Fascist driven out of Hulme Asda
squatticus | 03.09.2004 10:35
BNP activist Joe Finnon was working in Asda in racially-harmonious Hulme - until we raised the alarm.
Joe Finnon has left Hulme Asda, local anti-fascists have learned.
WP and friends leafleted the store to warn fellow workers on 19th August.
(See:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/manchester/2004/08/296608.html )
Yesterday, whilst one of the leafleters was getting his groceries, he was approached by an evidently chuffed member of staff. The Asda worker announced that on the day following the leafleting, Finnon had been called in by management - that was the last time he had been seen on the premises.
Have Asda sent him to the freezer to sleep with the fish-fingers? Who knows. But if not, and he tries to return to the University of Manchester in September, he'd better realise students and staff will in no way tolerate a Nazi in their midst.
NAZIS ARE NOT WELCOME ON CAMPUS - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
WP and friends leafleted the store to warn fellow workers on 19th August.
(See:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/manchester/2004/08/296608.html ) Yesterday, whilst one of the leafleters was getting his groceries, he was approached by an evidently chuffed member of staff. The Asda worker announced that on the day following the leafleting, Finnon had been called in by management - that was the last time he had been seen on the premises.
Have Asda sent him to the freezer to sleep with the fish-fingers? Who knows. But if not, and he tries to return to the University of Manchester in September, he'd better realise students and staff will in no way tolerate a Nazi in their midst.
NAZIS ARE NOT WELCOME ON CAMPUS - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
squatticus
Comments
Hide the following 25 comments
See also
04.09.2004 00:09
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Socialist Unity Network
A security assessment
Andy Newman
My professional expertise is in security. It is not often that this is useful in my private life. However the infiltration of the SWP for a year by two BNP members (Joe Finnon and Diane Stoker) should give us all cause for self examination. The most important thing to say is that this is an attack on the whole left, and we must stand in solidarity with the SWP comrades. Now is not the time for point scoring. The last thing we need now is for the SWP to feel that this is being used a stick to beat them by the rest of the left. The SWP are our comrades and we must stand together.
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Weekly Worker 542 Thursday September 2 2004
BNP infiltrates SWP
Two leading members of the Socialist Workers Party’s youth wing in Manchester have revealed themselves to be members of the far-right British National Party, employed to gather information on the British left. Joe Finnon, 21, and Diane Stoker, 19, both originally from the north east, joined the SWP at Manchester University freshers’ fair last September with the sole purpose of supplying misleading information about far-right activists in Burnley and relaying information back to the BNP, it emerged last month.
googlin
and
04.09.2004 00:20
John Nicholson
Two young students attending University in Manchester for the last year, one from Sunderland the other from South Shields, have recently been exposed as BNP "spies". In their time in Manchester these two have successfully "infiltrated" a series of campaigns, from the Manchester Social Forum to the Stop the War Coalition, Respect and the Socialist Workers Party. They have reported back to the BNP throughout the course of their activities and now have been outed, on various websites of opposing political persuasion and in the Morning Star.
still googlin...
Not the Manchester Social Forum they didn't
04.09.2004 09:15
very recently and i had never met them until i saw them outside M & S on the picket. They didn't attend any SF meetings, never did any actions with us and I wouldn't have known who they were except for that one meeting outside M & S.
don't think that counts as successful inflitration meself.
me
hierarchy and inflitration
04.09.2004 09:25
I think its important to point this out. Because the googled comment from John Nicholson makes the SWP, Respect and Manchester Social Forum sound implicity like similar organisations with the same weaknesses. This is not the case.
me again
Infiltration
04.09.2004 12:35
H.
two points
04.09.2004 13:10
2. If the BNP-SWPers went to the picket of M&S they were among the only SWPers who did! SWP support for this long-running protest has been pitiful.
communist
whoa there, you touchy communists
04.09.2004 21:05
Hey Communist. re "scoring cheap political points" , don't know what happened to London Greenpeace but I suspect they had positions such as secretary, etc. that were formalised to some extent and therefore could be infiltrated, Manchester Social Forum doesn't and hasn't been inflitrated by anyone. Miss the point, why don't cha?
No intention to score anything (could you be trying to score cheap sneery political points here? cause it won't work, i'm not arsed one way or another frankly, just saying what i've seen).
jesus. communists can be so touchy.
and yes, the SWP do have easy entry, so what? I'm talking about hierarchical structure here. Its not how you get in, its how you get into power that matters.
I agree that the first SWP's I saw on the picket were the BNP-SWPers.
and?
me
no, honestly
04.09.2004 23:17
London Greenpeace were so anti-hierarchical it was untrue. They would die with shame if you suggested anyone in it was ever the holder of a formal title.
Sorry if I sounded touchy but I honestly don't get why or how being non-hierarchical makes an organisation harder to infiltrate. All you need to do in something without an organised structure is hang around a lot and volunteer for lots of things.
Anyway this is all beside the point. The SWP can be slagged for lots of things (including not supporting the M&S pickets and running 'Unite against fascism' which encouraged people to vote Labour to keep out the BNP) but the fact that they were the target for infiltration by fascists actually proves more that they were considered (wrongly in my view and probably yours but we weren't doing the infiltration) to be some sort of threat.
Every type of anti-establishment outfit, of every variant of hierarchical or otherwise, communist, anarchist, national liberationist, you name it, has had some attempts at infiltration. Now here's a really cheap political point - if your organisation is truly the only one ever to not have suffered such attention from any quarter - maybe its cos nobody thought there was anything worth finding out or disrupting. Didn't want to say that but it is the logical conclusion of what you are saying...
touchy communist
you and me
04.09.2004 23:26
1. London Greenpeace were so anti-hierarchical it was untrue. They would die with shame if you suggested anyone in it was ever the holder of a formal title.
Sorry if I sounded touchy but I honestly don't get why or how being non-hierarchical makes an organisation harder to infiltrate. All you need to do in something without an organised structure is hang around a lot and volunteer for lots of things. It takes a while to win people’s confidence in the same way it takes a while to be elected to some position of responsibility, but the net result is the same.
Anyway this is all beside the point. The SWP can be slagged for lots of things (including not supporting the M&S pickets and running 'Unite against fascism' which encouraged people to vote Labour to keep out the BNP) but the fact that they were the target for infiltration by fascists actually proves more that they were considered (wrongly in my view and probably yours but we weren't doing the infiltration) to be some sort of threat.
Every type of anti-establishment outfit, of every variant of hierarchical or otherwise, communist, anarchist, national liberationist, you name it, has had some attempts at infiltration. Now here's a really cheap political point - if your organisation is truly the only one ever to not have suffered such attention from any quarter - maybe its cos nobody thought there was anything worth finding out or disrupting. Didn't want to say that but it is the logical conclusion of what you are saying...
2. And nothing. This was me scoring a cheap political point off the SWP...
touchy communist
Unconvinced
04.09.2004 23:55
What about the Italian, whose has also infiltrated the ISM, code named "Abbotoloni" and aledgedly works for both SISMI and MOSSAD? And the other one in London.
Are these just silly scare stories.
H.
Correction
05.09.2004 00:21
H.
Italians
07.09.2004 16:46
Unsuccessful Mossad spy
(Dont Mention the Italians)
08.09.2004 00:32
A man in a pub near Piccadilly told me. He was dressed in a blue/black suit and wearing a bowler hat, and went by the name of Harty, or it might have been Hardy. He was overweight with puffed-up, rosy cheeks, and thin black slicked-back hair. I had only been out of prison for 3 days so my first pint made me a little cloudy headed and euphoric, and severely blunted my cool tell-it-how-it-is logic.
However, I do remember he snapped on to politics quickly, and I ended up explaining Tony Blair's 'Third Way'. Blair looks in the mirror each morning, I told him, and says three times:"What would Maggie Do?". Anyhow, I just didn't believe him in the end, despite all the stuff he new about Manchester (and the Italians), and about me; and besides all the coincidences. He came out with so much, I couldn't keep up.
I came round to thinking he was a smart but sad bloke, who told such terribly bad jokes he should have been locked up(or at least taken in for questioning by the cops and ruffed up a little). His partner, Lorrelle (I think), had left him, hence he was just chatting me up.
One other thing I remember is that he was meant to meet someone called Stan in the pub, but he hadn't showed by the time I left. I was stood up too, by the sister of the Dutch bloke I had just shared a cell with for two months. I was meant to pass on some important messages to her that Vincent couldn't write in letters because the cops read them, and we weren't allowed to use the phones.
There could have been some simple explanation: like Harty was a friend of Vincent’s and was sussing me out you know, in case I was cop - Vincent was a big time smuggler, you see. I may have told Vincent most of the stuff that Harty said to me. What gets me it that I didn't ask a few direct questions; I just played along. Don't know if it was the booze, just having got my freedom, or paranoa. Who knows, but that's one half plausible explanation, and there are probably others too.
Although I never heard from Vince again (he ignored my letters) which was very odd because we got very close. Talking about me being a cop, Vince could have been a plant to get info out of me and other prisoners. You sing like a choir boy when you're inside.
So do you or does anyone else know this Hardy, bloke. If not, take it as complete bollux unless you have any other proof. I dont really know what he was banging on about, if anything at all, and I really dont want to know. And in any case, I tell you one thing, for certain, it's impossible to get any sort of proof in these cases, where someone is suspected as being a spy/agent. I did not ever intend to mention this, and will no more. So it's best forgotten about. It's best for everyone, really!
Keep Schtum
H.
Failed organisation
08.09.2004 12:05
You know it makes sense.
me
Re: me
09.09.2004 09:57
Yes, London Greenpeace (v. non-hierarchical etc) at one point had more corporate spooks than activists in meetings, and they got info and 'power' by, er, getting involved, and, um, offering to do things. Oh how our non-hierarchical structures stand up to 'the authorities'!! (having said that, the cops did admit they found it very hard to infiltrate anti-roads stuff in the 90s, but that wasn't simply to do with hierarchy).
@
@narchist
Tell us bout the road protest
09.09.2004 11:50
Hanarchist.
never said i wasn't
09.09.2004 11:54
but that wasn't the intention of the original comment, regardless.
me
just want to point out
09.09.2004 21:46
and i'll surprise everyone by saying, nice one squatticus et al for getting that bastard out of ASDA.
cheers
heather
I'm not from Manchester and dont know heather
09.09.2004 22:55
What most likely happened is that a bloke names Harty who I had bever met before, tried to recruit me as an agent in London. I went a long with it initially. He said I'd be working with three others: an Italian London, another in Manchester, and a Jewish bloke (he accidently or deliberately let drop one of their christian names). He said, I'd become the forth member of the team.
I had joked a bit with my cell mate (I'd just been released from prison)about becoming an informer/agent who may have passed this information on.
I asked what they wanted me to do. He said, they were interested in any info about the far left, but specifically mentioned the ISM, including names & addresses, meeting places. I was offered $2000 per week, with 1 months notice for every year I worked.
At the time I didn't take this seriously. Even if I had done I would never have said yes. But looking back it was probably genuine. I think this bloke Harty was so brazen, because the whole story sounds like complete bollocks; nobody would believe it.
H.
no worries
09.09.2004 23:09
aarrggghh
i think my rats an undercover chicken
heather
Whoareyoucallingafuckinganarchist?
10.09.2004 23:48
Verytouchycommunist
anti-fascist?
11.09.2004 20:26
palestinian
yes!
11.09.2004 21:03
x
people not political parties
Clarification
15.09.2004 11:15
bob
e-mail:
Victory_Intifada@hotmail.com
parz1fal
12.12.2004 00:31
henry fowler