I’m still alive (Hello, Nooman)

November 25, 2007 at 8:11 pm (deviants, Galloway, Tory scum, twat, voltairespriest, wankers)

Hello, children.

Just wanted to reassure those kind souls who have expressed concern for my welfare that the only reason for my not having posted for some time is that I have recently moved house, and I have been too much of a lounge lizard to sort out my internet access as yet. Fuck me, I only got around to buying a microwave yesterday. Worry not, my little bunny rabbits.

Now, let me bring something to your close attention that has appeared in the blogosphere recently. It’s a discussion between two socialist feminists, our own TWP and my good friend Stroppybird, and George Galloway’s new-found online butler Andy Nooman. TWP and Stroppy, in a thread on Liam Macuaid’s blog, raised criticisms of George Galloway’s attitudes on issues of great importance on the left, for instance those of gender. The response from the former SWP apparatchik Nooman (a heritage he shares with another of Galloway’s goons, former SWP Birmingham organiser Ger Francis)? Firstly to blither on about what bastards the SWP are (wow, shocker), and then to attempt to invalidate the views which these two women who raised, entirely legitimately, about sexism on the left of not having the right to speak in the debate, on the grounds that they:

“…make a great deall out of a mildly sexist comment from GG, but go out drinking and share a blog with an open racist.”

Now, not withstanding the sickening nature of the idea that “mild” sexism shouldn’t be made a “great deall” (sic) out of, you get three guesses as to which “open racist” this wannabe stand-in for Sideshow Ron is referring to.

If you guessed Jim Denham of this blog, then you get the prize.

This was the point when I finally lost any respect I may once have held for Nooman. I’d always thought that in spite of his perceptible drift to the right, his obvious desperate desire for a job in Galloway’s tin-pot machine, his loss of any sense of political perspective that once defined him as a genuine left-wing independent, that somewhere underneath all of that rot and decay lay the beating heart of a decent socialist, with the same commitments to human liberation that we all share. And yet it seems I was wrong.

Instead of engaging in a discussion about “mildly” sexist comments on the part of his patron, Nooman has instead chosen to libel a life-long socialist and anti-racist whose political principles make him look like a cheap telephone salesman. Furthermore, to reiterate, he has used that lie in order to shut down a debate with two principled left-wing feminists about sexist comments made by the leader of his particular political faction.

They always used to say of ex-Stalinists like John Reid and Peter Mandelson that they retained the method, the will to lie, bully and smear, after they left the CP’s ideology behind. Et tu, Nooman: it seems you can take the boy out of the SWP but (even decades after the event, he’s not a young man), you can’t take the SWP out of the boy.