Come In Number Six

For some reason when I originally read the post excerpted below from the UK Left Network Yahoo Discussion group, I immediately associated it with the comedic daftness of the underrated Fairly Secret Army but a quick read of the article on the sitcom on the Off The Telly website revealed that I had misremembered David Nobbs comedy big time.*

No matter, I still can't get my head round the fascination for Party names, false names and all the rest of it.** Groups like the CPGB, the ICC and the RCG seem to indulge in this sort of stuff more than most. I take on board that there will be occasions when people will sometimes have to use false names to protect themselves from possible victimisation in the workplace, when undergoing political work and such like, but the stuff and nonesense below is nothing more than the self-delusion of people living in Palmers Green kidding themselves on it's Petrograd 1917. Of course, they wish it was the latter.

"I wonder how Mark Fischer's writing under the name 'Ian Mahoney' assists the CPGB in promoting its agenda. Or Peter Manson writing under names like 'Alan Fox', 'Simon Harvey' and 'Jim Blackstock'? Or John Bridge also writing under names like 'Jack Conrad' and 'James Marshall'.

Or how about 'S.L Kenning' and 'S.W. Kenning', who respectively claimed to know much about the SLP and the SWP respectively.

In the case of 'S.W. Kenning' they probably could have got done under the trade descriptions act, since when Peter Manson was writing under the former, pre-Simon Harvey name, he at least had some real knowledge of what he was writing about from the inside. 'S.W.Kenning' 'kenned' fuck all about the SWP.

I could go on.... But then the CPGB are the most amazing bunch of hypocrites."

Of course the guy who wrote the above had got the arse because as an ex-member of the CPGB he had been uncovered by his ex-comrades as someone who had also written articles and letters under a series of different names. A funny postscipt to all this is that in the very next issue of Weekly Worker, following the post above, the letters page carries a letter from a 'Ian Mahoney' followed immediately by a letter from a 'Mark Fischer'.

If that's the vanguard, what does it say about the rest of us?

* Like I say, memory plays tricks at time and I can only guess the reason that I remembered Fairly Secret Army so wrongly was because I can still, in my mind's eye, remember the scene from the series where Geoffrey Palmer's character, in infiltrating a far left organisation, tells his local cadre: "That I will get round to brushing up on the works of Lenin after I finish this Dick Francis novel I've been reading." I also remember Citizen Smith being funny - I was wrong on that score as well.

** Aye, confession time. When I once had pretentions to maybe writing an article or a book review for the Socialist Standard, I even came up with a nom-de-plume to write it under: mel stead, an abbreviation of Hemel Hempstead. Naturally, I thought it was terribly witty and clever, and of course never did get round to writing anything for the Standard.