Chairman Mao

I fail to see how the police and the Crown Prosecution Service rate going to charge anyone over the alleged 'slaves' who have been members of a Maoist cult for the past 30 years or so.

Much has been said, initially by the police, of three women being held prisoner by 'invisible handcuffs' for three decades, yet if this is true it surely has to be the case that the women put their restraints on willingly - and then threw away the key.

Because by any measure of common sense they were free to walk away at any time,  despite the fact that they had been indoctrinated into a political cum religious cult - which is not hugely different to similar organisations I've come across in my time.

Rod Liddle writing in the Sunday Times has a good handle on these things and doesn't take any of them too seriously - which is a good thing, I think.      


By Rod Liddle

I suppose it is going too far to say that anyone who was a member of a far-left Marxist revolutionary party in that most unhinged of decades, the 1970s, was mentally ill. That would take in quite a large proportion of the previous government, most of the BBC (probably including the weathermen), High Court judges, charity bosses and indeed myself. “Fantastically deluded” would be kinder. Certainly we did not think we were mad as we stood on street corners selling our preposterous newspapers. We thought we were simply in possession of an important truth that the unenlightened masses couldn’t grasp.

I was a Trot in the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and I sold the newspaper alongside supporters of Rosa Luxemburg in the Spartacist League, burly unreformed Stalinists in the Communist party, twitchy fellow travellers in the International Marxist group and the weirdly cultish and secretive sectarians of the Workers Revolutionary party (WRP). Most of us were members of parties that had the word “workers” somewhere in the title or the small print. None of us had ever done any, of course.

But we didn’t think we were mad. The people we thought were right on the edge, whom we looked up to almost with envy, were the Maoists. When it came to absolutist political points of view, the Maoists were in a league of their own. Also, they had the best terminology: they could use terms such as “capitalist lackey” and “running dog” without appearing embarrassed.

It’s good to see the Maoists back in the news, then: it’s been a while. Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his missus, Chanda, 67, have been arrested and bailed in connection with the extreme left-wing “collective” they are said to have run in an insalubrious part of south London. Three women were allegedly “rescued” from the house, having supposedly been held captive for more than 30 years.

Balakrishnan, or Comrade Bala, the form of address he allegedly preferred, had set up the Workers Institute of Marxism- Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, not to my mind a terribly catchy title. Apparently, its adherents believed the Chinese People’s Liberation Army would invade the UK by the end of the year — 1978. As things transpired, it invaded Vietnam instead.

Here the Maoists were not so mad, or not notably madder than the rest of us. We all signed up to the certainty of deliverance, which would arrive very, very soon. When I asked my local party boss how this deliverance would come, he leant close and whispered: “We’re going to arm the workers, Rod. We’re going to give them guns!” I didn’t ask how.

An absolutist mindset was required that was pristine as a consequence of its lack of compromise — or common sense, as you might put it. Little wonder that both the WRP and the SWP were torn apart by bullying, sexual misconduct and abuse of power: these organisations were — are — cults, with their millennial fantasies and minuscule memberships and lowering, powerful party bosses.

Still, Maoists in Brixton in 2013! It’s like finding one of those Japanese soldiers hunkering down in the jungles of Guadalcanal, unaware that the war ended decades ago. These days our end-times millennialists tend to be in the green movement, and the deliverance they seem to yearn for is dead polar bears and the Earth burnt to a crisp. I wonder if, 30 years hence, a global warming cult will be discovered still holed up in south London, still keeping the faith.