Come off it, comrades!
Socialist Organiser1984 1984-02-09Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 16 →
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Published by the Socialist Organiser Alliance, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. Printed by Fast End Offset, London Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office. Signed articles do not necessarily representtthe views of the SOA. THE Gerry Birmingham affair gets stranger and stranger. An more mysterious.
He had a couple of messy an perhaps, unwise love affairs. And because of this - so we understand — the General Management Committee of St. Helens Labour Party agrees, without dissent [?] to inflict the political death penalty on him!
Or at least on his career as an MP.
Is Birmingham's love-life all there is to this nasty business? Can it be all there is to it? We don't know. But publicly the answer must be yes. That's the only way it's been presented. If there is anything else - some hidden issue or half buried conflict - it should be unearthed immediately.
Right now St. Helens CLP appears to be an organisațion of intolerant, puritanicai, oppres. sive and prying people who recognise neither the conventional distinction between public and private life nor a limit to their own collective power to regulate, supervise and punish Birmingham.
It may be that some - but surely not many - derive the attitudes from a misguided 'feminism" - or think it is part of the battle to make MPs accountable.
But the result is indistinguishable - in St Helens CLP itself - from the suffocating and restrictive Christian moralism against which champions of personal liberty and th advanced labour movement ani its allies had to fight long and hard. Attitudes like those always, in the end, serve the status quo and bear down most heavily on women, gays and heretics.