow workers on the streets of Glasgow yesterday. One or two dodgy ones too! But overall very convivial and supportive of its content.
Preliminary statistics show that over Saturday and Sunday there were 108 hits on our website via the QR code on the leaflet. As by then some 1600 had been handed out, that’s 1 in 15, ie for every 15 leaflets handed out 1 person was sufficiently interested to scan the code and visit our site.
That suggests it is worth putting a QR code on our leaflets and handing out leaflets.
“That suggests it is worth putting a QR code on our leaflets and handing out leaflets.”
Sure does. Not a bad response rate I would say.
Having never scanned the QR code (or any other QR code to be honest) does the code take you directly to the Party’s front web page, or to some other page. I might be teaching my granny to suck eggs, but would it not be be directed to the “who we are” page rather than the front page.
We are trying to recruit new members, the section about joining is towards the bottom of this web page, maybe this should be closer to the top. Also perhaps we should be more specific about the topics covered in the membership test, explaining what our view is in these areas and why we need to ensure that all prospective members agree in these areas.
There’s another national demonstration, on Saturday 25 November, so we’re having more leaflets printed. Also for distribution elsewhere, even to passers-by on the streets.
https://palestinecampaign.org/events/national-march-for-palestine-ceasefire-now-2/
South Wales branch report on leafletting this meeting:
“Two of us gave out leaflets outside tonight’s Stop the War meeting at the Unison offices in Cardiff. There was an attendance of around 70 and just about everyone there got one. Surprisingly there were no other organisations giving their stuff out, and that made it easier. The meeting was addressed first by John Rees of STW who spoke at length (too long). It must be said that he’s a hell of a good speaker and did it all ad lib with eloquence and power, but not in a rabble-rousing way. As for the content, well he never attempted to back Hamas but focused on the need for a ongoing ceasefire, something I think we would all, at least on a personal level, consider positive if it were to happen. He also mentioned the underlying economic elements, the kind of thing that’s done very effectively indeed in the editorial on p.3 of this month’s Standard. It’s unsigned, but whoever wrote it, congrats. Anyway the next three speakers were an MP, a Palestinian living in Cardiff and a poet, but after that we left. This was partly because the room was so hot, but also because 8 more speakers were billed, so it’s probably still going on now.”
There is another national demonstration in London tomorrow, starting at Hyde Park and ending in Parliament Square.
https://www.stopwar.org.uk/events/ceasefire-now-national-demonstration-for-palestine/
Once again London and Kent members and sympathisers will be leafletting it.
The arrangements will be the same as last time. Head Office at 52 Clapham High Street SW4 will be open from 10.30 to 4pm for members and sympathisers to pick up leaflets.
This one is organised by the Stop The War Coalition rather than Palestine Solidarity Campaign and so should in principle be more anti-war than pro-Palestine. Whether it will be remains to be seen.
Much smaller demo, I only shifted about 280 leaflets, despite moving from the front of the march to Trafalgar square, organisers say about 100K.
Interestingly little intervention by Jo Grady of the UCU: they erected a stand on Park Lane, and she gave a wee speech that no-one listened to (largely because of the drums), but she did make a good point about Gaza’s univirsities being destroyed.
The others handed out about 400 or so. We wanted to find a copper to exchange our leaflet for this one they were apparently handing out telling demonstrators what not to do but couldn’t find one.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/1C17/production/_131819170_policeleaflet.jpg
There’s a counter-demonstration tomorrow which we should probably leaflet (if we dare).
It will be interesting to see if the police leaflet that demonstration.
For the record, a comrade did pass by the anti-antisemitism march but didn’t hand out any leaflets. They probably wouldn’t have elicited any positive response from a march led by such war-mongers as Boris Johnson and the Chief Rabbi. Not that there would be anything wrong with a march against antisemitism if that’s what it had been.
Breathtakingly hypocritical of Johnson to take part in such a march after he depicted Jews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections in a little-known 2004 novel written while he was a Tory MP.
Seventy Two Virgins, also includes numerous other questionable portrayals of ethnic minorities.
While telling the story of a fictional terror attack on Westminster, Johnson deploys descriptions of Kosovan Muslims as having “hook noses”, describes a mixed-race character as “half-caste” and repeatedly uses racial slurs, introducing a group of characters as “pikeys”, an ethnic slur for travellers, and another as a “Chinaman”.
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