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this issue we review Helena Kennedy's indictment ammunist Party; and a controversial new novel by 3ook Reviews • the British legal system; biographies of two entral figures in the history of the British ack author Phillip Baker. Eve Was Framed By Helena Kennedy ublished by Vintage UK Press, 1993, £6-99 leviewed by Claire Bradley •HIS IS A book packed with case after case of how women have been dealt with by the itish legal system. It is also biographical, telling of Helena nnedy's own struggle to work as riminal lawyer in a male - and ss - dominated legal profession. is a highly readable book alrugh some of the points made , repeated over and over, and I ve the feeling that it would be far punchier indictment of the haic British legal system if it re half the length.
Helena Kennedy opens the book ›laining that the recent miscarges of justice have rocked the al system.
Subsequently, she Is for a series of reforms which : feels would redress the prob- 1s. But she does not draw any clusions from the fact that key rects of the British legal system, = the House of Lords, are inteil parts of the capitalist state, petuating the existence of the ss system under which we live. The book's title comes from the ter's belief that all women in , legal system must live up to : example of the Virgin Mary, cluding that Eve was framed ore she ever embarked on her on earth.
The book poses the question of y society feels differently about nen who commit crime. "Terror a man but wickedness is a nan" - women are witches or azons, mad or bad, constantly reotyped. Crime is seen as an • Book Reviews inevitable extension of normal male be haviour, whereas offenders women have breached sacred notions what is deemed as truly female.
All her points case studies and statistics. Women are imprisoned with fewer convictions than men - 53% of women have two or than men as many women go to prison for a first offence than men.
In the West Midof lands 27% women first offendprobation compared to 13% of men. Yet serious ofwomen commit less fences. Most women in prison are there for non-payment of fines. Black people are treated even worse - 5% of the British population are black and Asian, yet 22% of the prison population and 29% of women prisoners are black. Black defendants are more likely to get immediate custodial sentences, 35% compared to 21.4%, and longer sentences.
The book highlights the stereotyping of women, quoting the judge who said that there are three types of women, mothers, wives and whores! The history of the legal system, relying on 'com- * mon law' rather than a US-style Courte of Juaslee constitution, dates back to the Middle Ages and even to Roman law, when women and children were placed under the jurisdiction of the head of the household and deemed to be his property. The book also looks at the ar.
chaic traditions of legal training, why there are few women judges and why 82% of lawyers are men. She points out the hypocrisy of the courts, lauding the family and motherhood whilst refusing to acknowledge the social and economic support needed to sustain a woman in motherhood. She points out, using example after example, that the law does not protect women and how with marriage the
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law actually sanctions women and children.
Helena Kennedy's concluding chapter explains that "the law mirrors society with all its imperfections and therefore reflects the subordination of women, even today". She calls for reforms, and a written constitution, arguing that the English legal system basically has a high level of professional competence and integrity.
My conclusion really is worth cases she quotes
is the readin are an
t the book g and the indictment
Raja
Palme Dutt: A study
British Stalinism By John Callaghan blished by Lawrence an Wishart, 1993, £19-99
Harry Pollitt
By Kevin Morgan
Published by Manchester Univer
sity Press, 1993, £40-00 hbk
by David
ROM THE 1920s to the
• 1950s Rajani Palme Dutt and
Harry Pollitt were the two most important leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Authoritative biographies of both are long overdue and these two books go some way towards filling the gap, although the authors' political analyses leave much to be desired.
The tragedy of the CPGB was that its pioneers inherited the feeble tradition of early British Marxism and were, therefore, dependent upon Moscow for money and ideas. Lacking the ability to think critically and independently, the CPB's leaders failed to recognise the bureaucratic counter-revolution that took place in the Soviet Union with Stalin's rise to power. Consequently, the likes of Dutt and Pollitt changed from sincere but unseasoned revolutionaries into time-serving mediocrities, running errands for the Stalinist bureaucracy. Unfortunately, neither Callaghan nor Morgan come anywhere near understanding this process.
Dutt is usually seen
not just of the courts but of the capitalist system we live under. But in its present guise the legal system is not reformable as such because too much of the class system is invested in the Old Boys' club.
The United States of America needed a revolution to throw off the control and power of the British ruling class before they could write their constitution
There are few women udges.
humourless robot who cynically carved out a career as the Kremlin's chief British yes-man. Nevertheless, he began as a brave and genuine revolutionary. While at Oxford University Dutt joined the Independent Labour Party. During the first world war, he refused to be conscripted, for which he was briefly imprisoned. In 1917 he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolsheviks and was sent down from Oxford because of his revolutionary activities.
Pollitt was a communist of a very different type. He was a boilermaker from Lancashire, drawn to communism by the Russian revolution, as he later recalled: "The thing that mattered to me was that lads like me had whacked the bosses and the landlords, had taken their factories, their lands and their banks... These were the lads and lasses I must support through thick and thin".
In the 1920s Pollitt led the National Minority Movement (the CPGB-influenced rank and file trade union organisation) and he served as the party's general secretary from 1929 until 1956 (with one brief interregnum).
Despite their contrasting backgrounds, Dutt's and Pollitt's careers ran closely together. In 1929 both were central figures in a Comintern-inspired coup in the CPGB, designed to ensure support for Stalin's ultra-left Third Period' policy. Pollitt nevertheless had misgivings about Moscow's call to by-pass the established trade unions, a policy which proved SO
disastrous that a qualifiec was soon proposed (which sisted).
Callaghan notes in his account that in this controversy some of Trotsky's supporters in the CPGB were strongly behind the ultra-left line on the trade unions and were encouraged in this by Dutt. "Thus, from these puerile beginnings" sneers Professor Callaghan, "was British Trotskyism born". The pioneer British Trotskyists were certainly gravely mistaken on the trade union question at this time, but to portray them as no better than "Third Period' Stalinists is a grotesque distortion.
The centre-piece of "Third Periodism' was the denunciation of reformist socialists as 'social fascists', a policy • which split the German workers and allowed Hitler to power. Trotsky and his supporters opposed this and advocated a workers' 'united front' against fascism. It was for this 'crime, and for distributing Trotsky's writings about Germany, that the British Trotskyists were expelled by Pollitt and co. in 1932.
During the 1930s both Pollitt and Dutt defended Stalin's infamous frame-ups and murders of his enemies, including many old Bolshevik leaders. Rose Cohen, a British communist who had married Comintern official, disappeared in Russia during the purges. She had been a close personal friend of Pollitt, who tried in vain to discover her fate. However, he still dutifully supported the purges, in the deluded belief that in doing so he was standing by
I retreat Dutt re-
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le lads and lasses' who had made e October revolution.
In 1939 Dutt and Pollitt had a out. When Britain ajor falling clared war on Germany the ?GB leadership unanimously reed to support the war. But orrs quickly came from ascow to oppose it, as a sult of the pact that alin had signed with tler. Dutt, typically, emaced the new line with questioning enthusiasm. litt argued against it in = CPGB's central comnporarily deposed secretary. Follow- German invasion the USSR in 1941, hower, the CPGB switched ck to supporting the r and Pollitt was rein- In 1953 Stalin died. In Khrushchev conmned some of the Blood Posse By Phillip Baker blished by Picador, 1994, £5-99 Reviewed by Aaron Taylor URRENTLY SERVING A 15year prison sentence drug offences, Phillip Baker a Jamaican-born writer who ved to New York as a child. His ently published book, Blood ise, relates the gang fights over trol of the drugs trade between ican-Americans and Jamaicans. ›posedly an accurate reflection the period, Baker revels in the ad and gore: the body count by second chapter is in three figs and rising. The characters are icatures; the plot is marginal to description of violent death. od Posse fits into the racist judices held by many in the te literary establishment; it is ent, sexist and homophobic. All ill, Blood Posse is a poorly writ- , violent, bad book.
Why then bother to review it at Because Blood Posse is just latest in a slew of books claimto reflect Afro-Caribbean life the streets of Britain and the In Britain, the trail was • Book Reviews crimes of Stalin, causing uproar in the world's CPs. Dutt reacted with typical equanimity but Pollitt was unable to stomach the criticism of his long-time hero and retired as general secretary, ostensibly on grounds of failing health. EMPLOYED MOVE BRANCH blazed by Yardie, the story of Jamaican drug trafficers by • Victor Headley, and its follow up, Excess. When they first appeared, the literary establishment went wild. Here were two novels telling it like it is, written in the language of the streets. Hard and violent, they told the story of the Yardies, the gang battles, the drugs, the clubs, the music.
subtle racism behind the white media's fawning at the feet of the new black writers. What, a Jamaican who can write?! How perfectly amazing! And so they paternalistically pat him on the head, and ignore the literary merit of the writing, ignore the fact that the books bear little resemblance to the real lives of Jamaicans in Lon- York, ignore the almost complete lack of story, characterisation or writing ability in the books - and ignore the vast tom ba black that he amount of poetry, literature and autobiography, that has been written by blacks in Britain and the US for years, but which don't fit into their preconceptions of what Jamaican life is like.
The US forerunners of this style were Robert Beck and Donald Go- Pollitt died in 1960. Dutt lived on until 1974, finding himself at odds with a younger generation of CP leaders. In 1968 the CPGB condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia and for the first time Dutt broke party discipline, supporting the Soviet action in the pages of Labour Monthly. However, the new CPGB leaders were not evolving away from Stalinism towards genuine Marxism.
They were merely taking through to their logical conclusion the nationalist and reformist policies that Dutt and Pollitt had dutifully accepted from Moscow.
The process was finally completed in 1991, when the CPGB explicitly renounced Marxism dissolved itself. The CPGB was dead, but it had died as a revolutionary party long before.
ines. Under his pseudonym of Iceberg Slim, Beck wrote a whole number of novels all very much the same: the men were all big and hard, the women all beautiful, working the streets to get money for drugs for their men. Goines wrote a series of violent novels before being killed in a drug connected attack. With both writers, plot is secondary to the description of violent death, characterisation is virtually nil. Yet, they have both become cult writers, allowing particularly white readers to shore up their stereotyped image of the pimp and the drug pusher. This is not to say that no novels can be written about the drugs and violence that are a part of many people's lives. In Britain, the recently published Iced by Ray Shell is a frightening, brilliantly written novel on drugs and black youth. Yet, like Yardie, Blood Posse will be seized on by the reviewers, ig norant of reality African-American, West Indian and black British writing that is there below the surface. Hunt it out, track it down and read it - the real explosion in black British writing is still to come.
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