Recommended by Gary Robertson.
Prophet' Donna Rigney Claims To Have Opened A Heavenly Portal Over The White House And Mar-A-Lago
Peter Fryer was an English Marxist and member of the Communist Party, later the Communist Party of Great Britain, who was on the staff of the party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, later to be renamed The Morning Star. Peter was despatched to Hungary to report on the events taking place there in October of 1956, an uprising against the Stalinist regime which was subservient to the Soviet Union and which the people were pretty pissed off with, and that is an understatement.
Fryer was sent by the CP to report on the events which were occurring and the party, which were themselves Stalinist, did not like the report Peter sent back. The CP then in turn supressed his report according to this little pamphlet, Hungarian Tragedy, first published in 1956 then republished in 1986. The events of Hungary during this period are a subject I have not revisited for a number of years which prompted me to pick up this easy read. The questions asked were, was the Hungarian rising a fascist led coup against socialism? An attempt to return the country to ‘capitalism and landlordism’ of the past? An American sparked rising under the control of Washington? These were claims made by the Soviet Union, with a certain amount of justification, prompting their invasion.
These questions were interesting because the USA had and has a track record of fuelling coups and uprisings in other countries against systems they do not approve of! There can be little doubt the US were certainly interfering on the periphery of the uprising but to what extent? Were they financing it? Were they in league with ‘fascist’ and ‘reactionary’ groups trying to direct the revolution into resurrecting ‘capitalism and landlordism’? If they were the US would never admit to it but let’s say their fingerprints were on the gun, a smoking gun! I would not write off this possibility as quickly as Peter. Stalinism is a cruel distortion of socialism used by the western media on behalf of governments as evidence why socialism will never work. Don’t listen to them, they are talking crap and they know it! Most of us owe the Soviet Red Army a world of gratitude for defeating the Nazis at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. Without these victories of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany it is unlikely the Western allies would have won the day, certainly as early as they did. It was the Soviet Red Army which stormed Berlin in 1945 hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag. If Nazi Germany had prevailed at Stalingrad, we could all be speaking German now.
However the Red Army operating in Hungary were not in the same vein as those liberators eleven years previous. After the Second World War the political configuration was completed by 1949 when the so-called ‘Hungarian Peoples Republic’ was formed. This so-called socialist state (which it was not) had little if anything in common with Marxism or even ‘Marxist Leninism’, itself becoming a distortion of the works written by Marx, Engels, and even early Lenin.
The Hungarian Revolution began on 23rd October 1956 as a protest initially against the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interference and domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Matyas Rakosi. Students on this protest were shot dead by the AVH (the Stalinist Police) which moved the situation from a protest to a revolution. The revolution was not about reinstalling capitalism, according to Peter Fryer, but about establishing true ‘socialism’ in Hungary. One problem was, in hindsight, that fascist and reactionary groups were on the periphery hoping they could mould the revolutionary demands their way. Perhaps a mistake was not dealing with these small reactionary groups along with the AVH. These fascist and reactionary groups, not dissimilar to the Anti-Semitic groups who latch on to the pro-Palestinian marches today, infiltrated to a very minor degree the revolution. This was, however, enough to give the USSR the self-perceived reason to invade Hungary to ‘fight fascism’ and the ‘White Terror’ which, they claimed, was active in Hungary and were organising this uprising. If the Hungarian revolutionary fighters had dealt with these small groups, assuming they knew who they were and if they did not any fascist utterings should have been detected early, this excuse used by the Stalinist USSR could not have been used.
There were signs early on of reactionary possible involvement and these right-wing groups with fascist leanings should have been stamped on certainly if the aim really was, as Peter asserts, socialist revolution. According to Peter Fryer in his little book, Hungarian Tragedy:
The Hungarian Revolution began on 23rd October 1956 as a protest initially against the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interference and domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Matyas Rakosi. Students on this protest were shot dead by the AVH (the Stalinist Police) which moved the situation from a protest to a revolution. The revolution was not about reinstalling capitalism, according to Peter Fryer, but about establishing true ‘socialism’ in Hungary. One problem was, in hindsight, that fascist and reactionary groups were on the periphery hoping they could mould the revolutionary demands their way. Perhaps a mistake was not dealing with these small reactionary groups along with the AVH. These fascist and reactionary groups, not dissimilar to the Anti-Semitic groups who latch on to the pro-Palestinian marches today, infiltrated to a very minor degree the revolution. This was, however, enough to give the USSR the self-perceived reason to invade Hungary to ‘fight fascism’ and the ‘White Terror’ which, they claimed, was active in Hungary and were organising this uprising. If the Hungarian revolutionary fighters had dealt with these small groups, assuming they knew who they were and if they did not any fascist utterings should have been detected early, this excuse used by the Stalinist USSR could not have been used.
There were signs early on of reactionary possible involvement and these right-wing groups with fascist leanings should have been stamped on certainly if the aim really was, as Peter asserts, socialist revolution. According to Peter Fryer in his little book, Hungarian Tragedy:
the uprising was neither organised nor controlled by fascists or reactionaries, though reactionaries were undeniably trying to gain control of it.
If Peter could see this surely the revolutionaries could? These people were an even greater threat to the uprising than the USSR and had they gained any kind of control the ideology of the revolution could well have changed in an unpleasant way. In the latter days of the Second World War the Hungarian Nazi puppet government installed by Berlin were as evil and vicious as their masters in Germany. On his arrival in the country one of the first things Fryer noticed was a young soldier working away at a five-pointed red star:
He whistled happily between his teeth as he bent forward in his ill-fitting uniform, closely modelled on the uniform of the Soviet Army. He was absorbed in his task of picking with a nail-file at the red star.
The soldier was obviously trying to remove the red star from the mosaic which was not an easy task.
Eventually the red star came away. Pocketing his nail-file the young soldier ground the bit of stone to powder with his heel and sauntered away.
The question here is, why did he do this? The Red Star is the sign of international socialism and not the preserve of the USSR. If anything, it was the Soviet Union who should have not adopted the red star. If, as Fryer claims, the Hungarian revolution was about installing true socialism in the country, why then take down the symbol of international socialism, the Red Star? It was not a symbol of the USSR. In fact, in 1924 Stalin adopted the unworkable theory and political position of ‘socialism in one country’, and in 1943 dismantled the Communist International (Comintern). It was the USSR under Stalin who disregarded international socialism, so, if Hungary was trying to bring true socialism to their country the Red Star should have been central to any design for the Hungarian masses! Another point of observation; why did the Hungarian revolutionary government abandon the Marxist maxim: ‘Proletarians of the World Unite’? Again giving credence to those who might disagree with Fryer’s analysis but I still give the Hungarian people, at this stage, the benefit of the doubt.
With the demise of the AVH, officially disbanded by the new government of Imre Nagy (later murdered by the Soviets), and to realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government. These councils of workers were something which the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was based upon and should, if the USSR was still loyal to those socialist principles, which they were not, have supported and encouraged these councils. The major error which the Nagy Government made and the USSR could not allow, was declaring Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, leaving a huge hole in the Eastern Bloc's defences in the west, thus allowing NATO an open door in the event of conflict.
With the demise of the AVH, officially disbanded by the new government of Imre Nagy (later murdered by the Soviets), and to realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government. These councils of workers were something which the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was based upon and should, if the USSR was still loyal to those socialist principles, which they were not, have supported and encouraged these councils. The major error which the Nagy Government made and the USSR could not allow, was declaring Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, leaving a huge hole in the Eastern Bloc's defences in the west, thus allowing NATO an open door in the event of conflict.
Did this give the Soviet Union the right to invade? Well yes and no. They were equally as entitled as the USA were to interfere in Vietnam or invade the tiny island of Grenada, almost three decades later, for electing a Marxist government under the guise that it threatened the security of the USA. US Congressman, Ron Dellums, sent to investigate these claims, concluded no threat existed in Grenada. Nikita Khrushchev considered Hungary leaving the ‘Warsaw Pact’ a threat to the security of the USSR. Therefore, the Soviet leader by the same criteria as that adopted by the USA was right! The US involvement supplying Kai Chang Chek in China against Mao’s Communists, who the masses wanted, with weapons and advisors might be another example of two sets of rules. Rules existed for both then super powers, not just the Soviet Union, and both political and military giants broke these rules.
The people of Hungary were committed to the building of socialism on democratic not dictatorial lines and were equally adamant there would be no return to ‘capitalism and landlordism’. They looked to Yugoslavia and Marshal Tito for inspiration, but not to be ruled by, as it was Tito who stood up to Stalin in 1949. In a letter to Stalin Tito wrote:
The people of Hungary were committed to the building of socialism on democratic not dictatorial lines and were equally adamant there would be no return to ‘capitalism and landlordism’. They looked to Yugoslavia and Marshal Tito for inspiration, but not to be ruled by, as it was Tito who stood up to Stalin in 1949. In a letter to Stalin Tito wrote:
Stalin, you have sent your agents three times to assassinate me. I would only have to send my agent to you once. Signed, Tito.
It was this kind of anti-Stalinism which gave the Hungarian freedom fighters heart. The Kremlin claimed that ‘White Terror’ was rife in Hungary which was, according to Fryer, not the case. The Soviet Union had seen ‘White Terror’ at first hand when the Nazis invaded. That was ‘White Terror’ and to say such forces were at work in Hungary was an untruth of the highest level. Another example of White Terror was the actions of Franco in Spain against all opposition. Bruce Renton wrote the ‘truth about the white terror’. “In the provinces only the AVH was physically attacked” (New Statesman November 17):
I had seen no counter-revolutionaries. I had seen the political prisoners liberated . . . I had seen the executioners executed in the fury of the people’s revenge . . . But there was no White Terror. The Communists walked free, the secret police were hanging by their boots. Where then was this counter-revolution, this Wite Terror”? (Truth November 16).
White Terror is the organised suppression by a bourgeois dictatorship of its revolutionary opponents. This dictatorship did not exist in Hungary and there was no evidence to suggest the ‘uprising’ ever intended to bring about this end. The USSR was, at best, perhaps premature in their invasion, at worst, they had no right to invade at all.
The Soviet Union claimed the Nagy government were moving towards fascism which they were not but Peter Fryer writes, which I disagree with:
The Soviet Union claimed the Nagy government were moving towards fascism which they were not but Peter Fryer writes, which I disagree with:
even if Nagy had been making concessions all along the line to fascism, even if counter-revolution had succeeded, even if White Terror had been raging the Soviet Union would still not have been justified in intervening.
I disagree with Peter because he was writing knowing full well no such threat existed but, it appears, he would have held the same opinion if fascist gangs were rampaging through the streets just like the SA and later SS did in Nazi Germany. By his criteria the fascists should be allowed to roam unmolested? I can see his point but a line has to be drawn as to when fascism is present and must be stopped. That line did not exist in Hungary, but Peter's remedy (do nothing) was equally wrong.
VI Lenin, one of the leaders in the October Revolution in Russia 1917, stated:
if Finland, if Poland, if Ukraine break away from Russia there is nothing bad about that. Anyone who says there is, is a chauvinist. It would be madness to continue the policy of the Tsar Nicholas . . . No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.
Lenin was writing before the rise of fascism in Europe which almost overran the continent. Would he have spoken in this vein if he had witnessed the horrors inflicted on the Soviet Union by the Nazis in the first six months and beyond of their invasion? Karl Marx also wrote, quite correctly but again before the rise of fascism but less questionable; “A people which enslaves others forges its own chains”. This is as true today as it was in the days of Karl Marx but fascism gives us a contradiction! Such a contradiction or contradictions did not exist in Hungary 1956. The question remains, were the vents of Hungary 1956 a bourgeois counter revolution or a proletarian uprising?
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| Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist. |
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
Before We Conform, Or Condemn, Let Us At Least Be Curious
♜One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it - Albert Camus♞
That has been made unambiguously clear by successive taoisigh, successive External/Foreign Affairs ministers and others. Sean MacBride as Minister for External Affairs made it clear in the Dáil and Seanad in February 1949 that Ireland is of The West, part of The West, and on the side of The West.
Ireland is simply militarily neutral - meaning it is not in NATO. Its decision not to join NATO was not based on some principle but on one simple fact - the existence of partition. On 23 February 1949, Minister for External Affairs Sean MacBride told the Dáil that:
He told the Seanad:
We approve of the Atlantic Pact and I think that, if it were not for the fact that a portion of our country is wrongfully occupied by Britain, we would have been in the Atlantic Pact. Theoretically, its aims, its purpose are in accord with our own wishes and our own desire.
Sean Lemass in 1962 said:
NATO is necessary for the preservation of peace and the protection of the countries of western Europe, including this country. Although we are not members of NATO, we are fully in agreement with its aims.
Ireland has demonstrated unambiguously that it is on the side of the democratic West. On Sean Lemass's explicit orders, Kennedy's embargo on Cuba was enforced by Ireland in planes landing in Shannon en route to Cuba. Goods in Soviet and Eastern Bloc planes breaching the embargo were confiscated - to the fury of Khrushchev.
Ireland like other Western states never recognised the illegal Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and like other states recognised the governments-in-exile of those states as the legitimate government. The modern Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian governments stress that they are the descendants of the Governments-in-Exile and not the Soviet puppet regimes Moscow installed.
Ireland is unambiguously on the side of Ukraine, not Moscow, as Russia breached the UN Charter in its invasion as an UN member we are obliged to uphold the charter. In theory under UN rules Russia could have been expelled for its invasion, just as the USSR was expelled by the League of Nations for its invasion of Finland in 1939. In practice, the existence of vetoes made the expulsion power, like a lot of UN powers, inoperable as veto powers can simply veto actions against them or their friends.
Russia like the USSR has always acknowledged that Ireland is not politically neutral. It regards Ireland as a de facto member of NATO. It was one of the reasons who Stalin repeatedly vetoed Ireland's efforts to join the UN. (Countries are admitted by the General Council on the recommendation of the Security Council. Stalin vetoed Ireland annually, preventing any SC recommendation to admit Ireland.) His death removed the logjam.
He also despised Irish neutrality in World War II as "cowardice" - a longstanding Soviet and Russian attitude towards the concept of neutrality in general. The former Allies like Britain and the US lobbied Stalin on Ireland's behalf, pointing out that though officially neutral Ireland had been working closely with Allies, breaking codes, spying on Axis diplomats and passing on information. Stalin simply threw his hands in the air, and spat out "cowards!"
He was particularly animated on the issue of de Valera's dumb decision to offer condolences to the German minister in Ireland on the death of Hitler - perhaps the biggest blunder in Irish foreign policy.
The truth is simple. Ireland is not and never has been politically neutral. It has been consistently been on the side of the west. It is simply militarily neutral, meaning it is not in NATO.
Sean MacBride was clear in the Seanad in 1949 in a speech:
based directly on the contents of the Atlantic Pact (setting up NATO), based on military considerations, based on public policy, the Atlantic Pact is heralded as the new instrument of international co-operation in the North Atlantic. It was intended to preserve if you like, the democratic way of life among the nations of the North Atlantic.
With that, we are in complete agreement. We approve of the Atlantic Pact and I think that, if it were not for the fact that a portion of our country is wrongfully occupied by Britain, we would have been in the Atlantic Pact. Theoretically, its aims, its purpose are in accord with our own wishes and our own desire.
⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.
Anthony McIntyre ⚽ It was much like watching Arne Slot’s Liverpool side from his second and final season in charge. Big hat no cattle.
With neither cohesion nor coherence to their play, France - despite all the hype carried into the game based on scintillating soccer, the frontal assault mentality, the dazzling displays, the prodigious ability, the exhilarating fluidity, the promise - simply did not turn up to win the only game standing between them and their third consecutive World Cup final. Tournament favourites, they came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. A serious disappointment not only to their own supporters but to lovers of the beautiful game in general who gathered to watch giants and saw only midgets.
A matter of days ago sports columnists were asking if this would turn out to be the best les Bleus side ever. On the strength of last night’s performance the side that turned out compares more with the team of 2002 that failed ignominiously to defend the trophy it secured for the first time in Paris four years earlier: no wins, no goals, elimination in the group stage.
If we sigh in disappointment, and take a more panoramic view, looking back for comparison to the great Brazil side of 1982 - the explosive team that boasted they did not care who they met in the final, they were going to win it anyway - we would be instantly reminded that the Zico-Socrates side went out having played the best match of the tournament. They went down to Italy fighting, not like France's graceless exit. The Socrates equalizer remains one of the great goals of World Cup history.
Spain who have stuttered for much of World Cup 2026, relying on late strikes from Merino to get games across the line, put in a solid performance. Their game plan superb, they were worthy of their victory, dominating France in every area of the park and using every blade of grass to ensure passes reached their target. French passing was, again, much like that of Slot's side. Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente might be a tad premature with his claim that Spain is 'the best team in the world’ after last night's victory, but few would deny him the megaphone. One more game and the answer will be revealed.
Didier Deschamps' side might feel hard done by over the penalty decision awarded against Lucas Digne but the former English Premier League man went from Villa to villain for displaying no sense of awareness that a player of the threat posed by Lamine Yamal was bearing down on him. Even if it was handball by Yamal, and it is highly disputable, Digne has no grounds to petition for a fool's pardon for his unpardonable lack of concentration. Had Saliba stayed on the pitch it was unlikely to have made any difference. In such situations a side with the depth of France should swiftly recalibrate and move on. They failed.' As Mbappe observed in his post match interview: When you don't do what you have to do in a World Cup semi-final, you don't win.' France didn't just fail to win, they lost miserably.
Spain who have stuttered for much of World Cup 2026, relying on late strikes from Merino to get games across the line, put in a solid performance. Their game plan superb, they were worthy of their victory, dominating France in every area of the park and using every blade of grass to ensure passes reached their target. French passing was, again, much like that of Slot's side. Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente might be a tad premature with his claim that Spain is 'the best team in the world’ after last night's victory, but few would deny him the megaphone. One more game and the answer will be revealed.
Didier Deschamps' side might feel hard done by over the penalty decision awarded against Lucas Digne but the former English Premier League man went from Villa to villain for displaying no sense of awareness that a player of the threat posed by Lamine Yamal was bearing down on him. Even if it was handball by Yamal, and it is highly disputable, Digne has no grounds to petition for a fool's pardon for his unpardonable lack of concentration. Had Saliba stayed on the pitch it was unlikely to have made any difference. In such situations a side with the depth of France should swiftly recalibrate and move on. They failed.' As Mbappe observed in his post match interview: When you don't do what you have to do in a World Cup semi-final, you don't win.' France didn't just fail to win, they lost miserably.
French Newspaper L'Equipe was scathing in its criticism of the national team's performance, rating Digne, Dembele and Olise 2/10. Mbappe did little better managing only 3/10. Compare that to the ratings of Spain's Porro and Dani Olmo with 8/10, and the chasm opens up to expose its vastness.
England take on Argentina in around thirty minutes time and are more than capable of making it through to the final. The English have grown into this tournament and have dug deep when most needed. They have a stronger and more dynamic midfield than the Argentinians and are not as overly reliant in front of goal on one towering talent. While Argentina could go all the way, there is a feel of the 1986 Mexico squad to the current crop. Without Maradona that team would never have won the World Cup. Messi is the main man here but in 86 Maradona was 25 whereas Messi is almost 40. An old dog for the hard road might find that old legs won't carry it the distance.
Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 6-June-2026.
The left can see that something has gone wrong with Sinn Féin. It has reached for revulsion where the answer is structural
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| RDS Stage, Dublin |
1. The Standard
The Robert Tressell Festival took place in the RDS on Saturday, and in the course of it Ruth Coppinger TD stood up and described, more completely than anyone has managed in months of commentary, what a genuine left would have to be.
She began with the form. There should be a common left platform, she said, coming up to the next election. And then, before anyone could file it under electoral arithmetic, she widened it: it is not just about elections, because to challenge what is happening you have to build movements on the ground as well. That second sentence is the one worth holding onto. It says the platform is not a transfer pact or a seat-maximising arrangement. It is a thing built outside the electoral cycle, in the places elections do not reach, and the electoral form is meant to grow from it rather than stand in for it.
Then she set the conditions. A genuine left, in her account, stands implacably against racism and in solidarity with racialised communities, with women, with LGBT people. It acknowledges that the wealth of the society is hoarded by a tiny minority, and it advocates for that wealth to be taxed and taken under control. The social commitments and the economic commitment are not two lists. They are one list, and the holding of both together is what she meant by genuine.
On migration she was emphatic in a way that is worth reproducing closely. A united front against racism, she said, with no leaning in, in any way, shape or form, to anti-immigrant sentiment. Immigrants are not to blame for the crisis in capitalism. To challenge the myth of scarce resources, you talk about wealth, not about the people who have arrived to live among the scarcity. On abortion she was just as plain: no backtracking, on that or on any position previously held. And on the question of who a left platform could govern with, she drew the hardest line of all. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are excluded from a common left project. Not negotiable, not a matter of seats, excluded.
Set those pieces beside one another and what you have is not a wish list and not a purity test. It is a coherent account of a political position: hold the whole terrain, social and economic, as one thing; do not trade your positions for advantage; build the strength outside the electoral cycle that the electoral cycle can then express; and do not walk through the door marked government if the parties of the existing order are standing in it. Whatever one makes of any single plank, the thing hangs together. It describes a left that knows what it is and will not be moved off it.
That is the standard. It was stated clearly, from a stage, by a sitting TD, on a Saturday in June. Hold it there for a moment, because the rest of what follows is a question about the distance between that standard and the ground it was stated on.
II. The Room It Was Stated In
Consider the room it was stated in.
The festival’s theme, printed on the banner behind the speakers, was that the enemy is not the foreigner, the enemy is the system of greed. It is the right line, and it gathered the right people: trade unionists, the flotilla crews, Corbyn and McDonnell over from a British left in its own difficulty, the Higginses as patrons, writers and organisers and musicians, the whole ecosystem of the Irish and international left assembled under one roof for a day. The framing was solidarity, and the solidarity was real. For a day, the left performed its own unity, and there is a value in a movement reminding itself what it is for.
But a standard stated from a stage is also a measure laid against everyone standing on it. And Coppinger’s standard, taken at its word, describes a left that several of the parties in that room do not currently constitute. Arriving at the festival, Mary Lou McDonald spoke clearly and without hedging on Gaza, confirming Sinn Féin would table a motion to stop the Irish football team playing Israel while a genocide is committed, calling it unconscionable. Bacik and Gibney said the same, in much the same words. On that question the left was united and unequivocal, and Sinn Féin was unequivocal with it.
It is worth asking why that question was easy. The answer is that on Gaza the line costs Sinn Féin nothing. Its base is already there, the broad public is largely there, and clarity on Palestine loses the party no votes it wants to keep. Set it beside the questions on which the party does hedge, migration above all, and a pattern appears that is not vagueness and not cowardice but something more precise. Sinn Féin is clear exactly where clarity is free and reaches for ambiguity exactly where clarity has a price. The same instinct that let McDonald be unequivocal about the Israel match is the instinct that produced the leaflet promising to manage migration. The unequivocal stance and the managed one are not a contradiction. They are the same calculation, run on two questions with two different costs.
And the choice of what to carry home from the day tells the same story. The clip Sinn Féin cut and sent into the world was not the Gaza motion or anything on the terrain Coppinger had named. It was reunification, and the building of the republic we all deserve. A party’s choice of what to amplify is a choice about what it wants seen, and from a festival convened around the economic and social terrain, Sinn Féin chose to show its base the one piece of ground that is unambiguously and historically its own, and that costs it nothing to stand on.
So the room performed a unity that the standard stated within it quietly fractured. Not because anyone present was insincere about solidarity. Because solidarity as a feeling and a genuine left as Coppinger described it are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely the gap the rest of this is about. The left can fill a hall. The question is whether the thing it stated from the stage of that hall is a thing any party in the hall can actually be.
III. The Revulsion and the Analysis
Here is where I want to slow down, because the way the left has talked about this matters as much as the thing it has been talking about.
When Sinn Féin leans toward anti-immigrant feeling, when it hedges on migration, when it lets a leaflet promise to manage the thing rather than refuse the framing of it, the response from the left has been revulsion. Betrayal, disgust, the sense of a party showing a face it had kept hidden. And the revulsion is not wrong. Something is wrong. The leaning-in is real and it is bad, and the people who feel it as a betrayal have correctly identified that a line has been crossed. I am not going to ask anyone to feel less about it. The feeling is earned.
But the feeling has been close to the whole of the response, and a feeling is not an analysis. Revulsion treats the hedge as a failure of character. They were cowards. They were cynics. They sold the principle for a few points in a poll. And if that is what the problem is, then the remedy follows from it: better people, more courage, a leadership that would hold the line where this one would not. Find the braver party, or shame this one into bravery, and the problem is solved.
I do not think that is what the problem is, and I think the comfort of the revulsion is part of why it has been mistaken for an explanation. There is a satisfaction in disgust. It flatters the one who feels it: we would never lean in, we hold the line, the rot is in them and not in the situation. It sorts the field into the principled and the sold-out and lets us know, warmly, which side we are on. That satisfaction is exactly what an analysis has to give up, because the question an analysis has to ask is the unsatisfying one. Not how do we feel about the leaning-in. Why does it happen. Why does it happen to this party and not to the party down the bill. Why does it happen to the large party and not the small one. The revulsion has no answer to those questions, because it was never asking them. It was naming a wrong, which is a real thing to do, and then stopping at the naming.
What follows is an attempt not to stop at the naming. The wrong is real; the revulsion has that right. But the wrong is structural before it is moral, and reading it as moral leads somewhere that does not work, because the next party that reaches the size this one has reached will meet the same thing, and bravery will not have been the missing ingredient. To see why, you have to put the feeling down for a moment and look at the table the pieces are actually standing on.
IV. The Physics of the Table
There are two forces on the table, and between them they do most of the work that the language of cowardice has been asked to do.
The first is the shape of the terrain itself. There was a time when a party could hold a clear economic position and stay vague on the social questions, or hold firm on the social questions and stay quiet on the economics, and the two could be kept in separate rooms. That time is over, and the far right ended it. The achievement of the reactionary politics now organising across the West, in Ireland as everywhere, has been to bundle the questions together: migration, the borders, the national culture, the rights of women, the climate, sovereignty, all wired into a single circuit so that a position on any one of them reads as a position on all of them. You cannot, any longer, be sound on housing and evasive on
migration and have the evasion go unnoticed, because the migration question now carries the whole charge of the bundle. This is why Coppinger named the two grounds she named. The migration line and the abortion line are not two items she happened to mention. They are the two places where the integrated terrain bites hardest, the points where a left position is most exposed to the pull of the bundle, and she named them because she understood that holding the terrain means holding it precisely there, where it is hardest, or not holding it at all.
The second force is the one the party is standing in rather than standing on. The institutional architecture of the southern state is built to absorb. Every serious attempt to construct a left politics outside the two parties of government has, within a generation, been drawn into one of them, and the drawing-in has a mechanism. The architecture rewards the party that comes inside and punishes the party that stays out. Come inside and there are ministries, there is the vocabulary of the state, there is the slow education in what cannot be done, and at the end of the education the party speaks the language of the thing it set out to change. Stay outside and there is permanent opposition, permanent criticism of decisions taken by others, permanent smallness. The architecture is not neutral ground that parties cross. It is a set of rails, laid in advance, and the party that climbs aboard can take the driver’s seat and grip the wheel and feel itself to be steering, while the track decides where it goes. Coppinger’s hardest condition, the refusal to govern with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, is a condition written against exactly this. It is an attempt to bar the one door through which the absorption has always come.
These are the two forces. The terrain that will not let the social questions stay quiet, and the architecture that carries aboard whoever climbs on. Neither of them is about the character of any particular leader. They are the physics of the table, and they act on every object placed there, regardless of what the object intends or how brave it is. Which is why the question that matters is not whether a given party is principled, but where on the table it has come to rest, and what the forces do to an object resting there.
V. The Standard and the Scale
Now put the standard back on the table and watch what the forces do to it.
Coppinger stated the standard and she holds it. Implacably, in her phrase, with no leaning in, in any way. And she holds it from two per cent. Her party, Solidarity – People Before Profit, the alliance her party sits within polls at two per cent between them, and it has held the line on migration with a completeness that no larger party has matched. The temptation is to read the completeness as the cause of something, a purity that ought to be rewarded and has been punished by an ungrateful electorate. I want to suggest the relation runs the other way. Solidarity – People Before Profit can hold the line with total confidence because two per cent is a position the line has never cost it anything to hold. It is a group of committed activists in a handful of constituencies, talking mostly to people who already agree, never within reach of the kind of power that puts a position under the pressure that breaks it. The line is easy to hold there. That is not a criticism. It is a description of where on the table the small left rests, and of how light the forces fall on an object resting there.
Move to where Sinn Féin rests and the forces fall differently. A poll this weekend, the second in a fortnight to say the same thing, put the party at 20%, sliding, with the vote it gained in 2020 visibly draining away. The Social Democrats were up 3% in the same poll, and it does not take much to see where a good part of the drained vote has gone. 20% is not 2%. 20% is a party trying to hold together a coalition of voters that includes the cosmopolitan and the communitarian, the city professional frustrated by housing and the worker in a town where immigration is felt as a pressure and not an abstraction, and 20% is within reach of the power that 2% is not. That is where the migration question bites. That is where the integrated terrain and the architecture meet, on a base too wide and too contradictory to be held by a single clear line, with the rails of government close enough to climb aboard. The party leaned because that is what the forces do to an object resting there. Not because it was braver or more cowardly than the party at 2%. Because it was bigger, and bigness is where the test is.
This is the sentence the revulsion cannot say, and the reason it cannot say it is that the sentence offers no one any satisfaction. The small left holds the line not because it is virtuous but because it is small. Sinn Féin leaned not because it is vicious but because it is large, and largeness is where the pressure lives. The principled small party and the compromised large one are not two kinds of character. They are the same forces acting on objects at different points on the table, and the difference between them is the difference between 2% and 20%, between never being tested and being tested constantly. Strip the moral language away and what is left is a structural fact with no villain in it. The standard that Coppinger stated from the stage is a standard that becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would matter.
It is worth saying that the fracture this describes is not invisible to the mainstream. The Irish Times, surveying the same left after the by-elections, noted that the disagreements between Sinn Féin and the rest run through abortion, immigration and climate, and concluded that they do not extend to the economic questions that once defined the divide. The first half of that is exactly right, and it is the half that matters here: the terrain on which the left fractures is the social terrain, the integrated terrain, the ground the far right has wired together. Whether the economic agreement is as settled as the second half assumes is a question for another day. What is not in doubt is where the breaking happens, and it happens precisely where the bundle bites.
Holding the line and reaching the scale to enact the line have come apart. The party that has the line does not have the scale. The party that has the scale cannot hold the line. And the form that would have both does not exist.
VI. The Gamble
There is a reply to all of this, and it is the best reply available, and it comes from someone who was inside the building.
Siobhán Fenton was a press adviser to the Sinn Féin leader and then a spokesperson for the party, and she has written an account of its inner workings that is due in the autumn. Ahead of it she has offered the strongest version of the case that the drift is not a failure at all but a strategy. The argument runs like this. The 2020 coalition of voters was always incompatible, the cosmopolitan and the communitarian wired together by a housing crisis they both felt and little else they agreed on. To pick a side would be to lose the other and collapse back to a smaller party. So the ambiguity is deliberate, a holding of both for as long as both can be held, and it has an exit. The issue that will decide the next election is not yet visible, just as immigration was not visible early in the last cycle and housing was not visible early in the one before. The party waits. When the galvanising issue arrives, late in 2028, it plants its flag, recovers a clear identity, and fights the election on ground it has chosen. The lacklustre years are the price of the option, and the option is worth the price.
It is a serious argument and it should be taken seriously, with the caveat that it is an account offered by a former press officer rather than a proven fact about what the leadership decided, and that the book it trails is framed less as a story of strategy than as a story of how things came apart. But take the argument at its strongest, as the deliberate gamble it claims to be, and it still rests on a single assumption that the rest of this piece has been quietly dismantling. The gamble assumes that the deciding issue of 2028 will arrive in the form the gamble needs: a clean issue, an economic one, the kind a party can lead on while keeping the social questions in their separate room. Housing in 2020 was such an issue. You could ride it without committing on migration or abortion, because in 2020 the terrain had not yet been bundled.
It has been bundled now. That is the whole burden of the integrated terrain, and it is why the gamble’s exit is sealed over. The issue that decides 2028 will not arrive clean, because there are no clean issues left on a terrain the far right has wired into a single circuit. Whatever the galvanising question turns out to be, it will come already carrying the charge of the bundle, already entangled with migration and the borders and the rest, and the party that has spent the intervening years declining to hold a position on exactly that terrain will not be able to plant a flag on it, because the flag-planting is the very thing the years of declining will have unlearned. Coppinger named the two grounds where the terrain bites because she understood that they cannot be kept quiet until a convenient moment. The gamble is a bet that they can. The bet is against the structure, and the structure does not break.
VII. What Would Have to Be Built
So return to the stage, and to the standard stated on it.
The thing worth holding onto from Saturday is not that Sinn Féin failed a test. It is that the test was stated at all, completely and clearly, by someone who meant it. The left does not have a problem of not knowing what it is for. Coppinger said what it is for, in plain sentences, from a platform, in front of the whole movement: hold the terrain entire, refuse the leaning-in, keep the positions, build the strength outside the cycle, stay off the rails that lead inside. There is no confusion about the standard. The standard is not the difficulty.
The difficulty is the one this piece has been tracing. The standard becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would change anything, and at the scale where it would change everything it has so far proved impossible to hold at all. The party that keeps the line is kept small partly by keeping it. The party that reached the scale could not carry the line up the slope with it. This is not a story about good people and bad people. It is a story about a shape, the shape of a terrain that will not let the hard questions stay quiet and an architecture that absorbs whoever climbs aboard, and about the fact that no political form has yet been built that can hold the standard and the scale at the same time, against both of those forces, on the ground as it actually is.
That form is what would have to be built. Not a better leader for an existing party, because the forces do not care about leaders. Not a purer small party, because purity at two per cent is not a counter to anything. Not a clever wait for a clean issue that the terrain will no longer supply. Something else: a politics that could hold what Coppinger described, at a scale that could enact it, while resisting the pull that has absorbed every previous attempt to do exactly that. Whether such a thing can be built I do not know. I know that it does not exist, that the weekend made its absence unusually visible, and that the absence is the actual subject beneath the polls and the speeches and the insider accounts of who decided what.
The standard was stated on Saturday. The form that could carry it has not been. That gap is the whole of the matter, and what fills it, if anything fills it, will be built by people with more at stake than a writer watching the room. I will keep watching the room. The building, if it happens, will happen elsewhere.
⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
Before We Conform, Or Condemn, Let Us At Least Be Curious
♜One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it - Albert Camus♞
Ignoring the distraction that is FIFAs corruption taking place in the land of the free, providing you’re white and Christian, back home the Premier Sports Cup/League Cup group stages got underway with sixteen matches taking place on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest shock being Lowland League winners Linlithgow Rose beating Championship Morton by a solitary goal in front of nearly 1100 people at Morton’s Cappilelow Park.
Sadly though for fans of the Rose their promotion to the Scottish Second Division was blocked by the SFA due to club not holding a SFA Bronze licence.
It's all official red tape I won’t bore you with details of what this entails as it’s all very dull, to be honest. For instance, the manager and at least one first team coach must hold a UEFA B licence. I'm sure some people find this stuff fascinating so I’ve added a link here where, if you’re a nerd or insomniac you can investigate this yourself. I wish you well.
Suffice to say, I feel sorry for the players and the fans who won’t get to watch their club competing at a higher level, this season at least.
Other results of note include Dundee United relying on a penalty to get past Stirling in the 93rd minute.
Who says the bigger teams don’t get preferential treatment eh? 🤣
Other Premiership clubs took care of their opponents with wins for St Mirren by four against Dumbarton, Falkirk putting five past Edinburgh City and Dundee coming out victors with a 4-2 win over Airdrie
In other news: finally Celtic have made a signing, not a contract renewal but, no, not one, but two new faces. Camilo Duran, the 24 year old Colombian forward landed on a five year deal from Qarabag. A potential replacement for Daizen Maeda who whilst is still a Celtic player, fans are resigned to the fact that he’s likely to be gone soon.
The other new face is a brand deal with Christophe Duchamp luxury watches - the official timepiece of Celtic FC
Yes, while other teams rebuild, the Celtic board continue to look for money making opportunities.
I know it’s a business etc etc but FFS, seriously, Celtic what are you doing?
Your average fan couldn’t afford one of these watches, they’re clearly for “monied people” and while us peasants look for players, the Celtic board through their official X account “are pleased to announce”… fancy fucking watches.
I gave up alcohol for a number of reasons, and despite my son buying me whisky and a decanter for Father's day I’ve so far managed to avoid drinking it even though right now it may be the only way to get through the day. It’s draining being a football fan, it’s certainly draining being a Celtic fan.
As I finish writing this I’m acutely aware that in the last few days we’ve had the 45th anniversaries of the passing of Joe McDonnell and Martin Hurson. On July 8th and 13th respectively. I extend my condolences to their family, friends and former comrades. May they rest in eternal peace.
Til next time ….
🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.
Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on the age of the earth.
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| Ken Bates |
The past few days have seen welters of condemnation by conservative writers and commentators on the glee allegedly being expressed online by lefties/progressives/woketards on the deaths of former Conservative and latterly Reform UK politician Ann Widdecombe and US Republican Senator Linsey Graham.
I must state at the outset that the death of any human being leaves their loved ones in a state of grief and so any comment on the recently deceased must in the first instance acknowledge that fact and express sorrow for those who mourn their loss. Death and its impact on relatives and friends is a universal which will affect all of us on this planet. Any reflections on the passings of public or private figures must always incorporate this unchangeable truth. That is as true for those for those who have whooped with glee at the deaths of the aforementioned big beasts of the political Right either side of the Atlantic as it would be for Donald Trump reacting to the death of Robert Mueller, former Head of the FBI and his would-be nemesis by saying “good” and that “he wasn’t a very nice person”.
However normal human decencies should never preclude honest reflections on the conduct and character of any public figure who has departed this temporal existence. That Ann Widdecombe was the elderly female victim of an appalling act of homicide and who had in her post-Westminster life achieved a partial national treasure status due to her participation in reality TV shows such as “Strictly Come Dancing” and “I am a Celebrity” should not deflect from critique of her views on abortion, same sex marriage, capital punishment and Brexit (all views which are polar opposite to mine but which I recognise the sincerity in which they were held) and her actions as Prisons Minister in John Major’s Conservative administration in the mid-1990s which included the shackling of pregnant female prisoners.
Likewise, Linsey Graham’s staunch support for Ukraine needs to be balanced against his cynical volte face on his views on Trump’s unsuitability for the US Presidency and his enthusiastic backing for his illegal war on Iran and for Netanyahu's war of obliteration in Gaza. Yes, it is a truism that the deaths of universally admired personalities such as the broadcaster Dermot Murnaghan and the tragic passing of young athletes in their prime such as 25-year-old Jayden Adams who made his debut for South Africa recently in the World Cup will generate much more outpouring of sadness that partisan political figures. But the rule in obituary and tribute paying should always be play the public persona.
Which brings me to the dilemmas for Leeds United supporters such as myself posed by the death at the age of 94 in Monaco of another notable figure last weekend: Ken Bates, former Leeds and Chelsea Chair. For in death as in life he has provoked division among Leeds fans. It is undeniable that he saved the club from almost inevitable liquidation as a result of the catastrophic financial mismanagement by the PLC board headed by Peter Ridsdale by investing £10m in January 2025 and for this he earned eternal gratitude from one section of the fan base. But for others, most likely the majority, his tenure which ran to 2013 was another dark chapter in the history of the club which saw relegation to the third tier for the first time, and the club being put into administration the manner of exit from which earned us a 15-point deduction at the start of our first season in League One in 2007-08.
Which brings me to the dilemmas for Leeds United supporters such as myself posed by the death at the age of 94 in Monaco of another notable figure last weekend: Ken Bates, former Leeds and Chelsea Chair. For in death as in life he has provoked division among Leeds fans. It is undeniable that he saved the club from almost inevitable liquidation as a result of the catastrophic financial mismanagement by the PLC board headed by Peter Ridsdale by investing £10m in January 2025 and for this he earned eternal gratitude from one section of the fan base. But for others, most likely the majority, his tenure which ran to 2013 was another dark chapter in the history of the club which saw relegation to the third tier for the first time, and the club being put into administration the manner of exit from which earned us a 15-point deduction at the start of our first season in League One in 2007-08.
Even after we returned to the Championship three seasons later under the stewardship of fan and ex player Simon Grayson, actions taken by Bates would serve to delay our return to the Premiership by almost a decade. From these fans, the reaction was as vituperative as those of the woketariat to the demise of Miss Widdecombe and Senator Graham with “Rot in Hell” being amongst the more family newspaper printable comments. While I belonged to the latter faction and abhorred everything he done after promotion from League One my reaction was “Let bygones be bygones” as, to paraphrase Amy Winehouse, hate is a losing game.
Ken Bates, a self-made millionaire from haulage and readymade concrete whose own football career was ended by a knee injury entered football chairmanship in the 1960s first as Chair of Oldham Athletic for five years before becoming owner and vice chair at Wigan Athletic and then really establishing his reputation at Chelsea. When he bought the club for £1 in 1982, it had become a ramshackle club far removed from the Kings Road glamour era on the late 60s and 70s with debts of £1.5 million and who had reached such nadirs on the field as a 6-0 defeat at Rotherham and a 7-3 home defeat to Leyton Orient in 1979.
Ken Bates, a self-made millionaire from haulage and readymade concrete whose own football career was ended by a knee injury entered football chairmanship in the 1960s first as Chair of Oldham Athletic for five years before becoming owner and vice chair at Wigan Athletic and then really establishing his reputation at Chelsea. When he bought the club for £1 in 1982, it had become a ramshackle club far removed from the Kings Road glamour era on the late 60s and 70s with debts of £1.5 million and who had reached such nadirs on the field as a 6-0 defeat at Rotherham and a 7-3 home defeat to Leyton Orient in 1979.
It is fair to say that he rescued Chelsea from extinction, and he can boast of setting them on the road to modernity by securing the freehold on its Stamford Bridge Ground from property dealers Marler Estates, enabling its conversion into a 40,000 plus capacity all seater stadium. His business acumen attracted quality players like Pat Nevin, Dave Speedie and Kerry Dixon, and by 1984 the club had returned to the then First Division suffering only one more one season in 1988. With the advent of the Premier League in 1992, Chelsea regained the glamour factor winning trophies such as FA Cup in 1997 and 2000 and the old European Cup Winners Cup with star continental imports such as Ruud Gullit (he of the “sexy football” vibe), Gianfranco Zola, Marcus Desailly and Gianluca Vialli along with English grit such as Dennis Wise and Michael Duberry (both eventually Leeds bound).
But his time at the Bridge was also characterised by grandiose gestures such as the construction of an electric fence around the Bridge to deter hooliganism (Chelsea fans had a particularly notorious reputation in that dark era of the 80s in English football) which was never switched on due to a refusal of permission by Greater London Council on safety grounds. His period in charge also say spectacular ruptures with friends such as Vice Chair and lifelong Blues fan Matthew Harding who was crucial to their revival, but who Bates banned from the boardroom in 1995 and who died the following year in a helicopter crash with no reconciliation with his erstwhile ally. Ruud Gullit who had steered Chelsea to the FA Cup in 1997, their first major trophy in sixteen years, was sacked the following year reportedly by teletext. Bates’ match programme notes became compulsive reading as he played out his feuds to the wider Chelsea community. It was a playbook that Leeds fans were to become used to.
Bates eventually sold the club, again in a parlous debt situation, to Roman Abramovich in 2003 and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a member of the FA Executive Board, Bates was a prominent figure in the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium being appointed chair of Wembley National Stadium Limited in 1997 only to resign in 2001 owing to what he felt was lack of progress on the project.
And so the unlikeliest White Knight arrived to save Leeds United oblivion. To reprise briefly what was the lie of the land then in January 2005. Leeds had been relegated from the Premier League in May 2004 with debts amounting to £100m as a result of the boom-and-bust era under Peter Ridsdale which saw scintillating form on the pitch leading to four successive top four finishes, a UEFA Cup semi-final place and, the piece de resistance, a Champions League semi-final appearance in 2001. It seemed only a matter of time before trophies started rolling in as David O’Leary’s young team (his “babies” as he cringingly called them) with young stars like Harry Kewell, Alan Smith, Stephen McPhail Jonathan Woodgate who had broken into the first team from the youth squad who had won the FA Youth Cup in 1997 augmented by established first teamers Lucas Radebe, Gary Kelly and Lee Bowyer and then joined by exciting arrivals on transfer such as Rio Ferdinand, Mark Viduka and Robbie Keane enthralled fans and football lovers generally with attacking, fearless prowess.
But his time at the Bridge was also characterised by grandiose gestures such as the construction of an electric fence around the Bridge to deter hooliganism (Chelsea fans had a particularly notorious reputation in that dark era of the 80s in English football) which was never switched on due to a refusal of permission by Greater London Council on safety grounds. His period in charge also say spectacular ruptures with friends such as Vice Chair and lifelong Blues fan Matthew Harding who was crucial to their revival, but who Bates banned from the boardroom in 1995 and who died the following year in a helicopter crash with no reconciliation with his erstwhile ally. Ruud Gullit who had steered Chelsea to the FA Cup in 1997, their first major trophy in sixteen years, was sacked the following year reportedly by teletext. Bates’ match programme notes became compulsive reading as he played out his feuds to the wider Chelsea community. It was a playbook that Leeds fans were to become used to.
Bates eventually sold the club, again in a parlous debt situation, to Roman Abramovich in 2003 and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a member of the FA Executive Board, Bates was a prominent figure in the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium being appointed chair of Wembley National Stadium Limited in 1997 only to resign in 2001 owing to what he felt was lack of progress on the project.
And so the unlikeliest White Knight arrived to save Leeds United oblivion. To reprise briefly what was the lie of the land then in January 2005. Leeds had been relegated from the Premier League in May 2004 with debts amounting to £100m as a result of the boom-and-bust era under Peter Ridsdale which saw scintillating form on the pitch leading to four successive top four finishes, a UEFA Cup semi-final place and, the piece de resistance, a Champions League semi-final appearance in 2001. It seemed only a matter of time before trophies started rolling in as David O’Leary’s young team (his “babies” as he cringingly called them) with young stars like Harry Kewell, Alan Smith, Stephen McPhail Jonathan Woodgate who had broken into the first team from the youth squad who had won the FA Youth Cup in 1997 augmented by established first teamers Lucas Radebe, Gary Kelly and Lee Bowyer and then joined by exciting arrivals on transfer such as Rio Ferdinand, Mark Viduka and Robbie Keane enthralled fans and football lovers generally with attacking, fearless prowess.
The trouble was that the sunny uplands of the present and future were built on a pyramid of high interest loans from hedge funds secured against twenty years of season ticket sales; HP payment arrangements for new arrivals such as Mark Viduka, five year deals with excessive wages and a culture of excess and extravagance throughout the club with directors flying in private jets to away matches and 17-year-old youth players on wages of £6k a week. All this was mortgaged against annual participation in the Champions League and when Leeds failed to secure this objective for the second successive season in 2002, the whole edifice was to crumble with the departures of Ferdinand, Woodgate, Bowyer, Keane, Smith and Danny Mills in the next two seasons and the sacking of O’Leary as manager in June 2002. The cull was completed after relegation with only Gary Kelly and Michael Duberry remaining.
When Bates arrived, the club was run by a group of local businessmen headed by insolvency practitioner Gerard Krasner who had mortgaged their own properties to keep the club running but clearly lacked the wherewithal to carry on for the long haul. The Chelsea connections were always going to rankle with elements of the fan base but after false hopes had been raised by the prospects of rescue by Bahraini sheiks or Ugandan property developers; it was patently obvious that Bates was the only show in town. The prospect of administration averted (for now) Leeds ended the first of what was to be a sentence of sixteen years exile from the top flight in fourteenth position.
The arrival of reinforcements to the squad such as Rob Hulse, Richard Cresswell, Eddie Lewis and David Healy led to optimism that we could get promotion in the 2005-06 season. However the goal of securing the automatic route back to the Premiership was undermined by Bates’ decision to sell another homegrown starlet Aaron Lennon to Spurs who subsequently went to play for Everton and England. The absence of Lennon’s pace on the right flank was arguably the crucial difference between us going up automatically and having to do it through the play-offs. And so it was that thousands of us flocked to Cardiff on the third Sunday of May 2006 perhaps more in hope rather than expectation of a return to the Promised Land. Our abject 3-0 defeat to a hungry and ‘up for it’ Watford side put paid to any such optimism.
When Bates arrived, the club was run by a group of local businessmen headed by insolvency practitioner Gerard Krasner who had mortgaged their own properties to keep the club running but clearly lacked the wherewithal to carry on for the long haul. The Chelsea connections were always going to rankle with elements of the fan base but after false hopes had been raised by the prospects of rescue by Bahraini sheiks or Ugandan property developers; it was patently obvious that Bates was the only show in town. The prospect of administration averted (for now) Leeds ended the first of what was to be a sentence of sixteen years exile from the top flight in fourteenth position.
The arrival of reinforcements to the squad such as Rob Hulse, Richard Cresswell, Eddie Lewis and David Healy led to optimism that we could get promotion in the 2005-06 season. However the goal of securing the automatic route back to the Premiership was undermined by Bates’ decision to sell another homegrown starlet Aaron Lennon to Spurs who subsequently went to play for Everton and England. The absence of Lennon’s pace on the right flank was arguably the crucial difference between us going up automatically and having to do it through the play-offs. And so it was that thousands of us flocked to Cardiff on the third Sunday of May 2006 perhaps more in hope rather than expectation of a return to the Promised Land. Our abject 3-0 defeat to a hungry and ‘up for it’ Watford side put paid to any such optimism.
However what none of us suspected was that this defeat had laid the ground for future calamity. Having seen his strategy of getting Leeds back to the PL on the cheap fail, Bates in the following season was to turn his attention to Plan B which was to put the club into administration at the most opportune moment. The opportunity presented itself when - with one game to go, relegation to League One was virtually assured due to our hugely inferior goal difference to that of the club above us, Hull City, - Bates called in the administrators with the club debt at £35m including £7m to the HMRC who incensed by the obligation of clubs in administration to pay off their football debts in full while settling for much lower terms for the other creditors including the taxman, decided to take a stand. They challenged Bates’ deal to buy the club from off shore companies with connections to him in the British Virgin Islands and to repay creditors with a rate of one penny in the pound. After a summer of shenanigans, the Football League agreed to allow Bates to circumvent normal insolvency procedures with the proviso of a 15-point deduction.
Bates also imposed Dennis Wise as manager on a hostile fan base. He waged war on the Official Supporters Club and banned those who didn’t like from the boardroom. On our return to the Championship he presided over the dismantling of the core of the squad that got us promotion and who with additions could have got us to the PL in order to build bars and restaurants around Elland Road. He undermined Simon Grayson before sacking him.
But that is all in our past. We have moved on. Rest in Peace, Ken.
Bates also imposed Dennis Wise as manager on a hostile fan base. He waged war on the Official Supporters Club and banned those who didn’t like from the boardroom. On our return to the Championship he presided over the dismantling of the core of the squad that got us promotion and who with additions could have got us to the PL in order to build bars and restaurants around Elland Road. He undermined Simon Grayson before sacking him.
But that is all in our past. We have moved on. Rest in Peace, Ken.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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