23 July 2019, World Socialist Web Site (Austrlia) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/23/assa-j23.html
By our reporters
As part of the global defence
campaign to secure freedom for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, the
Socialist Equality Party attended the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorchester
on Sunday. A campaign stall won support from hundreds of workers, students and
retirees.
The annual festival commemorates the
lives of six agricultural labourers from Dorset, arrested and convicted in 1834
for swearing an oath to form a union. The men were sentenced to seven years’
transportation to Australia. Five were sent to New South Wales and the
sixth—George Loveless—was sent in chains
to Tasmania.
Landowners and the government were
determined to teach a lesson to the workers, with Judge Baron Williams
declaring their punishment would serve as “an example and a warning.” All the
trappings of British class justice were on display at a rigged trial whose jury
foreman was a Whig MP and brother-in-law to Home Secretary Lord Melbourne.
But the capitalist establishment was
soon shaken by a powerful working-class movement demanding freedom for the
convicted labourers. A meeting of 10,000 was held in March 1834, with a
committee formed to fight for their release. The following month, 100,000
rallied near London’s Kings Cross, presenting an 800,000-strong petition to
Parliament.
In 1837, all six workers were
pardoned. They returned to England and continued their fight, with the press
complaining that Loveless, “instead of quietly fulfilling the duties of his
station, is still dabbling in the dirty waters of radicalism and publishing
pamphlets to keep up the old game.”
The freedom won for the Tolpuddle
Martyrs showed what an organised working class could achieve and helped inspire
the growth of the Chartist movement.
On Sunday, one section of marchers
cheered when they saw the SEP’s stall with posters of Assange and Manning and
many others gave a thumbs-up as they passed by. Hundreds of people took copies
of the WSWS statement “For a global campaign to prevent
Julian Assange’s rendition to the United States!”
SEP campaigners drew attention to
the statement’s insistence that “The case of Julian Assange is a critical 21st
century battleground in the defence of free speech, truth and the fight against
exploitation, dictatorship and war, the basic evils of the capitalist system.”
Throughout the afternoon, dozens of
people approached the stall to ask for more information and many signed up to
join the global defence campaign.
Claire described Assange’s arrest on
April 11 as a watershed event: “It was so frightening. I couldn’t watch the
television when he was arrested and dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy. It
was so upsetting. People don’t understand what is at stake. It is freedom of
the press and right to know the truth. Assange is a very principled man with
lot of integrity. He is really brave.”
“He didn’t have to retract
anything,” she added, “I am really with him in Belmarsh [prison]. I hope he is
okay.”
Kate agreed, explaining: “Chelsea
Manning also played a crucial role in these revelations. If there wasn’t a
media outlet like WikiLeaks, we wouldn’t have known these things. They revealed
the secrets of the state they don’t want us to know about. He revealed them
with 100 percent accuracy. He is being smeared because he is speaking the truth
about power.”
Sheila Goodchild told the SEP’s
campaigners, “I support Julian Assange because he has been made scapegoat for
doing something which is basically good for the majority of the people. The
media and the establishment are supporting his persecution. He is not a well
man, I believe. They want somebody to blame for letting us know all this stuff
carried out behind our backs. We want more whistle-blowers, not fewer.”
Bill Dobbs, a retired teacher, said
that he regularly reads WSWS coverage on Assange, describing a speech by the
SEP’s Julie Hyland as one of the best speeches in defence of Assange that he
has heard.
He said, “The way WikiLeaks
discovered what our governments have done, it’s made me feel ashamed of being
an Englishman. It’s simply not the way we should be treating people. The awful
Isabel Oakeshott who writes for the Mail and is a member of the
Integrity Initiative, which is hell bent on twisting reality, she’s able to
publish what our ex-ambassador in Washington has to say about Trump, in an
exact parallel with what Julian Assange was doing with the DNC [Democratic
National Committee] emails. It’s shooting the messenger.”
Dobb’s wife, Jacqualine, interjected
on the role of the media, “We used to take the Guardian, but we no
longer do. They’re going for the neo-liberal line now, and any hope of them
being a supporter of the left is just not happening at all. As for the awful
people such as [ Guardian journalist] Shaun Walker, I read their
articles and they’re appalling. Blatant lying in some cases.”
Barry, a retired delivery driver,
said he supported Assange, “Because he’s an honest decent guy who’s trying to
make the world a better place and uncover all of the atrocities that various
countries are doing throughout the world. Terrible things, I’ve seen them on
YouTube. He’s trying to uncover all of that to stop it happening again. He’s a
very important guy. He should be released from wherever he is at the moment.
Tom from Dorset said, “I think it’s
been a complete fix-up. The Americans want to send him over there, to try him
for crimes that aren’t crimes in my view. Assange is allowing information that
should be public, and I think it is an absolute disgrace that the Americans are
trying to put pressure on us to send him and extradite him to America.”
Vincent, a research physicist, said,
“Julian Assange has done a lot to inform us about what is going on. Everybody
in the media has taken his information and relayed it and now that he is in
jail, everyone thinks that it is just normal. People can say what they like
about him but what he has achieved is bigger than that. What he has achieved is
really big and it is useful for the public.”
The sympathy for Assange and Manning
among festival goers stood in marked contrast to the attitude of the Labour and
trade union bureaucrats on the speakers’ platform. Not a single union official
or Labour MP—including party leader Jeremy Corbyn—so much as mentioned the name
Julian Assange.
The line-up of union officials at
the event, including Trades Union Congress President and Public and Commercial
Services Union (PCS) leader Mark Serwotka and Unite General Secretary Len
McCluskey, only served to highlight the gulf between the early labour movement
martyrs and today’s corporatist organisations staffed by well-paid
functionaries who suppress the struggles of the working class.
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