Jo Clifford, Writer, Performer, and Trans Rights Leader

                                                                     

I met Jo Clifford at the Candlelight vigil for trans people outside the Scottish Parliament during December 2019. I talked to her e.g. about the Gender Recognition Act, and she then gave an inspiring speech. She has since been pro-active in Brazil.


                               SALTIRE SOCIETY

Jo Clifford was born in North Staffordshire in 1951 where she was raised as a boy.

This entailed an enforced separation from her mother at the age of 7 when she was sent to boarding school; the resulting trauma was intensified at the sudden death of her mother when she was 12.

She discovered her vocation for theatre when she played women’s roles in school plays. That was when it became clear to her she was not male. The terror, shame and confusion of this realisation in a completely ignorant, hostile, and prejudiced environment unfortunately  became  associated  with  the  theatre.  It  took  her twenty years to recover enough to find her voice as a theatre writer (with “Losing Venice” in 1985) and another twenty years after that to re-discover her vocation as an actress and performer (with “The Gospel According To Jesus Queen of Heaven” in 2009)

                                  PLAYWRIGHT'S STUDIO

Jo Clifford

Jo has written over 70 performed scripts which encompass every dramatic form, and her work has been performed all over the world.

                                                                SCOTTISH BOOK TRUST

Jo loves running writer’s workshops, and is hugely experienced at doing it. She has led writer’s workshops with the Traverse, the Festival Hub, Playwrights’ Workshop, in secondary schools; in Valencia, in Singapore, in Mumbai, and has designed and led Masters’ courses in Playwriting at Queen Margaret University. Besides playwriting, she can teach workshops that focus on radio writing, on gender, on bereavement. In fact, on anything you care to mention

                               TEATRO DO  MUNDO

Jo is a writer, performer, poet and teacher based in Edinburgh.

She is the author of about 80 plays, many of which have been translated into various languages and performed all over the world.

Her original plays include: Losing Venice, Lucy’s Play, Playing With Fire, Ines de Castro, Light In The Village, War in America, The Tree Of Life, The Tree of Knowledge, God’s New Frock, The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven, An Apple a Day, Sex, Chips and the Holy Ghost and Every One.

Plays based on other sources include: Heaven Bent, Hell Bound, Great Expectations, La Vie de Boheme, Tchaikovsky and The Queen of Spades, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Don Duardos, The Force Of Destiny, Faust Parts One and Two.

Translations include: The House With Two Doors, The Doctor of Honour, Schism in England, Life Is A Dream, Celestina.

Radio Plays include: Desert Places, Ending Time, Writing Home to Mother, The Leopard, Torquemada, Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead, Spam Fritters, La Princesse de Cleves.

Libretti include: Ines de Castro (music: James McMillan), Anna (music: Craig Armstrong), The Magic Flute (adapted from Mozart), Hansel and Gretel (adapted from Humperdinck).

She is an Associate Artist of Chris Goode and Company.

Her transition from John to Jo has enabled her to become an actor and performer. Performances include “God’s New Frock”, “Sex, Chips and the Holy Ghost”, “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven”, “High Heels Aren’t Compulsory”.

Work in 2015 includes the opening of a new dramatisation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (Sell A Door theatre Company); revivals of “Great Expectations” (Studio Life, Tokyo, and Dundee Rep); “Anna Karenina” (Manchester Royal Exchange and West Yorkshire Playhouse), “Ines de Castro The Opera” (Scottish Opera), and “The Gospel According To Jesus, Queen Of Heaven” (Edinburgh festival fringe at Summerhall).

In 2016 Jo will be performing a new play she has co-written with Chris Goode for the National Theatre of Scotland. She will be perfuming her “Jesus Queen of Heaven” at Queer Contact in Manchester and Outburst Arts Festival in Belfast.

Chris Goode and Company are mounting a new production of "Every One" in March 2016 in Battersea Arts Centre.

                                         Nick Hern Books

                                                   

                                                                                    

                                                                       

  

    JESUS, QUEEN OF HEAVEN

Almost a decade after it was first performed Jo Clifford says her play The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven is still provoking "extraordinary violence and hatred but at the same time very intense love".

The one-woman play which portrays a transgender Christ has most recently toured Brazil, where it has become the "most talked-about" show there sparking both strong protests and devotion.

Clifford says everyone involved in the Brazilian production has "really suffered".

                                    IN MEMORIUM SYVIA RIVERA


                                                       

                       OUR ARMIES ARE RISING AND WE ARE GETTING STRONGER

Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (Karl Marx)

                                                                                   

Many of the recent cataclysmic events can be blamed on Capitalism. While we're looking for something different, it would be a good idea to consider Marx's Das Kapital again.


                                                  VOLUME 1: PDF



                                                    BRITANNICA


Das Kapital, (German: Capital) one of the major works of the 19th-century economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83), in which he expounded his theory of the capitalist system, its dynamism, and its tendencies toward self-destruction. He described his purpose as to lay bare “the economic law of motion of modern society.” The first volume was published in Berlin in 1867; the second and third volumes, edited by his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95), were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, respectively.


                Karl Marx  (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)



Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.




                                                                       

                                                    KARL MARX : Wikipedia

                                                    DAS KAPITAL: Wikipedia





Das Kapital, also called Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, pronounced [das kapiˈtaːl kʁɪˈtiːk deːɐ poˈliːtɪʃən økonomˈiː]; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics by Karl Marx.^[1][2][3] Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.^[4]

                                         
 In Das Kapital (1867), Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labor, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value. The owner of the means of production is able to claim the right to this surplus value because he or she is legally protected by the ruling regime through property rights and the legally established distribution of shares which are by law only to be distributed to company owners and their board members. The historical section shows how these rights were acquired in the first place chiefly through plunder and conquest and the activity of the merchant and "middle-man". In producing capital (produced goods), the workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour. Das Kapital proposes an explanation of the "laws of motion" of the capitalist economic system from its origins to its future by describing the dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, commercial competition, the banking system, the decline of the profit rate, land-rents, et cetera. The critique of the political economy of capitalism proposes:

• Wage-labour is the basic "cell-form" (trade unit) of a capitalist society. Moreover, because commerce as a human activity implied no morality beyond that required to buy and sell goods and services, the growth of the market system made discrete entities of the economic, the moral and the legal spheres of human activity in society; hence, subjective moral value is separate from objective economic value. Subsequently, political economy—the just distribution of wealth and "political arithmetick" about taxes—became three discrete fields of human activity, namely economics, law and ethics, politics and economics divorced.^{[citation needed]}
• "The economic formation of society [is] a process of natural history". Thus, it is possible for a political economist to objectively study the scientific laws of capitalism, given that its expansion of the market system of commerce had objectified human economic relations. The use of money (cash nexus) voided religious and political illusions about its economic value and replaced them with commodity fetishism, the belief that an object (commodity) has inherent economic value. Because societal economic formation is a historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections among capitalists.^{[citation needed]} The economic formation (individual commerce) of a society thus precedes the human administration of an economy (organised commerce).
• The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy (German: gegensätzliche Bewegung) describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour and so the class struggle between labour and capital, the wage labourer and the owner of the means of production. These capitalist economic contradictions operate "behind the backs" of the capitalists and the workers as a result of their activities and yet remain beyond their immediate perceptions as men and women and as social classes.^[5]
• The economic crises (recession, depression, et cetera) that are rooted in the contradictory character of the economic value of the commodity (cell-unit) of a capitalist society are the conditions that propitiate proletarian revolution—which The Communist Manifesto (1848) collectively identified as a weapon forged by the capitalists which the working class "turned against the bourgeoisie itself".
• In a capitalist economy, technological improvement and its consequent increased production augment the amount of material wealth (use value) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of the same wealth, thereby diminishing the rate of profit—a paradox characteristic of economic crisis in a capitalist economy. "Poverty in the midst of plenty" consequent to over-production and under-consumption

THE AMAZING ASSASSINATION OF PRIME MINISTER SPENCER PERCEVAL

                                                                     

         The seven Prime Ministers who died in office

Name	Year	Country	Title	Cause of death
Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington	1743	Great Britain	Prime Minister
Henry Pelham	1754	Great Britain	Prime Minister
Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham	1782	Great Britain	Prime Minister	Illness – influenza
William Pitt the Younger	1806	United Kingdom	Prime Minister	Illness
Spencer Perceval	1812	United Kingdom	Prime Minister	Assassination – shooting
George Canning	1827	United Kingdom	Prime Minister	Illness

Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston

1865

United Kingdom

Prime Minister

Illness

                                                          SPENCER PERCEVAL  Wiki

                           

                                                                       

At 5:15 pm, on the evening of 11 May 1812, Perceval was on his way to attend the inquiry into the Orders in Council. As he entered the lobby of the House of Commons, a man stepped forward, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest. Perceval fell to the floor, after uttering something that was variously heard as "murder" and "oh my God".^[14] They were his last words. By the time he had been carried into an adjoining room and propped up on a table with his feet on two chairs, he was senseless, although there was still a faint pulse. When a surgeon arrived a few minutes later, the pulse had stopped, and Perceval was declared dead.^[7]

At first it was feared that the shot might signal the start of an uprising, but it soon became apparent that the assassin – who had made no attempt to escape – was a man with an obsessive grievance against the Government and had acted alone. The assassin, John Bellingham, was a merchant who believed he had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia and was entitled to compensation from the government, but all his petitions had been rejected.^[14] Perceval's body was laid on a sofa in the speaker's drawing room and removed to Number 10 in the early hours of 12 May. That same morning an inquest was held at the Cat and Bagpipes public house on the corner of Downing Street and a verdict of wilful murder was returned.^[7]

One of Perceval's most noted critics, especially on the question of Catholic emancipation, was the cleric Sydney Smith. In Peter Plymley's Letters Smith writes:

If I lived at Hampstead upon stewed meats and claret; if I walked to church every Sunday before eleven young gentlemen of my own begetting, with their faces washed, and their hair pleasingly combed; if the Almighty had blessed me with every earthly comfort–how awfully would I pause before I sent forth the flame and the sword over the cabins of the poor, brave, generous, open-hearted peasants of Ireland

John Bellingham was tried on Friday 15 May 1812 at the Old Bailey, where he argued that he would have preferred to shoot the British Ambassador to Russia, but insisted as a wronged man he was justified in killing the representative of his oppressors.                           

                                                                 

He made a formal statement to the court, saying:^[3]

Recollect, Gentlemen, what was my situation. Recollect that my family was ruined and myself destroyed, merely because it was Mr Perceval's pleasure that justice should not be granted; sheltering himself behind the imagined security of his station, and trampling upon law and right in the belief that no retribution could reach him. I demand only my right, and not a favour; I demand what is the birthright and privilege of every Englishman.

Gentlemen, when a minister sets himself above the laws, as Mr Perceval did, he does it as his own personal risk. If this were not so, the mere will of the minister would become the law, and what would then become of your liberties?

I trust that this serious lesson will operate as a warning to all future ministers, and that they will henceforth do the thing that is right, for if the upper ranks of society are permitted to act wrong with impunity, the inferior ramifications will soon become wholly corrupted.

Gentlemen, my life is in your hands, I rely confidently in your justice.

Evidence was presented that Bellingham was insane, but it was discounted by the trial judge, Sir James Mansfield. Bellingham was found guilty, and was sentenced to death.^[3]

Bellingham was hanged in public three days later. René Martin Pillet, a Frenchman who wrote an account of his ten years in England, described the sentiment of the crowd at the execution:^[4]

Farewell poor man, you owe satisfaction to the offended laws of your country, but God bless you! you have rendered an important service to your country, you have taught ministers that they should do justice, and grant audience when it is asked of them.

A subscription was raised for the widow and children of Bellingham, and "their fortune was ten times greater than they could ever have expected in any other circumstances".^[4] His widow remarried the following year.

Bellingham's skull was preserved at Barts Pathology Museum.^[5]

In September 2009 the St Neots Local History Society erected a plaque on Bellingham House in St Neots. The house, on the corner of Huntingdon Street and Cambridge Street, is said to be the birthplace of Bellingham.^[6] 

EUGENICS AND ECO_FASCISM DURING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

                                                               
                                                      
                                                                             

          Here is an extremely disturbing article by Bojo's lackey, Toby Young, He appears to be advocating mass genocide of the elderly during the coronavirus crisis.



                                                       ARTICLE BY TOBY YOUNG   (31st March 2020)




                                                                             

EXCERPTS:
Even if we accept the statistical modelling of Dr Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, which I’ll come to in a minute, spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money. That may sound cold-hearted, but this isn’t a straightforward trade-off between public health and economic health. People are killed by economic downturns just as surely as they are by pandemics and more years of life will be lost than saved if the lockdown is prolonged. The Government should end it as soon as possible and encourage people to return to work, limiting social distancing measures to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.


Okay, what about the loss of life caused by the inevitable economic recession? During this crisis, politicians have had an annoying habit of contrasting the sacred value of human life with secular, economic values and asserting that it would be morally unacceptable to trade off the former against the latter. Thus, Rishi Sunack repeatedly said he would do “whatever it takes” to save lives, while New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “I’m not willing to put a price on a human life.” Setting aside the fact that policy makers frequently do put a price on human life – when deciding how to allocate health resources, for instance – these high-sounding pronouncements ignore the fact that economic downturns cost lives. The choice politicians are making is not between saving lives and economic growth, but between sacrificing lives now and sacrificing them in the future. Being politicians, they’ve plumped for short-termism but they shouldn’t pretend that’s an act of great moral courage







                                                             TOBY YOUNG WIKI


                         

Eugenics[edit]

In 2015, Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine Quadrant entitled "The fall of meritocracy". In it he advocated what he termed "progressive eugenics." Young proposed that when the technology for selecting embryos for high intelligence is mature, it should be provided "free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs."^[65] He argued this "could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite," through a mechanism that should be acceptable to political conservatives.^[65] This argument has been criticized on scientific and ethical grounds.^[66]

In January 2018, Private Eye^[67] and the London Student^[68] revealed that Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence at University College London (UCL) in 2017, which was described by the media and a number of politicians as a "secret eugenics conference".^[69] The conference was convened by Honorary UCL professor James Thompson, and included speakers such as Richard Lynn.^[70]

Responding to these reports, Young wrote in The Spectator that he attended the conference as a journalist to report about it (which he later did) and that he "only [attended] for a few hours on a Saturday"^[63] in preparation for the "super-respectable" International Society for Intelligence Research conference in Montreal in July 2017 at which he gave a speech, which was later published.^[70][71][72] He also says that his resignation from the OfS and his presence at the conferences were unconnected.^[72]

UCL launched an investigation into the London Conference on Intelligence, of which it had previously been unaware, for potentially breaking its room booking policy, after Young's presence at one of them had been revealed.^[73][74] UCL has suspended any "further conferences of this nature".^[75]


                                      ON TORIES, BORIS JOHNSON, AND EUGENICS

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST AND OTHER CRUEL LOGIC

Johnson is a vociferous advocate of philosophical aristocracy, by which I mean not simply a believer in necessary social hierarchy, but that those who are at the top are there because they are inherently, even genetically superior. He is also known as an enthusiastic social Darwinist who believes society should be organised to flush out the weak. The importance of competition in a capitalist system for him is precisely because only the fittest succeed.

In his 2013 Margaret Thatcher Memorial Lecture, he argued that the "violent economic centrifuge" or capitalism accentuates inequalities amongst people "who are already very far from equal in raw ability" before going on to propose that people are also inherently unequal in "spiritual worth". This aristocratic ethos also encourages an interest in eugenics, shared by a number of his advisers. From this perspective, the idea he should propose a cull as a means of disease prevention becomes rather chilling.

Over the course of the last five years, the rise of the alt-right—with whom Johnson has a connection via Steve Bannon—has been alarming. One of their aims has been to shift the ‘Overton Window’, or the frame of acceptable speech. In particular, they want eugenics put back on the agenda because it helps re-establish the pseudo race science they are so fond of. Hence, one other thing we should learn from this pandemic is just how effective this project has become.

                                      SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, EVIL EUGENICIST

AWAITING THE CORONAVIRUS, a poem by Tom Leonard

                                                   AWAITING THE CORONA-VIRUS

                                                                by Tom Leonard


                                                        Dedicated to Lindsay Oliver




                                                                        

                          The South Sea cannibal Queequeg awaited death

                          On the deck of the Pequod;

                          Righteous death from the big white whale

                          He'd harpooned in a grievous way;

                          When death struck, he clung on to the mast

                          As his ship to the depths descended,

                          While his young chum Ishmael like an eel

                          Wriggled away.


                           I await the corona-virus in my Bruchton flat

                           My chest constricted as if the flu of '18 has struck

                           The church organist now recovering from his bout.

                           Is it death that I await,

                           Or eternal solitude?

                           Maybe the Hereafter is better than

                           Disastrous planetary life.


                           But Ishmael must survive

                           To turn the tide

                           When the young save humanity

                           From its dire fate

BBC RADIO SCOTLAND: Open Book Reading and Mental Health Issues

                                                              BBC RADIO SCOTLAND 

                      Sunday Morning with Richard Holloway (8th March 2020)

                      For discussion of Open Book Reading Group in Edinburgh's Botanic
           Cottage, and  related Mental Health issues  (1 hour   and 13 minutes after beginning of 
            program) please click on link, start listening and move orange blob along time axis accordingly. 
           Includes comments by Tom Leonard relating to Attention Deficitness and dementia.