Leftwing Criminologist

20 years ago: the Strangeways prison riot

2010-04-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

from this weeks issue of the Socialist

On 1 April it was 20 years since the start of the Strangeways prison 'riot'. The riot was a protest by prisoners against their appalling conditions. They initially barricaded themselves in the prison chapel, then took to the roof to raise the profile of their demands.

Iain Dalton

At the time conditions in prisons were bad. Strangeways had a certified capacity of 970, yet at the time of the riot the prison was holding 1,647 prisoners.

Prisoners on remand were in their cells 18 hours a day. Category A prisoners were in their cells 22 hours a day, only being allowed out to slop out - empty their chamber pots - for an hour's exercise and for a weekly shower. There was no change of kit for most prisoners after showers, and young prisoners had no work and few activities to keep them occupied.

The prisoners put these demands through the Manchester Evening News:

* Improved visiting facilities, including the right to physical contact with visitors and a children's play area.
* Category A prisoners to be allowed to wear their own clothes and be able to receive food parcels.
* Longer exercise periods.
* An end to the 23-hour-a-day lock-up.

Over a period of a few weeks, prisoners surrendered or were recaptured. Eventually the last five were taken off the roof in a cherry-picker.

The riot led to the setting up of a public inquiry under Lord Woolf which concluded that prison conditions were 'intolerable' and urged reform.

But a scurrilous article in the Society Guardian on 3 March this year attempted to put the responsibility for the riot onto violence-seeking prisoners and lazy prison officers who couldn't see the vision of the newly installed reforming prison governor Brendan O'Friel.

Yet the Woolf report noted that his reforms hadn't done much to alleviate the standards of prison life and called the conditions 'still wholly intolerable'.

Prisons had been understaffed for years, resulting in prisoners being locked up for longer and longer periods.

As part of the government's Fresh Start scheme for prison staffing, prisons had been reducing the number of hours overtime worked by prison officers as well as making other 'efficiency savings' whilst not making up for this by increasing staffing levels.

This also led to the increasing use of sedatives to keep control of the prison population.

After the Woolf report there was a slowdown in the growth of the prison population. Many prisons were improved so that they contained integrated sanitation and Strangeways itself was rebuilt at a cost of £55 million after the damage it had suffered during the riot. It was re-opened as Manchester prison.

But since then the prison population has shot up again. It is now over the 80,000 mark, which necessitated the use of police and court cells to hold prisoners during 2007. Although slopping out is supposed to have been phased out, it is still present in a few prisons such as Peterhead.

Some right-wing media portray prison conditions as luxury accommodation, yet as the Strangeways riot showed, it is far from the 'holiday camp' they wish to portray.

Contract Killers

2010-03-30T02:15:00.000-07:00

Review from the February 2010 issue of Socialism Today

Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, 2008, £8.99
Reviewed by
Iain Dalton

THE NEW year began with a US court throwing out a case against five Blackwater guards accused of killing between 14 and 17 Iraqis in the infamous 14 September 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad. Witnesses allege that they fired indiscriminately when the convoy they were guarding approached a crowded intersection. Thrown out on a procedural technicality, the case highlights the use of private contractors in warzones, and the way in which they can act with impunity as they go about their business of doing the dirty work of US imperialism, and other major powers. A number of claimants had reached out-of-court settlements with Blackwater.

Blackwater is a name which has become associated with the brutality of the US ‘security’ operation in Iraq. So infamous has the organisation become that it has seeped into culture. The Anti-Flag song, The Ink and The Quill, is dedicated to it, describing its forces as "the hidden fist of the free market". In the popular RPG computer game, Oblivion, ‘Blackwood Company’ mercenaries massacre a village of civilians they are informed are bandits. Several films feature Blackwater-esque companies. So much so that, in January 2009, it rebranded itself as Xe in an attempt to escape that association.

Blackwater was initially set up in 1998 as a ‘one-stop shop’ training facility by former armed forces personnel on the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, the company named for the colour of the water there. From creating a mock-up high school facility for training after the Columbine massacre to landing central government training contracts, Blackwater went from strength to strength. But it was only after the 9/11 attacks and invasion of Afghanistan that Blackwater Security Consulting was incorporated, and the company began supplying ‘security contractors’ to various wings of the military and US government, starting with providing 20 guards for the CIA’s Kabul station.

The biggest contract that Blackwater managed to land in this period was the one to guard the US viceroy in Iraq, ambassador L Paul Bremer III. The corruption and self-serving nature of the regime Bremer presided over is detailed well, from the $9 billion in unaccounted for Iraqi reconstruction funds, the ‘de-Baathification’ which threw hundreds of thousands out of work, lowering corporation tax from 40% to 15% and, crucially for Blackwater and others, Order 17, which granted immunity from prosecution to contractors in Iraq.

Jeremy Scahill does not just describe Blackwater’s rise to prominence, but that of the security contracting industry as a whole. Other mercenary outfits, such as DynCorp, Aegis, Eirlys, the Steele Foundation and others, have all benefited from the Iraq war privatisation, sending thousands of armed troops between them. Indeed, by the time Donald Rumsfeld left office in 2006, there was almost a one-to-one ratio of contractors to US armed forces personnel. (This includes other tasks, such as catering, as well as mercenary fighters.)

As with other traditional state functions, such as policing and imprisonment, privatisation has mostly proceeded from taking over peripheral functions, such as catering, transport and guard duties. It was while escorting a convoy of kitchen supplies that four under-equipped Blackwater personnel were killed in Fallujah. US forces responded by inflicting collective punishment on the city. Blackwater has its own air force, run under the name Presidential Airways, and has created its own armoured personnel carrier. As well as its original training facility, it has developed several others, including a jungle training complex in the Philippines.

It is not just from the Iraq and Afghan wars that Blackwater has made its profits. Much closer to home, it moved into New Orleans to provide security for the Department of Homeland Security and other private facilities in the city after hurricane Katrina. The company has also been involved with training elite units in the armed forces of US allies in the so-called ‘war on terror’, such as in Azerbaijan, and has suggested that it could deploy a force as peacekeepers in Sudan!

The latest edition of this book contains an extra chapter examining where Blackwater will go after the end of the Bush administration whose wars have proved so pivotal to the company’s growth. Scahill discusses how Blackwater is pulling its focus from Iraq, particularly after having landed a contract for counter-narcotics work in Latin America. It is also moving into supplying US forces with its own vehicles, such as a mine-proof SUV and surveillance blimps. Using ex-CIA operatives, it has also created Total Intelligence Solutions to bring ‘CIA-style services’ to the open market for Fortune 500 companies. But, as Scahill notes, while for Blackwater the Iraq occupation may not be its priority anymore, as long as US troops are deployed abroad, it is likely they will be accompanied by private contractors for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, as Blackwater departs, there are actually more contractors entering Iraq, the total increasing by around 2,500 over the first half of 2009. One of the main companies that the US government is replacing them with is DynCorp. Not only has this company overbilled the US government by around $13 billion for services in Iraq, it has been involved in equally or even more unwholesome activities as Blackwater. For example, there have been two separate allegations from former company employees that DynCorp was running a sex-trafficking business during the Bosnian war in 1990s. Teenage girls were brought in from Romania and Russia, with the help of the Serbian mafia, and were also traded as slaves between some DynCorp contractors. A recent Senate committee hearing heard that in 2003 a DynCorp subcontractor was killed when a bullet penetrated the car he was travelling in. The armoured car that he should have had was being used to ferry prostitutes between hotels used by DynCorp in Kuwait and Baghdad.

The extent of the privatisation of warfare and security throws up several interesting questions. Recruiting troops as mercenaries could allow countries such as the US the ability to deploy more troops without a draft or, more likely, Scahill argues, to make the troop count deployed in warzones a much more palatable level. Potentially, US security corporations may also come into conflict with the US government if they or their subsidiaries supply training or forces to regimes hostile to it. When US armed forces helped overthrow Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he was being guarded by security forces from US-based Steele Foundation.

Unfortunately, throughout the book you find yourself grappling with what point Scahill is attempting to make, apart from the generalised harm that companies such as Blackwater are inflicting on the world. Where he details the background of Blackwater’s main founder, Erik Prince, a right-wing Christian neo-con, it reads in part as if he is some sort of conspiracy nut, as if outing links between Blackwater, the White House and the Christian right will somehow stop them. At other points, you feel as if Scahill wants privatisation surgically removed from the military so it can fight wars better. While offering very informative quotations, facts and figures – there is a wealth of other events that there is not space to go into here – these are presented in chapters that sometimes do not seem to have a logical succession and can be overwhelming.

But Scahill is a journalist who is simply exposing facts for our understanding. It is up to active Marxists to take the information supplied and weave it into our analysis of modern day warfare and the perspectives in war-torn areas, such as Iraq, to give such material a practical application

Capitalist Fraudsters

2010-01-22T04:22:00.000-08:00

Letter from this weeks Socialist

In January last year when reporting the Madoff scandal the socialist posed the question of how many more fraudsters like him were going to be exposed like him. Since then we've seen the downfall of England Cricket Board backer Alan Stanford, and a report by accountancy firm, BDO, a massive increase in reported fraud.

This year reported fraud has reached £2bn a year, the financial sector alone accounting for £1.34bn a 70% increase on last year - but around 90% of the largest frauds aren't even reported at all. The fraudsters, have been using the wealth they've been able to con from greedy bankers to emulate their opulent lifestyles.

We need to take over the banks and run them democratically under workers control to use the wealth to benefit the majority of the population, not just the opulent lifestyles of a few.

Iain Dalton

A Note on the Approach of Marxists to the Police

2010-01-03T05:05:00.000-08:00

Some time ago now, there was a short polemic published on the Socialist Party in relation to the police and the state (Marxism and the State: An Exchange). The protagonist of the debate, a by then ex member of the Socialist Party had criticised the Socialist Party for its position in relation to the police, regarding that he believed the police were reactionary through and through and therefore Marxists shouldn't make appeals to them.
As the reply admitted, the police are often used to crush the workers movement and are used by the state as a tool for repression. Thus some people come to a position that the police are 'one reactionary mass'. But this is only one side of the situation. Any institution is made of human material and such peoples opinions, beliefs etc change over time. Of course, the impact of their day to day activities is important, but so is the wider world.
As people may be aware, the 1918-19 British Police Strikes were led by Socialists within the police force - now it may be objected that this was a unusual situation - but the reply in the polemic gives several others - such as Emil Eichorn taking over the Berlin police without arguement and the paralysis of the police during the May 1968 events in France. (Also, the 1917 overthrow of the Tsar was conveyed by a very excited Kharkov police chief, as Trotsky notes in The History of the Russian Revolution, chapter 8)
I'd like to add one more, in his book German Revolution 1917-1923, Pierre Broue points out that "... the Communists stepped up their propaganda work towards non-proletarian layers affected by the crisis, in particular officers and policeman."(pg729)
This was in 1923, during the hyper-inflation crisis, when if anything people were turning towards the nationalists in Germany (the Communists experienced growth too, but at a somewhat slower pace). Why approach the police? Because they aren't seperate from the class contradictions that tear through societies.

Out With the Bad Mercenaries, In With The Equally As Bad Ones

2009-11-13T03:31:00.001-08:00

As people may work out from my political views, I'm not a reader of FHM. However, on spotting a copy of the December 2009 issue which featured an article on mercenaries, I grabbed it a scribbled down a few notes from the issue, the following piece is what I've gleaned from it.

The most famous currently existing mercenary company (or civilian contractors as they prefer to be known) in the world today is probably Blackwater, responsible for the Nissour Square shootings and numerous other incidents in Iraq which propelled them into the spotlight. Such was the turmoil, that they have now changed their name to the more corporate Xe and are supposed to be being ejected from Iraq (although they have had certain contracts extended such as $20m aviation contract and are getting new contracts in Afghanistan) and replaced by other firms.

A review of the Jeremy Scahill book on Blackwater will shortly be appearing on this blog, so I won't go into too much depth on them. But the article provides interesting information on how Blackwater's fromer head, Erik Prince, has dealt with some of these incidents - for example redeploying men who had been sent home for steroid abuses, claiming that sending them home was weasting company money, or the rumour that they (Blackwater) were "...offing anyone who tried to alert the authorities about Blackwater's (allegedly numerous and ongoing) war crimes."(pg193)

However, the US are gradually handing Blackwater's contracts to other groups, mainly DynCorp. Although the coalition troops themselves are being deployed from Iraq, the article states that mercenaries hired by the US increased from 10,743 in March to 13,232 in June. Moreover, DynCorp's reputation isn't any better than Blackwater's.

The article lists a whole load of alleged shady goings on that the company have been involved with such as that,

"Two DynCorp employees seperately alleged that the company was running a sex-trafficking business during the Bosnian war in the 90's. Teenage girls were traded as slaves between DynCorp contractors. They were brought in from Romania and Russia thanks to collaboration with the Serbian mafia"(pg194)

"Meanwhile their cavalier attitude to crop-spraying while combatting the South American drug trade meant that ordinary crops got destroyed and children died..."(pg194)

"DynCorp has also being accused of sexually exploiting the local womenfolk in the Middle East. A subcontractor was killed in 2003 by a bullet penetrating the unprotected car he was riding in. Where was the armoured DynCorp car that he was meant to have? Ferrying prostitutes between DynCorp hotels in Kuwait and Baghdad, according to another subcontractor testifying at a Senate committee this year."(pg194)

The final thing that I picked up from the article was a contradiction within it. Towards the end of the article it argues that the US government finds it cheaper to pay contractors $60k-70k a year rather than the $100k it costs for a soldier in training, food, salary, healthcare, pensions etc. Yet at the same time, it talks of these mercenary contractors massively exceeding their budgets, such as DynCorp exceeding its Iraq budget by 51% and overbilling the government by $13.3bn. I'm not sure I understand the economics of mercenaries and I will have to come back to this issue at a later point.

Review: The Everlasting Staircase: A History of the Prison Officers’ Association 1939-2009

2009-09-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

From the September 2008 issue of Socialism 2008.

By David Evans with Sheila Cohen, Pluto Press, 2009, £15

Reviewed by Iain Dalton

WHEN PRISON officers went on their first ever nationwide strike two years ago, it propelled their organisation, the Prison Officers Association (POA), into the spotlight as, ironically, their leaders were threatened with imprisonment if they did not call off the action. Yet the history of trade unionism within the prison service goes back way further than this action or even the formation of the POA in 1939. Until now, it has been a relatively unwritten story, so the publication of a fairly comprehensive history is most welcome.
David Evans begins his narrative with the coming into being of the modern prison in the late 19th century and the attempts of the newly-created salaried gaolers to resolve their grievances. While a few attempts were made to form a trade union organisation in the early 20th century, it was not until the setting up of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO) in 1913 and the Prison Officers Federation (POF) in 1915, that this was achieved. Both unions were illegal, as a Home Office standing order was interpreted by then home secretary, Winston Churchill, as meaning that prison officers should be treated like the police, soldiers and sailors and banned from organising a union.
However, the NUPPO-organised walkout of the Metropolitan police in August 1918 over pay changed everything, with the government verbally backtracking over pay, conditions and the right to form a union. The apparent success of the action led to NUPPO and the POF merging. Yet, within a year of this apparent success, the government felt strong enough to pass the 1919 Police Act which once more took trade union rights away, at the same time attempting to buy off police officers with a substantial pay increase. NUPPO organised strike action in protest, but this was badly undermined with only a small number of police officers coming out as well as a few prison officers in Birmingham and 70 from Wormwood Scrubs. All those who took action were dismissed. The additional disillusionment following the failure of the 1924 Labour government to reinstate the strikers severely disappointed many who had been involved with NUPPO.
Instead of trade union rights, prison officers were left with an ineffectual representative board and, for the next 20 years, pay and conditions deteriorated, steeling the determination of prison officers to secure trade union rights once again. Despite the earlier association with police officers and the fact that the Police Act was used by the Home Office to designate prison officers as having police constable status and so banning them from forming a trade union, the struggle for union rights in the prison service has more in common with those of civil servants. Indeed, it was two leaders of the Civil Service Clerical Association who assisted in spearheading the POA’s right to exist and represented the fledgling POA in negotiations.
The newly-formed POA quickly reached a very high density of membership within the prison service, covering all prisons in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It quickly expanded in 1942 to win rights to represent staff at special hospitals such as Broadmoor. The period after the second world war saw a massive expansion of the prison population, almost doubling between 1945 and 1950. Prisons became overcrowded, with prison officer numbers failing to keep up with the increased population which, when combined with reforms improving prisoners’ conditions, began to breed resentment.
As Evans explains, it was not because prison officers were fundamentally reactionary, as some would claim, but that many of the improvements in conditions came without increasing staffing levels to ensure the safety of both prisoners and staff. This is not to say that the POA did not support improvements in prisoners’ conditions. For example, the POA was instrumental in ending ‘slopping-out’ and forcing the prison service to invest in integrated sanitation. But the overcrowding and extra duties imposed on officers led to the situation in the 1970s and 1980s where prison officers were required to do massive amounts of overtime just to keep prisons functioning.
The period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s was full of POA disputes and struggles which there is not the space to go into here. Importantly, however, this was when the POA discovered one of its most potent dispute tactics: refusing to admit prisoners above the Certified Normal Accommodation (CNA) limits, which highlighted both prison overcrowding and understaffing. There are also other interesting points that Evans raises, such as how prison officers treated the Pentonville Five dockers imprisoned for trade union activities, for instance, by leaving their cell doors open.
But it was the confrontation with the Tory government of John Major in the early 1990s that shaped the major concerns of the POA in recent years. Continued overcrowding of prisons led in 1993 to refusals to accept more prisoners at Hull and Preston, the latter already operating at 200% of the CNA. The Home Office went to court to seek an injunction against this action, and the judge, as well as ruling the action illegal, went further than the Tories in declaring that the POA was not a trade union. This was formalised by the Tories in the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which instituted the infamous section 127 which criminalised calling for prison officers to take industrial action.
Combined with this was the beginning of prison privatisation. Even the Thatcher government thought this was a step too far. But, in the early 1990s, starting with Wolds remand prison and court escort services, the Tories began opening up prisons and related areas to privatisation as well as privatising any new-build prisons. Not only did the privatised prisons attack the pay and conditions of staff, they also refused initially to recognise the POA. Instead, they recognised the scab Prison Service Union, which had been set up by disgruntled ex-POA officials, in ‘sweetheart’ deals. Faced with the market testing of public-sector prisons, the POA decided to organise within privatised prisons and fight for their return to the public sector. The POA’s campaign has been partially aided by some privatised prisons returning to the public sector after private mismanagement, as well as the embarrassing failure of any private-sector tenders to run Brixton prison when it was market tested.
Despite assurances from New Labour in opposition that it would fully reinstate prison officers’ trade union rights and reverse privatisation of the prison service, the POA has been let down on both counts. This led to the POA general secretary, Brian Caton, tearing up his Labour Party membership card at the 2009 POA annual conference. Trade union rights were partially restored on condition that the POA signed up to a no-strike agreement. However, such were the appallingly low pay offers that prison officers were receiving (even compared to other public-sector workers) that the POA pulled out of the agreement and undertook national strike action in 2007. The Ministry of Justice then reinstated the Tory legislation banning strikes by prison officers. This has led to the POA calling for the TUC to organise general strike action against the anti-union laws, as well as bracing itself for the possibility that the courts will be used against it if the POA is forced to take action to defend its membership.
Overall, the book is a very detailed history of the POA. However, there are several areas where more detail on particular issues would be welcome, as well as some areas which are not commented on, such as the alleged influence of the National Front in prisons and the POA in the 1970s. Also, on some points, the narrative is a little confused, jumping backwards and forwards in time rather abruptly. This is partially due to having to cover the specific intricacies of the issues the POA was dealing with in Northern Ireland and Scotland. But these criticisms should not put off anyone who is interested in the POA from reading this well-researched book.

Interview with POA leader Brian Caton - Fighting for the right to strike

2009-09-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

Below I have reproduced an interview with POA General Secretary, Brian Caton from this weeks issue of the Socialist. Whilst I think the article is very interesting generally, it does also answer some of the questions I raised in the book review published recently in Socialism Today (which will be published on here at the end of the month).

Socialist Party industrial organiser Bill Mullins recently interviewed Prison Officers Association (POA) general secretary Brian Caton. Brian has recently decided to join the Socialist Party, after being a member of the Labour Party for many years.

How did you get into the Prison Service?

I come from a family of nine. I was brought up in Barnsley, my Dad worked as a collier. I was always a rebel at school. In fact I've got a school report which says: "If Brian doesn't improve his behaviour he will end up in prison."
My Dad was a union official when he was 16 and active in the 1960s. He was a very principled man.
I was in the army for 12½ years and I saw at first hand how devious governments of any colour can be.
My intention when I left the army was to be a probation officer. I was interviewed to be an assistant probation officer, then they scrapped those jobs.
They offered me a job in a rehabilitation hostel for drug offenders and alcoholics. But I just couldn't live on the wage. I was living in a council house but I had one child and my wife was heavily pregnant.
I passed the entrance exams for the police, prison and fire services. And because I'd been at Wandsworth prison as a potential probation officer I thought I'd go there.
I was a prison officer for 19 years from 1977. I started at Wandsworth and then went to Wakefield.
I was on the POA national executive, then in 1996 I left the Prison Service to become an assistant secretary.

What do you think about the privatisation of prisons?

Britain is the current leader in the world in having private prisons. In fact, per head of population, Wales is the world leader in private prisons. All of these have been built in the last 20 years.
Most of the companies involved with running prisons have got very long contracts. The public sector was never allowed to bid for them, the Tories just privatised them.
Justice Minister Jack Straw said there would be a level playing field for the running of prisons but then he said he's opening private prisons that the public sector will not be allowed to bid for.
We are not even allowed to bid for the transportation of prisoners. Public servants used to do all of this work.
The idea of Titan prisons - massive warehouses - was checked fully and was scrapped. But many Category C prisons have already got 1,500 prisoners, as big as Titans.
Straw is also pulling prisons together in clusters. The biggest travesty for us concerns Blakenhurst prison in the midlands, which we won back from the private sector.
Straw clustered it with Hewell Grange and Brockhill prisons, which were close to it. Now it's come up for retendering. So the other two which have never been private are now involved in a compulsory tender. He said he wouldn't do that, once again misleading the POA.
Birmingham, one of the biggest prisons in the country, has been named for potential privatisation. There is quite an active POA branch there and they took action in August 2007. So the threat of privatisation is Straw having a kick-back at us.

What do you think of the government's 'modernisation' plans?

We're not opposed to modernisation but the modernisation they are putting forward is dangerous for prison staff, dangerous for prisoners and dangerous for society.
We had the biggest turnout in a ballot ever in our history that rejected that modernisation. We're not allowed to take lawful strike or industrial action, so we go to the negotiating table at a disadvantage. They listen to what we say and then they ignore it.
We rejected workforce 'modernisation' in a ballot and now they're trying to impose it on us. This is alongside pushing forwards this market testing and privatisation. So we are in conflict with them.
I've been fortunate in having Colin Moses to work with. He's one of the few elected black trade union leaders in the country. We're both socialists and have very strong trade union beliefs. We both believe in trade unions doing the job for the members.

How do you deal with members of far-right organisations like the BNP in the union?

We have thrown BNP members out of the union, about six people. We were able to get the Prison Service to say they would sack any prison officers who were known to be members of far right organisations. In order to achieve this we constantly bombarded the Prison Service with the fact that we'd thrown people out for being members of the BNP but they were keeping them employed as prison officers. We got the Prison Service to make a declaration that if they found anyone in those organisations they would sack them. This applies to everyone who works in the Prison Service. This is part of a motion at the TUC this year.
If you get sacked for being in the BNP, if you're a POA member we won't support you.
We couldn't live with the thought of anyone with racist or fascist leanings having a key with a black person behind the door. We discussed it a lot and we decided to throw them out of the union. If we find any more we will throw them out. It's in the union rules.

Why did you leave the Labour Party?

I'm sick and tired of people saying that just because you're a prison officer you're right wing. I had three gold brooches for the amount of prison officers I have recruited to the Labour Party. I'm sad at having to leave the Labour Party but I couldn't stay in it with Jack Straw being politically dishonest to me.
I have respect for some Labour politicians and I have lots of friends in the Labour Party. Lots of my executive are still members of the Labour Party.
But being the general secretary of a union means you get face to face with people and you can ask questions that others can't. I asked questions and got waffle when I expected to be treated with respect and given honest answers.
I left a meeting at our conference with Jack Straw and made a presentation to him of a decanter from the POA to say thank you for coming to the conference. I also gave him a book entitled The Right To Strike and I said: "I've got you a third gift. You can have my Labour Party card after being a Labour Party member for 40-odd years."
I got a standing ovation.
He asked me what I was going to do now politically. I said I'll join the workers' party.
He did say that his father had been locked up for being a conscientious objector. I asked him what the founding fathers of the Labour Party would think of him now - fighting illegal wars and privatising prisons. I got a standing ovation for that as well.

What's happening now in the Prison Service?

From 1 September they're bringing in prison officers at £14,000 a year - £6,000 less than the proper rate. This will mean conflict. We've taken them to arbitration but it's all on the back of our members refusing the modernisation.
They want to scrap the principal officer grade and run prisons with people in suits. We're not up for modernisation if it means cost cutting, cutting our wages and conditions, and the conditions for prisoners.
If prison officers can't rehabilitate, all they can do is confine. That looks like what they really want us to do.
When we send those prisoners back into society under those circumstances, they will rape, rob and murder again. If we can't attempt to rehabilitate them or tackle their mental health problems, drug or alcohol problems then we're wasting our time sending them to prison.
We've said let's have an integrated system where prison officers and probation officers work together. Where non-custodial sentences deliver the same programmes as in the prisons but out in the community. But we can't do that with overcrowded prisons, filling them up with people who are mentally ill.
These things are part of the POA's policies. We argued these points with Labour in opposition. They said they would talk to us when they got into power but 12 years later they haven't done anything.
Cameron's lot will cause a massive increase in crime. They will lock people up for longer, try to cut the prison budget and privatise.
One of the things about the day's strike that we took was that we said: "You push us too far and we'll strike." No law will stop working people saying I will withhold my labour.
My members don't want to break laws but we don't want bad laws either. I'll be arguing at the TUC that for any union to be able to bargain properly with the employers, the union membership must be able to withdraw their labour.

Brian Caton is speaking at the Socialist Party's Socailism 2009 event.

Upcoming Attractions

2009-09-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

Right, now I've setup the new blog (see www.andnowforsomethingcompletelysectarian.blogspot.com) its time to figure out what to do with the old one. Should I delete everything non-crime and criminology related? Should I just post my own stuff or do some reposts on it off other articles that I think are interesting on this subject? Who knows, I'm gonna mull that question over for a while.

What I do want to do is get some new material up on the blog. Posts perhaps aren't gonna be all that frequent (maybe once a week on average), but I have got some things I did want to post.
For example, I came across a few pieces by James P Cannon in his book Notebook of an Agitator on crime which I want to post some commentary on. I want to post up some more material on Haiti as well as examining 'humanitarian' intervention in some other places too.
One piece that is finished and will be posted up at the end of this month is a review I have written for the current issue of Socialism Today (http://www.socialismtoday.org/). The book is a history of the Prison Officers Association called The Everlasting Staircase by David Evans with Sheila Cohen. If you're interested you can get a copy of this months issue from the website above or your local Socialist Party branch.

New Blog

2009-09-04T13:34:00.001-07:00

I've done it - I am going to split this blog in two. I'm still in the process of figuring out how that works completely, but from now on this blog will just feature posts on crime, criminal justice and other related issues.
For everything else, please see my new blog - And Now For Something Completely Sectarian

Some Thoughts On Blogging

2009-09-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

Like an idiot I have once more left the review I was going to post here on my laptop - so instead I originally quickly plugged some new blogs by Socialist Party members.

But then I got thinking about the blog. When I started the blog, I did want to write criminology posts, but also to comment on stuff around me. Both of which I think are dead useful, but of late, I feel a compulsion to keep churning out posts, some of which I know aren't that good quality at all and also I tend to frequently repost stuff too.
The problem I find is that often a lot of the crime related stuff tends to be more polished stuff that is intended for publication somewhere, whereas often I like to rant about other things, yet I feel that sort of thing lets the blog down. So I'm toying once more with the idea of splitting the blog into one which is to do with me, and a more specialised one on crime. We'll see in the next few days if I go through with it

Anyways, back to the blog plugs

First off there is Grinning in Your Paradise - written by a comrade who describes himself as hopping between Sheffield and Cambridge.

Then there is Everyones' Favourite Comrade - this one is written by a comrade in Cardiff who has set up the blog "for several reasons which include, to more orientate and structure my rants, to encourage my to write and read regularly as I get distracted easily and generally to get my specific views out there!"

Finally, I just wanted to once more plug again Proper Tidy - if you're looking for socialist analysis of the key issues in North East Wales look no further!

Meme: Political Firsts

2009-09-02T05:08:00.000-07:00

I was gonna post up a review of the Naomi Klein based documentary last night, but I've left it on my laptop at hom :( So instead, I'll do this meme I've been tagged in.

First political experience: Would have to be the 1997 General Election. Unlike the other versions of this meme I read, we had no mock polls and my parents aren't of any particular political persuasion (in fact as far as I can tell they vote for whichever candidate of the main 3 parties lives nearest to them). I do remember the children of our local Labour councillors who lived round the corner from me going out chanting Vote Labour!, but I kinda didn't see any difference between either Labour or the Tories.

First vote: 2004 European and council elections, given this was not long too long after the invasion of Iraq, I voted for the parties standing that appeared to be most against the war. So I voted for RESPECT in the European Elections and the Lib Dems in the council elections. By the time of the following general election I'd found my political way a bit more and voted Socialist Alternative.

First demo: To my shame rather than participate in the walkout on Day X i stayed in college cos I was screwing up so much in Maths. However, I did go to an anti-war gig on my birthday in early March 2003 and then went on a later and much smaller protest in Huddersfield where I did a little rant on a megaphone about the invasion of Iraq being all about oil.

Last vote: Would have been the European elections where I voted for No2EU: Yes to Democracy and contributed to us winning 1.1% of the vote. This was the first time that Socialist Party members in North West Wales have ever campaigned in an election - if you exclude student union ones.

Last political activity: I've just come back from a Troops Out of Afghanistan demo which we called off halway through cos it was raining. Apart from Socialist Party stuff, I guess the last other stuff has been selling papers outside Billy Bragg and Mark Steel gigs in Caenarfon (including to the artists themselves!).

Lockerbie: cynical actions of capitalist governments exposed

2009-08-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

From the website of the International Socialists, Scottish scetion of the CWI (http://internationalsocialists.org.uk/joomla/)

The release from Greenock prison of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing which killed 280 people, has provoked a storm of political protest. US president Barak Obama called the decision a “mistake”, the Director of the FBI Robert Mueller accused the SNP’s Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill of giving “comfort to terrorists”, US family members of those killed in the bombing have condemned Megrahi’s release and some Republican senators in the US have called for an economic boycott of Scotland in protest.

The recent debate in the Scottish parliament saw leaders of all the main opposition parties attack the minority SNP government and MacAskill for allowing the terminally ill Megrahi to leave Scotland on compassionate grounds for Libya after spending eight years in prison. A vote of the Scottish parliament on the issue is likely next week. Megrahi was welcomed back to Libya by the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi. In Libya Megrahi is widely seen as having been a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Gordon Brown has so far refused to make any comment on the decision to release Megrahi

Philip Stott

The mood in Scotland generally, and amongst the UK relatives of those killed in the bombing is more mixed. Normally, the idea of releasing an individual who was responsible for the murder of 280 people, even if he was terminally ill with cancer, would be overwhelmingly opposed. However, the fact that many of the UK relatives and others believe Megrahi was not responsible for planting the bomb and that the reality of what happened in 1988 has been deliberately covered up has produced a much more muted opposition to Megrahi’s release amongst some and significant levels of support for his release among others.

1988 – the Lockerbie bombing

Pan Am flight 103 left London Heathrow on December 21st 1988 at 6.25pm for New York’s JFK airport but blew up just after 7pm over Scotland killing all 269 people on board. When the wing section of the plane hit the ground at over 500 miles an hour 11 people in the town of Lockerbie also lost their lives as their homes were vapourised in the intense heat. Debris was found over an 81 mile distance. This was and still is the biggest terror attack ever carried out in the UK. It was also the biggest loss of US lives in a terrorist attack until the events of 9/11 2001.

Forensic investigators found that the bomb had been put into a radio, placed in a suitcase and had been set to go off while the plane was in the air. Despite the eventual accusations made against Libya – that their intelligence agents were responsible for the bombing – the initial focus of the investigations were aimed at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP – GC), who were funded by Iran and headquartered in Syria. The PFLP – GC had carried out attacks on Israel during the 1970’s and 1980’s.

For more than two years it was this line of enquiry that the FBI, the Scottish police and other agencies followed. The suspicion was that the PFLP – GC had been paid to carry out the bombing in retaliation to the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by the warship USS Vincennes in July 1988. 270 people most of them pilgrims heading for Mecca died in the attack. The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran.

Suspected PFLP-GC members had been arrested in Frankfurt two months before the Lockerbie bombing with Semtex explosive devices concealed in Toshiba radios. It was the fragments of a similar radio device that was found to have contained the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. German federal police provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

Imperialist interests

However, in the run up to the first Gulf War following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 when the US were looking for support from Iran and Syria (Syria joined the US coalition) the PFLP-GC investigation was stopped. The economic and strategic interests of US imperialism in its intervention in the Middle East were almost certainly the key factor in the decision to abandon the pursuit of the PFLP-GC and the connection with the Iranian and Syrian regimes.

Attention shifted to the Libyan dictatorship of Colonel Gadaffi, who had given support and resources to terror organisations in the past including the IRA and the Abu Nidal Palestinian group, who had carried out horrific attacks on civilians at airports in Vienna and Rome. The US under Ronald Regan and supported by Thatcher had bombed the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1986. In 1999 after years of threats, and economic sanctions Libya agreed to allow two of its intelligence agents, one of whom was Megrahi, to stand trial for the bombing in Zeist in the Netherlands where a Scottish court would sit. In 2001 Megrahi was found guilty by three judges of the bombing. He was eventually sentenced to 27 years in jail in Scotland.

During the trial it was alleged that Megrahi had placed the bomb in the suitcase in Malta, where he had also bought clothes to conceal the bomb in, fragments of the clothing were claimed to be found among the debris at Lockerbie. The suitcase was supposedly then flown to Frankfurt and then to Heathrow where it was transferred onto Pam Am 103. The key witness who claimed to have sold Megrahi the clothing in Malta, Tony Gauci, was paid $2million for his evidence - probably by the CIA.

There was widespread questioning over the outcome of the trial in 2001. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the legal architects of the original trial in Holland commented, “No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted him and it is an absolute disgrace and outrage what the Scottish court did.’

An unnamed senior British police officer – known to be a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS), which implies that his rank is assistant chief constable or higher – has testified to Megrahi’s defence team that crucial evidence at the trial was fabricated.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the Lockerbie bombing, has long believed Megrahi was not responsible for the bombing and has campaigned for a public enquiry made a telling point about Margaret Thatcher who was prime minister at the time of the Lockerbie disaster. “She refused even to meet me, as a representative of the families, to hear our request for a public inquiry. And then, in 1993, in her memoirs, she writes that after she backed the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986, Libya never again mounted a serious attack on the West. How can she write that if she believed Libya was behind Lockerbie two years later? Unless she knows something she is not saying.”

In the meantime the geo-political situation had changed markedly. Following the decision to allow Megrahi to stand trial in 1999 and the attacks on the Twin towers in New York in 2001 the Libyan leadership let it be known they were prepared to engage with US imperialism. Gadaffi agreed to abandon a nuclear weapons programme and following Tony Blair’s visit to Libya in 2004 the last of the economic sanctions imposed on Libya by the UN and the EU were lifted.

Profits to be made

Moreover, British and US imperialism were licking their lips at the prospects of the enormous profits to be made from contracts with Libya, including its large oil and gas reserves. BP, with its many links to New Labour, has signed a $900 million gas exploration contract to build 17 wells in Libyan territory. The Sunday Herald newspaper reported that: “The Libyan British Business Council, a group whose motto is "building bridges with Libya", advertises its services as making introductions to "high-level" decision-makers, government officials and potential partners.

“The LBBC's chairman, Lord Trefgarne, was Mrs Thatcher's former defence procurement minister, while the group's director general, Robin Lamb, was a one-time Foreign Office diplomat in Tripoli. Oliver Miles, the LBBC's deputy chairman, is the UK's former ambassador to Libya, while board member Sir Richard Dalton is a former British ambassador to Iran. The group's membership list also reads like a who's who of British business, including BG International, British American Tobacco, Barclays Bank, Wood Group and HSBC.

“A LBBC-led delegation to Tripoli in May focused on investment opportunities in Libya's financial institutions, while in June Prince Andrew co-hosted an event at St James' Palace in London with the chairman of the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio. Next month, the group stages an event to discuss the multi-million pound water and desalination contracts the Libyan government is expected to hand out. “

British companies are queuing up to cash in on the opening up of contracts in the financial, defence and energy sectors of Libya.

Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown have claimed there was no trade deal to allow Megrahi to be released but it is clear that the interests of big business played a key role in the unfolding of these cynical events. Including the signing by Tony Blair of a UK/Libya prisoner transfer agreement in 2007, clearly aimed at Megrahi as he was the only Libyan prisoner in a UK jail at the time.

Scottish legal system in the dock

Megrahi lost his first appeal but the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found in 2007 that a second appeal should be allowed as there were 6 grounds to suspect that a miscarriage of justice had been carried out. These included evidence, not made available to the defence that indicated four days before Tony Gauci in Malta picked out Megrahi in an identification parade he saw a photograph of him in a magazine article linking him to the bombing, undermining the reliability of his testimony.

Other material that would have come out in court included the US intelligence documents that discounted Libyan involvement and blamed Iran in response to the shooting down of the Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, a US warship, five months before the bombing. The US Defence Intelligence Agency papers suggested that Tehran sponsored the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), headed by Ahmed Jibril – a former Syrian army officer.

Megrahi dropped his right to a second appeal just days before he was released. The suspicion is that he was told this would speed up his return to Libya. Had Megrahi won his appeal, it would have been a disaster for the Scottish legal system and exposed the cynical actions of US imperialism. As Robert Black commented: “There was strong pressure from civil servants and Crown officials to bring the appeal to an end”

The SNP, Kenny MacAskill and the Scottish legal establishment together have a common interest in protecting the standing of a so-called “Scottish institution”. As a report in the Sunday Times revealed “an anonymous email sent to a SNP MSP, purporting to come from a justice department official said that Megrahi’s appeal was an “an almighty headache” for the criminal justice system concerned about flaws in the case against Megrahi and vulnerable to accusations that the Crown withheld crucial information from his defence team.

“The priority for the SNP has been to uphold the integrity of the Scottish judicial system, whether it deserves it or not,” said the SNP MSP. “It fits in with the general strategy of the SNP that you don’t rock the boat.To make matters worse for those, and especially the relatives of those victims of the Lockerbie disaster who want the truth the Foreign Secretary Labour’s David Milliband has slapped a Public Interest Immunity Certificate to ensure that “secret” documents on the Lockerbie bombing cannot now be released.

End the cover up

The 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing and their relatives have and are been treated like pawns in the manoeuvres carried out by successive governments to protect big business interests, imperialist influence and to preserve the “integrity” of a biased and class based legal system here in Scotland.

All documents and evidence related to the Lockerbie events and the legal process must be opened to public scrutiny by democratically elected representatives of the families, their representatives and wider society. This could mark a step towards a real accounting of who carried out the atrocity and into those who have sought to cover up, obscure or divert attention away what really took place.

As Jim Swire whose daughter died on December 21st 1988 has said: “The whole process was a political stitch-up from start to finish, which is something that needs to be gotten to the bottom of.”

The Lockerbie disaster and the events surrounding it underline the need to build a mass socialist alternative to the horrors of war, terror attacks and imperialist domination of our world. The International Socialists and the parties and groups that make up the Committee for a Workers International are fighting for socialist change internationally. We believe that a socialist world would lay the basis for an end to imperialist conflict, terrorism, corrupt dictatorships and the exploitation of the world’s peoples by big business interests.

Review – Guilty and Proud of It by Janine Booth (2009)

2009-08-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

There are certain struggles of the British working class that modern day socialists should make themselves aware of. Amongst those struggles are the 1984-5 Miners Strike, Chartism, 1926 General Strike, but there are also localised struggles that are worth our attention, and the struggle of the Poplar councillors is one of them. Booth, who writes for the blog Stroppyblog and is also a member of Workers Liberty, has done a service by bringing these events to a new audience including myself.
During the huge growth of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the first world war, Labour councillors began to be elected in ever larger numbers to local councils and even began to win control of some of them posing the question of what such councillors should do with their new found powers. After all, what local councils basically do is administer certain aspects of the capitalist system in a given area – should labour councils try and do this in a more humane manner or should they challenge the status quo by attempting to provide local services to meet the needs of the population?
As Booth demonstrates, the Poplar councillors chose the latter, demanding the money to be able to provide higher council wages (including equal pay for males and females!) and pay unemployment benefits without sending people to the dreaded workhouse. Their tactic in this campaign was to withhold the rates that they paid to all London bodies, demanding that rates should be equalised across London to pay for the larger welfare services needed in poorer boroughs, for this action they were imprisoned.
This section of the book is very well detailed, with a very good contrast between the actions of the Poplar councillors and the neighbouring councillors in Hackney which Labour also controlled who pursued the former policy mentioned above under the guidance of Herbert Morrison. One other important thing Booth notes is role of the paper, the Daily Herald, edited by the leading figure of the Poplar councillors, George Lansbury in terms of explaining the councils policy and actions.
Yet I feel the book has several points where I feel it falters. Firstly, whilst being excellent on the background to the struggle all the way up the imprisonment and release of the councillors, the book fails to portray a coherent reason for the eventual failure of the councillors struggle to spread further – certain points are raised, the role of the London Labour Party under the reformist Herbert Morrison, Lansbury being forced to sell the Daily Herald, the defeat of the 1926 General Strike etc. Yet the way these are discussed is like a list rather than explaining how these factors interlinked with each other. The role of different tendencies within the movement, apart from the divide between the councillors and the likes of Morrison, is also not explored with the detail needed to understand fully their roles in the struggle, although there is more detail in this respect within the movements of the unemployed.
A final gripe is in the final chapter dealing with the long-term aftermath of the struggle, whilst this chapter is brief in the events it deals with that is necessarily so, it is a book about Poplar and not everywhere else! Yet I feel it is to brief in dealing with the similar situation in Liverpool in the 1980s – this dispute is just lumped in with the others of that time, but Liverpool was significantly different, firstly it won concessions from the government in 1984 and secondly for the role of organised Marxists within the council. Whilst the author does refer to two books for further reference I do not feel that this does the comparisons between the two struggles enough justice.
In summary the book is well worth reading, despite the above mentioned drawbacks the depiction of the core of the struggle of the councillors around the non payment of London wide rates is excellent, and that after all is the main topic of the book.

A Reply From Ed Miliband

2009-08-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

Recently I sent a message of protest to Ed Miliband about the loss of jobs at Vestas - this is his reply.
However, as readers of the Save Vestas blog may have noted Skykon, a company that bought one of Vestas other plants in Scotland that they were also attempting to close are putting forward different arguments about the wind turbine market in Britain, saying it is in quite good shape and that they are expanding that particular factory at the present time. He also ignored my original point about nationalisation, so I would imagine this is a standard reply that is being sent out

Thank you for your email about the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight.
I am very sorry for the people who are losing their jobs. When I met the Vestas management a few months ago, to see how we could help, and when I have spoken to them since then, I have wanted to do all I can to try to find a solution that could help the workforce.
Vestas have made clear that the issue for them was not subsidies from government. The factory makes a different sized blade to the ones used in Britain, so each one it makes is shipped to the US. They wanted to have their production in America to cut some of that journey.
As part of global reductions in their workforce, they are not at the current time converting the Isle of Wight site to make turbines for the British market.
Their biggest difficulty is with planning objections to onshore wind turbines, which have slowed down the growth in the UK market. That is why we are reforming the planning rules and are arguing strongly that people need to see climate change as a bigger threat to the countryside than the wind turbine.
Vestas are keeping a prototype facility at the factory on the Isle of Wight and we are currently considering an application from them for support of an offshore blade testing and development facility, which will employ 150 people initially, and is expected to grow in the future.
Government policy is having a positive effect. Next year alone, the renewable electricity industry will get £1 billion of support because of government action, and the amount of power from onshore wind grew by a third last year, and the amount of offshore wind power grew by 67% - so Britain now has more offshore wind power than any other country in the world.
It is to enhance the prospects for green jobs that we have made available 120 million pounds for offshore wind manufacture in the UK and 60 million pounds for marine development. I recently visited a factory in Wales that employs 800 people and exports solar panels across Europe. The week before I saw a factory that is producing buses that produce fewer emissions, helping climate change and local air quality. Research suggest there could be half a million jobs in renewable energy by 2020.
I believe that to be ready to pursue these opportunities, we must invest in the skills, research, and the infrastructure to help clean energy companies grow – and we are making those investments.
There is government action for different industries and areas of the country, which you can read about at www.hmg.gov.uk/lowcarbon.
In the end, making sure the transition happens as quickly as possible will need government action, it will need dynamic companies, and it will also need us to win arguments around the country that renewable power should have a bigger role in the country’s future.
Thank you again for writing to me.
Ed Miliband

Anglesey in crisis

2009-08-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

Taken from Proper Tidy (http://wrexhamsocialist.blogspot.com/2009/08/anglesey-in-crisis.html) - I hope to do a post about the trials and tribulations of Anglesey County Council at some point soon

You may recall that I have written previously about Anglesey Aluminium, here.

On Thursday of this week, it was inevitably confirmed that a further 250 jobs would go as of September 30th, leaving a workforce of just eighty at the plant. At the turn of the year, Anglesey Aluminium employed 540 workers.

I could, at this stage, point out that Anglesey Aluminium are owned by a hugely profitable parent company; that Anglesey will be left decimated by the closure of one of the largest employers in the region; that Rio Tinto declined a public money grant of nearly £50 million in compensation for the loss of cheap energy from Wylfa; that consent was granted for the new Wylfa B nuclear power plant on the basis that it would preserve jobs at Anglesey Aluminium; and that this is a clear strategy of Rio Tinto’s to use the cover of recession to switch production to low wage economies, irrespective of the vast profits their existing plant has created for them and the devastating effect the closure will have on the island. But I have already covered this, previously, and there seems little point in going over old ground.

I should, perhaps, point out that the closure of Anglesey Aluminium will also have a significant knock on effect for what little industry is left on Anglesey; that many more workers are indirectly reliant upon Anglesey Aluminium.

David Hughes, operations manager at hauliers LE Jones in Ruthin, told the Daily Post: “A loss of a major factory like this is a major blow for the haulage industry in North Wales and it will impact on our company.

“They were one of our biggest customers and this will affect us. We don’t know how badly yet but it will impact.”

Another firm affected by the impending closure is Grays Engineering, which carries out welding work for the company. They employ 17 people.

Spokeswoman Karen Lewis said: “Workers are already on short time and this will put jobs under threat. We are very low here today and very concerned.

“They are our biggest customer and we have worked for them for 20 years.”

Graham Rogers, North West Wales regional organiser for Unite, said there was great anger at the plant.

“There is dismay, disappointment and anger at the decision. There is a feeling from workers they have been strung along through this and then let down at the end.

“The impact on the community is massive. It will impact on all types of businesses from shops to garages. In the long term you could quadruple the jobs that will be lost.”

Former Anglesey Aluminium worker Jeff Evans, now manager at the JE O’Toole Centre for the unemployed in Holyhead, said: “The impact on the Holyhead and Anglesey is devastating, it is a huge blow. The workers and the whole community has been left in the mire by the company. They have made vast profits over 40 years from this loyal workforce, they could have accepted some temporary losses over this recession but have showed that profits come before people.”

I’ve not got much more to add to the above, other than to say that this is a clear example of the callousness and greed not only tolerated but encouraged by neo-liberal capitalism. The workers of Anglesey Aluminium and the people of Anglesey have been let down; by big business; by the Welsh Assembly Government; by local New Labour mouthpiece Albert Owen; by the system. This is an island with a highly skilled workforce but with one of the lowest average wages in the UK. Unemployment is well above the national average, and those lucky enough to be in work are often employed in seasonal trades, such as agriculture and tourism, or in unskilled and poorly paid sectors such as retail and low-end production. That the people of Anglesey will now have to cope with the loss of such a key employer is nothing short of a tragedy, and the self-serving greed of Rio Tinto and Kaiser Aluminium, combined with the ineptitude, incompetence, and indifference of the WAG and Albert Owen MP is an insult to the workers of West Wales and beyond.

Support the Vestas Workers - Bangor and Wrexham Public Meeting

2009-08-10T09:30:00.001-07:00

Organised by North Wales Socialist Party

6.30pm
The Harp Inn, High Street, Bangor

or

7.30pm
Barracuda Bar, Wrexham

All welcome!

Protest Against the Eviction of Vestas Workers

2009-08-06T10:46:00.002-07:00

I repost below a message from Vestas workers,

Dear friend,

An eviction notice has been served on the occupation at Vestas IoW. The eviction is due to take place tomorrow, Friday 7 August, at 12 noon.

Please get to the Island if you can. The workers want support tomorrow. There is a minibus leaving London tonight. Email vickimorris@btinternet.com if you want to be on it and we will forward your number to the driver. If anyone else can drive or offer transport, please let us know. We can post details on the blog or put you in touch with people seeking transport.

If you can't go, please organise a protest in your town or join one of those already planned. Protests we know about are
-tonight, 6pm outside Department of Energy and Climate Change, 3 Whitehall Place, London
-tonight Bristol: demonstrate 5.30pm Bristol fountain
-tomorrow Manchester: demonstrate 5pm in Piccadilly Gardens, tel Hugh 07769 611320

Let us know if you are organising something and we can advertise it.Please contact Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband now. ps.ed.miliband@decc.gsi.gov.uk and tell him to step in to save wind turbine blade production at Vestas, IoW, for the sake of renewable energy, green jobs and his credibility as a politician. His phone number in his Doncaster constituency is 01302 875 462, and at Westminster, 020 7219 4778. And on Twitter http://twitter.com/edmilibandMP

Please forward this email to contacts or post up on your blogs/website.

Thank you,Save Vestas

Vestas Occupation – Socialist Party Bulletin Number Two

2009-08-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

Nationalise to save jobs!

Now entering the second week of occupation, working class people across the UK are looking towards the lads occupying Vestas as a source of inspiration for how to stand up and fight in defence of jobs. In the face of a viciously anti-union employer, Vestas workers have stood firm and stared down management. Is it any wonder, however, that Vestas workers are compelled to struggle? There are 625 jobs on the line at Vestas and currently only 124 job vacancies on the entire island! The economic crisis that greedy bosses and pro-market politicians have helped mold means this fi ght is more critical than ever. But Vestas workers have got the employer on the back foot; the adjournment of the court hearing to obtain an injunction doesn’t just represent Vestas management’s incompetence but also the popularity of the occupation – which has made New Labour hesitant to use the courts against it. The support of the local transport union – RMT – and their commitment to provide legal support for the court hearings has been a huge boost to the occupiers; now, Saturdays demonstration in St Thomas’s Square is an opportunity for trade unionists from across the island and further afi eld to express solidarity with Vestas workers – we need to build mass action to bring Vestas bosses to their knees and force the hand of the weakened New Labour government!

Vestas diet plan

Prisoners in Camp Hill get three hot meals a day, yet Vestas bosses have been allowed to try and starve out occupying workers! When Luke was forced to leave the occupation on Thursday, he was pale and shaking and paramedics found his blood sugar levels to be unusually low. How can Vestas bosses sleep at night when they know that they have sanctioned a brutal siege? We need to make sure that vital supplies get to the occupiers – not through short-term stunts, but by mobilising hundreds of people, occupier’s families, trade unionists and others to put pressure on everywhere we can. The employers have dragged Vestas workers to the courts for occupying; we should drag them to the courts for starving people! This, alongside mass action, could force supplies in.

Mass action for victory

If attempts are made to physically remove the workers from the factory a massive trade union
demonstration outside the plant should be immediately organised in their support. The workers movement in Britain should learn the lessons from South Korea, where more than 800 workers have been occupying the Ssangyong car plant since May. Despite riot police storming the plant, the occupation has continued. The Korean Congress of Trade Unions has called a two day general strike to support them. There are differences in the situation, but any moves to clamp down on the occupiers would have deep reverberations. The trade union movement needs to be prepared to harness the anger that any moves against Vestas workers would create, including organising industrial action in their defence.

Nationalise to save jobs & the environment

If this factory goes, what does the future have in store? Occupiers who’ve been separated from their families for over a week now fighting for a decent future would be forced to up sticks and leave the island. To find work and support a family there’s no other option, and even then nothings guaranteed. Vestas management have callously made it clear that they have no interest in keeping the plant open when its easier and cheaper to screw workers in the United States. In that context, appealing to the government to increase subsidies, as Green MEP Caroline Lucas has, makes no sense – Vestas have already said they don’t care about the subsidies! We have to be clear about it – this plant should be nationalised to ensurea future for workers on the Isle of Wight and the environment.
Across the country, over 80% of people support wind power – but none of us want unemployment in our back yard! Yet the government, and Tory local councils, are allowing a very small minority to block turbines being built. Contrast this to their attititude to nuclear power stations, which endanger local peoples health, but the government just impose.
Brown and Milliband might make the occasional green noise, but they’re so wedded to the ‘free market’ that they’re desperate to avoid further nationalisations. But this economic crisis has shown that the market doesn’t work and New Labour have been forced to nationalise – Northern Rock, RBS,the East Coast rail line; the list is getting longer and longer! As the lads in the occupation have put it: “If the government can spend billions bailing out the banks – and even nationalise them – then surely they can do the same at Vestas.” The governments hand can be forced, and we need to be clear that this is what we’re demanding. Of course, what happened at RBS and the like wasn’t genuine nationalisation –we’ve taken the risks off the bosses for them. What we really need is socialist nationalisation – where working people have a direct say in how companies are organised and run. Vestas needs to be retooled for the British market – who knows how to organise that best? The workers on the shop floor or managers whocan’t even fill in an injunction application properly?

Workers need a political voice

None of the establishment parties support the action that Vestas workers have been forced to take – a Labour MP in Pompey has refused to even sign apetition supporting them! This is hardly much toask. Workers at Vestas have waged a heroic struggleand shown their strength on the industrial front. Butimagine how much easier the fight would have been if a political party with a national profile had thrown its weight clearly behind them. Criminally, there isn’t a mass political party in Britain that stands in workers interests! Rather, New Labour helped push through the liberal employment laws that make it legal forVestas to dump workers in the Isle of Wight and move to the States without a bye-or-leave. That’s why the Socialist Party along with others, including the RMT, who’ve played an important role in this dispute, participated in a list of working class candidates in the European elections. We’re hoping to get a workers list together for the General Election when it happens, so workers have candidates who stand in their interests to vote for. This could be an important step towards the sort of mass working class party that could play a decisive role in struggles like this in the future.

“People on the island have realised that the reality is, if this places shuts down, a lot of small businesses can go under too. And there’s also the environmental side of it – which is massively important.
I’ve got two small children, twins, and we’re doing this for their future as well. The government needs to step up and act now, not 2012 or 2020 or whenever – something needs to be done now, not when they set their stupid deadlines.”
Sean, Vestas worker

Vestas workers demand:

• Immediate union recognition.
• No to job cuts – Keep the factory open.
• Nationalise the factory under workers’ control – power to the shop fl oor.
• Make the plant a building block for a new publicly owned green sector to provide more jobs.

Demo outside court hearing

Tuesday 4th August, 9:30am
Newport Magistrates Court, Quay Street, Newport

Socialist Party Meetings

Sunday 2nd August, 3pm + Tuesday 4th August, 2pm
Wheatsheaf Hotel, upstairs room, St Thomas Square, Newport

Solid Rallies

Outside the plant every day at 6pm

For more information contact Ben Norman on 07957 505263
www.socialistparty.org.uk 􀁑 0208 988 8777 􀁑 join@socialistparty.org.uk

Review – Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs

2009-08-02T10:16:00.001-07:00

I have to say, that when I recently read this book it was not for the first time, rather this book is one that I hold in great regard and wished to re-read it to clarify in my mind some of the issues that the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes raises.
These strikes which the book covers marked the beginning of an upsurge in union activity in the United States that eventually led to the formation of the industrially based CIO. Moreover it was really the first serious labour dispute that the Communist League of America, part of the International Left Opposition, became involved in. The book depicts these strikes in a very easily readable format whilst pointing out the steps taken, tactics chosen that the union local took and why they were taken. To my mind this is a book that all militant trade unionists should read.
But one thing I want to focus on is the way that the defence of the pickets from police attacks and brutality during the strike was organised. Unlike some on the left who seem to cry for workers to be given arms at any occasion as if the main issue is some desire to beat up the police (or at least this is the impression that can often be given), Dobbs is rather more sane as he explains why the strike committee deemed it necessary to arm pickets against attacks from the police as well as from the employer-organised special deputies.

“Up to now the workers had gone about their activities bare-handed; but they found that attempts to exercise their right to peacefully picket were being repressed with police clubs and blackjacks. They decided to take steps to enforce their democratic right to prevent scabs from grabbing their jobs. It would have been a tactical blunder for members of an isolated vanguard to attempt measures such as the strikers were about to take; they would only get themselves clobbered by the police. In this case, however, the means used in self-defence had their origin in a spontaneous mass mood that had been generated by capitalist repression. Since these means were appropriately limited in the given situation to matching the police club for club, the tactics employed were completely valid.”(pg.81)

Later on in the book he deals with the run-up into the third strike, when workers were making preparations for this and the question was raised again.

“At the first strike committee meeting, chaired by Kelly Postal, the question of ‘picketing equipment’ was put on the agenda. For the first time since the truce at the end of the May strike, the bosses would be trying to operate trucks in defiance of the pickets. The last attempt had been stopped when the pickets won a pitched battle with the cops, fought club against club. At this new juncture many pickets were inclined to start where they left off in May, again arming themselves with clubs. In the changed circumstances, however, this would have been tactically inadvisable. It would have given the cops a pretext for immediate violence against strikers who were trying to peacefully picket; and the union would have lost the tactical advantage of reacting to police violence under defensive slogans.”

And finally he discusses the question again in the aftermath of the police shooting at the strikers and killing two whilst injuring several others.

“In the meantime Local 574’s pickets were reacting to the police assault in full keeping with their magnificent fighting spirit. After the shooting, many who had escaped injury dropped from sight briefly, only to return soon armed with various kinds of weapons. They now had shotguns, deer rifles, revolvers, hunting knives, and various types of souvenirs from World War I, which the veterans among them had brought back from France. Having bested the cops club-against-club in May, the strikers were now prepared to face them gun-against-gun. Although their cause was just and their courage admirable, it would have been a grave tactical mistake to attempt to go through with such an undertaking.
“The situation was now qualitatively different from what it had been during the earlier battle with clubs. Despite the fact that a club can kill, it is not usually classified as a deadly weapon. By virtue of that fact, self-defence of the kind used in May could be sustained tactically for several reasons: it was carried out by a massive body of pickets who had widespread sympathy within the city as a whole; for reasons described previously, Governor Olson found it difficult to use the state militia against the union; and due to the insular nature of the conflict and the local politics involved, President Roosevelt had little inclination and no ready pretext to intervene with federal troops. Consequently the fighting in May remained confined to a showdown between pickets and the local cops.
“As matters stood after Bloody Friday, however, the situation was entirely different. Being so deadly, their use in self-defence against the gun-toting cops could have been twisted around by capitalist propaganda into the appearance of an ‘insurrectionary offensive’ by the strikers. The bosses would have screamed bloody murder, claiming proof of their contention that our aim was not to build a union but to make a revolution. At the first armed skirmish between strikers and police a clamour would have been raised for Olson and Roosevelt to send in troops against the union…
“Local 574, against which such military repression would have been directed, was engaged in an isolated local action. Nationally, our struggle was paralleled only by two other similarly isolated conflicts… Hence, it could not have withstood the heavy military pressure; the strike would have been broken and the union crushed.
“This was a situation in which the central strike leadership had to act swiftly and decisively. Otherwise impulsive pickets, looking for a showdown with the cops, could have done irreparable damage to the union’s cause while the policy question was being debated. The pickets had to be disarmed forthwith, and the central leaders had to do it on their own responsibility…
“…Once again, Local 574’s incomparable soldiers went out barehanded to face cops with riot guns.
“Our action was promptly reported to a meeting of the strike committee, and the reasons were given for the policy we had followed. After considerable debate the committee approved the course taken, issuing picketing orders accordingly. The orders, which were published in The Organizer, contained a deliberately obscure formulation: “All pickets are hitherto instructed to continue tactics of peaceful picketing as hitherto. They are, however, to defend themselves against any attacks.” Since we hadn’t troubled to let the cops know whether or not the pickets were armed, they weren’t sure what permission to ‘defend themselves’ meant and being aware of the strikers’ anger, the cops weren’t in a hurry to find out.”

As these quotes amply demonstrate, at each stage the strike committee measured the objective situation facing the workers and prepared themselves accordingly. The task was not to repeat demands for arming of the workers but to act in a manner that sought to defend the interests of the workers at each stage in response to the course the struggle took. It is a lesson that some ultra-lefts who repeat demands blindly should do well to note.

North Wales suffers in Race to the Bottom

2009-07-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

From Socialist Party Wales website -original with references can be read http://www.socialistpartywales.org.uk/front5.html. Photo is of Anglesey Aluminium.

Dylan Roberts (Socialist Party, North Wales)

Historically, the economy of the north west of Wales has been based upon agriculture and tourism; the economy of the north east of Wales upon heavy industry and manufacturing. However, over the past few decades, we have witnessed the death of heavy industry, and an agricultural sector decimated by the globalisation of food consumption. In both west and east we have watched as steelworks, collieries, quarries, and agricultural smallholdings have disappeared, to be replaced by unskilled manufacturing and service sector jobs which are inherently low paid and insecure.

The end result is that North Wales is one of the most highly skilled yet poorly paid regions of the UK, and which has witnessed rapidly increasing unemployment in recent times. According to the 2008 figures from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) report from the Office of National Statistics, the average annual wage in Wales is around 13% lower than the equivalent wage for across the UK, with the UK average wage sitting at £25,123 per annum in 2008, compared to £21,831 per annum for Wales. The reality in north Wales is likely to be even lower again. (1)

North Wales has been heavily hit by the capitalist crisis in 2009. We have already witnessed the loss of a vast number of jobs in the region, with major employers such as JCB, Indesit, Deep Stream Technologies, Corus, Marshalls Cement, and many others, either laying off staff or closing altogether. Many other employers have frozen pay, reduced working hours, terminated the contracts of temporary and fixed term workers, or are threatening to take such measures in the near future. In the past month we have seen a number of key employers undertake job cuts or site closures in both the west and the east of the region.

Air Products

On June 30th, Air Products, an American owned multinational, announced their site in Acrefair, Wrexham, would close, with the loss of around 200 jobs. Air Products are switching production to China. While the loss of 200 jobs in a relatively under populated area is reason enough to be concerned, the Air Products case is worthy of further comment for a number of reasons. Air Products’ Acrefair plant opened in 1950, at a time when the bulk of the workers of Wrexham were employed in heavy industry. However, in the modern day, Air Products was one of very few remaining employers of skilled manual labour in the area. The fact is that the skilled workers at Air Products will struggle to find similar work anywhere within this region. This means they will potentially face a long period of unemployment, and when they do find employment it is likely to be low paid and insecure work within unskilled manufacturing or the service sector. The alternative is, like many before them, to leave the region.

But why is Air Products closing their site? Well, naturally management blamed the recession, citing a drop in profits in the first quarter of 2009 and “on-going cost pressures and the changing demand for our products, which is shifting to other parts of the world, notably Asia". (2) Yet Air Products are not struggling, and neither was the Acrefair plant unprofitable, as management conceded at the beginning of the consultation period in April. Indeed, in 2008 they recorded a global turnover of £11 billion pounds, with profits of nearly £1 billion. Whilst they have seen a downturn in profits in comparison to previous years, it is nonetheless evident that they remain extremely profitable.Indeed, in the first quarter of this year they turned a profit of US $189 million, which equated to more than US $60 million a month, or in even starker terms, more than US $2 million a day. Less profit than they were used to perhaps but hardly a struggling company. (3)

What they are doing is using the cover of the recession to move production to where labour costs are lower, in order to squeeze the profit margin some more. Janet Ryder, Plaid Cymru AM for north Wales, described it as a "betrayal" of a workforce that had been "consistently profitable" for Air Products. (4)

Air Products had announced a consultation period in April, which of course meant that the decision had already been made. The workforce and Unite had put forward an alternative strategy that would have saved jobs and kept the plant alive, whilst conceding to some of Air Products' demands. Whilst offering concessions – job cuts – isn’t necessarily the right path to take, nonetheless this would have preserved some jobs and retained a much needed employer of skilled labour in the area. Air Products, however, were not interested.

As unpalatable as this is, it might not be quite so devastating if it was an isolated incident. Unfortunately, it is anything but.

Anglesey Aluminium

Anglesey Aluminium is, along with the Wylfa nuclear power plant, a major employer on the Isle of Anglesey, and in fact one of the largest employers in north Wales. It is estimated that the firm amounts to around a third of the entire economy of the isle of Anglesey. (5)

Anglesey Aluminium, a joint venture between Rio Tinto (who own 51% of shares) and Kaiser Aluminium (49%) announced in early July that they would be offering voluntary redundancy to 140 workers, with the remaining jobs almost certain to go in September when the plant ceases production. Anglesey Aluminium intends to retain only 80 workers from the 500+ strong workforce. The effect that the closure of Anglesey Aluminium will have on the island cannot be emphasised strongly enough. The north west of Wales is an overwhelmingly rural area with an over reliance on tourism, and the loss of such a significant employer will have long term consequences for many generations of workers on the island.

The plant is closing due to the end of a contract for cheap energy supply with Wylfa, with management citing this as the primary motivation for the closure. The only way the 400 jobs due to go in September could be preserved is if Anglesey Aluminium obtains another source of subsidised energy, which seems highly unlikely.

The closure of Anglesey Aluminium had been on the cards for some time. The closure of Wylfa was announced back in 2006, with the nuclear plant expected to close in 2010. However, earlier this year the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) announced that they may extend the lifetime of the existing Wylfa plant (Wylfa A), with a second nuclear plant (Wylfa B) having been proposed back in 2006. One of the reasons given back in 2006 for the creation of Wylfa B was for the need to continue the supply of energy to Anglesey Aluminium, although this would no longer be at the reduced rate.

The proposal for the second generation nuclear plant, Wylfa B, was voted through by Anglesey County Council, following a propaganda drive by the council and local Labour MP Albert Owen, who heralded the proposal for Wylfa B as a boon for the island and claimed that 1,500 jobs would be at stake if Wylfa B didn’t go ahead.

Iain Dalton, of the Socialist Party Bangor branch, has written previously about Wylfa. On 6th February 2006, Iain noted that:

“They claim that without it, the island will lose 1,500 jobs. This figure has been inflated by Wylfa taking on temporary workers, and by including 400 jobs at Anglesey Aluminium, which the company has publicly stated will not be threatened by closure of Wylfa, although they may use it as a pretext to move production to a lower wage economy. However, a new nuclear station would employ far fewer people than the current station due to new technologies, and that is before cost-cutting practices of the new station's private owners (Wylfa is presently publicly run).” (6)

Indeed, Iain’s words have been borne out. Despite the claims of Albert Owen and Anglesey CC, the fact that the proposal for Wylfa B has been given the go ahead has not prevented Anglesey Aluminium from using the end of the discounted energy supply as an excuse to close the plant, with Rio Tinto and Kaiser Aluminium exploiting the situation in order to switch production to cheaper labour markets.

The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), in conjunction with Westminster, offered a financial package of £59 million over four years to compensate for the loss of the discounted energy supply, which amounted to an astounding £1 million a month state subsidy. 7

However, management at Anglesey Aluminium, Rio Tinto, and Kaiser Aluminium rejected the deal, claiming that they would need at least double that figure in state subsidies to retain production on Anglesey. Yet Anglesey Aluminium has been extremely profitable in the 36 years it has been on the island. Furthermore, both Rio Tinto and Kaiser Aluminium are vast multinationals turning huge profits.

Rio Tinto, which owns the controlling stake, recorded record profits in 2008, delivering net profits in the first quarter of 2008 of an astronomical US $2.94 billion. They have not faired quite so well in the first quarter of 2009 but that still equates to US $1.6 billion in net profits between January 1st 2009 and March 31st 2009 – or US $177 million per day! 8

Yet again, we see private enterprise demanding that the losses are nationalised while the profits remain private.

As with Air Products, it is evident that the crisis of capitalism and rising production costs are being used as a scapegoat, for attacks on pay and conditions and the switching of production to non-unionised plants in low wage economies, in order to drive these obscene profit margins up yet further. In both cases, there is no pressing need to switch production; it is simply another case of profits coming before people.

As Iain pointed out, and as has been borne out by the impending closure of Anglesey Aluminium, the claim that a new second-generation nuclear facility on Anglesey would not only retain existing jobs but also create new jobs has been proven to be false. As Iain pointed out in the same article:

“Local campaign group Pawb (People Against Wylfa B – Pawb means ‘everybody’ in Welsh) are arguing for an alternative employment plan for the island. Much of this lies around the potential for harnessing renewable energy sources, as the island has near ideal conditions for several technologies including tidal, wind, solar and wave. Additionally, based on the experience of decommissioning Trawsfnydd in nearby Gwynedd, decommissioning the current Wylfa station will provide at least 500 jobs for at least fifteen years.”( 9)

Local politicians such as Albert Owen have argued that building a renewable energy plant on the island would not have been viable, as such a project would take many years, and would therefore leave the skilled workers of Wylfa and Anglesey Aluminium without employment. Yet as Iain points out above, decommissioning the existing Wylfa A plant would have provided significant employment for the next decade and a half, and a new renewable energy plant would have created both long term employment for the people of Anglesey, and shorter term employment as the plant would need to be built. Instead, it appears that Anglesey will retain a nuclear power plant, with all the inherent environmental dangers and impact that come with that, but will still suffer from mass job losses as Anglesey Aluminium ceases production and Wylfa inevitably cut jobs due to new technologies.

The ideal opportunity for a clean, green, environmentally sound mass source of renewable energy has been missed, in addition to the vast number of jobs in the beleaguered construction industry that could have been created by building such a plant.

We can also see further evidence of the short-termist attitude to the construction sector elsewhere in north Wales.

Hanson Cement

Hanson Cement – formerly Castle Cement – in Padeswood, near Buckley, Flintshire (north east Wales) announced on Tuesday 7th July that they had entered a 90-day consultation period, with a view to 96 redundancies. 56 production jobs and a further 37 in distribution are under threat, which would leave only a skeleton staff of 46 at the plant. This is despite promises made by Hanson that there would be secure work for 110 workers. The plant is home to the most modern cement kiln in Europe. (10) Job losses at the plant in Flintshire have been on the cards for some time, with Hanson prepping the turf back in 2008. (11) The threatened job losses have been blamed on the stagnant construction industry, with a spokesman stating that the plant was "reducing output to a minimum in light of the continuing downturn in the construction industry."
This follows the closure of Marshalls Cement, not far from Hanson Cement, in Llay, near Wrexham, which shut down in may with the loss of 55 jobs. (12)

In both cases, management has cited the stagnation of the construction industry and the resultant drop off in demand for cement as the primary reason for the job cuts and closures.
Hanson Cement (and Marshalls) does differ from both Anglesey Aluminium and Air Products, in as much as the capitalist crisis has undoubtedly had a severe effect on construction. Hanson are not switching production; rather, they are ceasing production, at least at the Flintshire plant.

It does, however, seem ridiculous that we are currently seeing massive job losses in the construction industry across the UK when housing remains such an issue, with the BNP in particular using pressure on limited social housing stock and an absence of affordable housing to gain political capital. Whilst the news that the New Labour government intends to undertake a programme to build 3,000 council houses and 20,000 affordable houses over the next two years is to be welcomed, in as much as it is better than nothing, it remains evident that this does not go far enough. (13) A programme could be adopted to build new social housing stock and affordable housing on a mass scale, which, combined with the termination of the right to buy programme, would serve to alleviate the huge pressure on limited existing stock, provide employment for the hundreds of thousands of threatened construction workers in the private sector, and cut off the BNP and the far right's main source of oxygen by providing employment and housing on a vast scale.

Likewise, a similar large scale construction project on Anglesey could have not only provided work for the beleaguered construction workers, but also delivered an environmentally beneficial source of renewable energy, which would have sounded the death knell of nuclear power in the UK.

In addition, key employers such as Air Products and Anglesey Aluminium (Rio Tinto) should have been prevented from switching production to non-unionised plants in low wage economies given that the levels of profits of both multinational companies, and the continued profitability of their north Wales plants, demonstrates their viability.

Both companies should be made to open their books, and if necessary both sites should be nationalised to ensure there are opportunities for skilled workers in the already decimated local economy of North Wales. However, it appears that while the government, and indeed the capitalist establishment as a whole, are more than happy to bail out the bosses and the bankers, there are no such plans to bail out the workers.

BNP get police to arrest socialists

2009-07-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

From this weeks issue of The Socialist.

On Tuesday 14 July I was arrested, along with two other Socialist Party members, on alleged public order offences following a complaint made by local members of the fascist-led British National Party

Dylan Roberts, Wrexham Socialist Party

The BNP's allegations were entirely without substance, and were a poor attempt at intimidation. The complaint related to campaigning on Saturday 30 May, when we were running a stall in Wrexham town centre.
We were promoting the No2EU-Yes to Democracy European election challenge and campaigning against the BNP. We had spent two hours campaigning prior to the local BNP mob arriving and setting up a stall a few yards away from us.
The BNP outnumbered us, but we did not rise to their deliberate attempts to provoke us. A member of the BNP approached us and made a number of racist comments, while another BNP member filmed us for several hours.

Arrests

One Socialist Party member was arrested at his home on 14 July at around 9am. I went to the police station of my own accord at around midday, where I was arrested. The third Socialist Party member went to the station after finishing work at 5pm, and he was also arrested.
We were detained for up to two hours each. We were asked to provide a statement, and then subsequently to provide fingerprints and DNA, and we were photographed. We also spent time in the 'custody suites'.
North Wales Police (NWP) treated us courteously, and the arresting officer behaved in a very professional manner. Nonetheless, the police had no evidence whatsoever, which leaves the question of why NWP chose to arrest us for what was evidently a fabricated charge.
We were bailed unconditionally, to appear back at Wrexham police station in August. The following morning we were contacted by the arresting officer, who advised us that there would be no further action.
We had to spend a fair amount of time in custody, and our DNA will be retained for 12 years, despite not being charged.
We were told that we had been arrested because NWP had a duty to investigate the complaint, and that the only way in which the police could investigate was to arrest us. It is not acceptable for the police to detain socialists and anti-fascists simply for campaigning against the BNP.

CWI Summer School 2009

2009-07-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

I was one of around 350 members of the CWI who met in Belgium this week for our annual European school. Despite having been a member for a while now I’ve never managed to get along to one of them before. And I have to say I feel really stupid for not doing so because if it has been anything near as good as it has been this year then I have really being missing out.
The school was split up into several discussions with big plenary sessions on the situation in the world, one focussing in more detail on the situation in Europe and one on building the Committee for a Workers’ International. There were also several sets of commissions on various topics and for the contents of all of these sessions I would direct people to the excellent report on the CWI website http://www.socialistworld.net/.
I went along to the commissions on Africa, Marxism & Science and Racism & the far-right and I have to say the debates in these were excellent. The one thing that really stood out in all of them was how many really capable young members we have in all the various sections, for example:
In the Africa commission there were several contributions on the finer points of countries that I’ve never discussed before such as Algeria as well as some really interesting points made on the role of China in Africa. In the Marxism and Science discussion some important points about dialectics were discussed and in the Racism and the Far-Right session the bravery of the comrades in Northern Ireland in defending Roma families in Belfast was discussed as well as the equal bravery of the Swedish section in defending our members against around 11 attacks in the last year and a half.
But the week was also an opportunity to relax and I’m proud to say I was on the winning team of the yearly football match, with England & Wales & Irish sections beating the rest of the CWI 5-1. And most of the school had a good laugh when a senior member of the CWI managed to lock themselves in the lavatory.
On a more serious note the school showed the tremendous progress being made by the CWI, obviously one of the main highlights was the election of Joe Higgins to the European Parliament which is already leading to the further development of the Irish section of the CWI as well as allowing us the ability to work more closely with other left groups in Europe. The growth in the England and Wales section also shone through, particularly as a result of our recent leadership of several important industrial disputes, with the recruitment of important layers of workers and trade unionists. The fusion between the former CWI section and another group in Brazil to form the new CWI section Liberdade, Socialismo, Revolucao. The growth of the CWI in new areas, especially Malaysia was also discussed. Even where we are experiencing a really difficult objective situation at the present time in Sri Lanka due to the civil war, we are still managing to function despite state harassment and death threats against our members.
If this sounds like I’m mostly going on about how great the CWI is then you are right. One of the points raised in the discussion was how quite a lot of the times we are too modest about the work we do around the world, of course we publicise what we do, but there’s also a lot more that goes unreported. I have to agree, I think I have underestimated how important the CWI is until this week. Due to the history of our organisation in Britain and with England & Wales being the largest section to a certain extent I think I thought of the International as sort of tagged on to our section. But this week has shown me that we make a serious difference to the lives of ordinary working class people in many areas of the world and it has made me really want to commit myself to living up to example that members of the CWI are setting around the world.

A British Prison in Nigeria?

2009-07-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Note: I'm going to be away for a week or so, so don't expect any posts until next saturday at the earliest.

The government has announced that it is in negotiations with the Nigerian government over proposals to upgrade the prison infrastructure in that country to allow them to forcibly transfer around 400 prisoners back to Nigeria.
The current UK prison service policy is to offer foreign national prisoners a transfer back to their country of origin where a treaty for such a course of action exists with that country. Such prisoners would then serve out the remainder of their sentences in their country of origin. However, given the appaling prison conditions in many countries around the world it is somewhat unsuprising that many imprisoned foreign nationals do not take up this offer. Even with the governments Facilitated Returns Scheme, with the 'incentive' of giving prisons who opt for a transfer £46 in cash (the equivalent of the amount that all prisoners receive upon release from prison to pay for any immediate needs) has not upped the return rate significantly.
The new plans are similar to a scheme that the prisons service has previously funded in Jamaica, where a prison was partially funded to help speed up prisoner transfers. In both Nigeria and Jamaica prison conditions are notoriously bad, Nigeria's prison system has been condemned by Amnesty International. Over 65% of those in Nigerian prisons have not being convicted of any crime, with waits of up to 10 years for a trial and as a result the prison system there is notoriously overcrowded.
The proportion of foreign nationals imprisoned within the UK prison system has grown largely over the past few decade or so, yet according to the Prison Reform Trust the overwhelming majority of these are first time offenders from some of the poorest countries in the world who have been convicted of drug trafficking. This means that rather than a wave of immigrant violence as some of the press have tried to paint these figures, the rise in foreign national prisoners is mostly down to increases in sentences handed out for drug related crimes, especially given that 4 in 10 male foreign nationals and 8 in 10 female foreign nationals in UK prisons have been convicted of drug offences.
In criminological theory, imprisonment is said to be justified on several grounds, either of incapacitation of those likely to commit crimes or of deterrence of people from committing future crimes. But it is not the people who are getting caught in these cases that are the serious criminals, those at the top of the drug cartels can simply sit back as the capture of another expendable mule means nothing to them. It is the criminological equivalent of chopping off the head of the weed but doing nothing about the roots.
A British funded prison will not do anything about the underlying problems within Nigerian society that lead people into the desperation of becoming drug mules, in particular the rape of the oil wealth by the Nigerian state and capitalist class which has led to poverty for the masses. Incidentally this is the same Nigerian government which has been backed by the British government despite widespread claims of fraud in the most recent national elections. So small are the hopes for even under this scheme convincing Nigerian prisoners to even transfer to a specifically built prison, as being proposed, that the government as part of the proposals is aiming to convince the Nigerian government to change its constitution to allow forcible prisoner transfers.
Schemes like this are only being proposed as a result of years of hiking up the prison sentences for crimes that are either trivial or are committed by those who would be unlikely to re-offend anyway as a repsonse to populist pressure for 'tough' action against crimes. Such prisoners are easily convicted and allow government bureaucrats to present figures that show they are 'winning the war on crime', yet do not tend to represent genuine steps towards seriously dealing with major crime problems. Removing the corrupt, theiving Nigerian ruling class and replacing them with democratic committees of workers and other oppressed layers and giving them control of the countries resources to alleviate the widespread poverty in the country would represent a serious step towards reducing the numbers of Nigerian drug traffickers, far more than any of the prison services schemes. But such a step would never be advocated by the UK government who rely on the Nigerian regime to support the interests of British capitalist companies in the country. Hence why only socialists can seriously solve the criminal justice crisis and under capitalism we see high crime rates and an escalating prison population.

Review: An Unbroken Agony by Randall Robinson

2009-07-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

This is the second, long overdue, post in my series on the 5th anniversary of the second overthrow and exile and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The first can be found here and a posting dealing with current events in Haiti can be found here.

An Unbroken Agony is a much different kind of book to Damming the Flood, the book we had previously reviewed in this series. Damming the Flood is a highly detailed and well researched account of the rise and fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide examining how and why he came to power as well as how and why he was overthrown.
Whilst An Unbroken Agony attempts to tell this story too as well as putting the events in a longer historical context than Damming the Flood, there is nowhere near the same amount of depth of research and explanation. Instead the main value of this book is in its insight into the life of Aristide through his friendship with the author.
Indeed, the book solves the question that Damming the Flood suggests an answer to but lacks the inside knowledge to conclude definitively on. That is the question of how Aristide ended up leaving Haiti for the second time on February 29th 2004 – did he flee or was he kidnapped?
Robinson is rather equivocal on the subject, he was kidnapped. In the book Robinson reproduces e-mail correspondence with Aristide and his wife and other information that make it blatantly clear that in the space of a few short hours the plans of the Aristide’s changed dramatically, they had made plans for a major interview on the 29th which was never cancelled. The change was precipitated by the arrival of US soldiers at Aristide’s house who escorted him to the airport.
Robinson points out that US TV news stations showed old footage of Aristide making a trip by himself abroad and attempted to pass this off as Aristide fleeing the country (as Robinson points out, his wife is nowhere to be seen in this footage. Moreover, why would Aristide flee to the dictatorship of the Central African Republic when neighbouring Jamaica had offered him asylum?
Although the book makes contributions on a few other points it is its utter demolition of the argument that Aristide fleed Haiti of his own free will, that is its strongest point.

Haitian Election Boycotts: Masses Reject UN Occupation

2009-07-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Whilst the mainstream media maybe talking up US forces pulling out of cities and towns in Iraq there is another occupation that the US initiated that is still ongoing. On February 29th 2004, US special forces kidnapped the Haitian President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and dumped him in the dictatorship of the Central African Republic after funding guerrilla insurgents and others to destabilise the country. US, Canadian and French forces moved to occupy the country, ostensibly as peacekeepers, and were later replaced by a Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping (read occupation) force.

Even 5 years on thousands still marched through Port-au-Prince to mark the anniversary of Aristide’s overthrow demanding his return to the country. Aristide is still associated with the hope the masses felt with the end of the hated Duvalier dictatorship and is seen as having achieved improvements for the mass of the population (such as increases to the minimum wage) despite the concession he made to imperialist countries to get international aid, such as the privatisation of public services. Indeed, the 2006 election of the Lespwa candidate and former associate of Aristide, Rene Preval, to the presidency was seen as a vote for the return of Aristide. But with huge food shortages leading to rioting in the capital, Post-au-Prince last year and no return of Aristide, support for Preval has massively diminished.

On April 19th the first round of Haiti’s senate elections were held with a record low turnout. According to the Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Electoral Provisoire - CEP) the turnout was 11%, although other observers place the figure as low as 5%. Prior to the elections, the CEP excluded all 14 candidates of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas.

In the run-up to the second round of elections, a prominent Fanmi Lavalas supporter, who was imprisoned in the run-up to the 2006 to stop him being a candidate in the Presidential elections, Father Gerard Jean Juste died from cancer. His funeral was used as a rallying call by Fanmi Lavalas activists to call on the population to again boycott the elections. Yet the funeral was yet another scene of vicious attacks by UN troops, killing one of the mourners. Despite denials by the UN force, a video has emerged showing two Brazilian troops firing into the crowd. The boycott appears to have been equally effective the second time round prompting the government to claim that imaginery ‘violence and intimidation’ are to blame for the low turnout.

Whilst Marxists support the right of Fanmi Lavalas to take part in the elections, and the right of Aristide to return to Haiti, neither will solve the problems of the Haitian masses. If either were to return to power, they would be forced into the position that they were in previously of giving concessions to foreign imperialist and capitalist interests in return for meagre aid packages. The Haitian masses must look towards the small but significant working class in Haiti and the development of a revolutionary party that can lead serious struggles to improve their living standards.

Socialist Party’s first North Wales District meeting

2009-06-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Picture: The Stilletoes performing at the Youth Fight for Jobs gig

On Sunday the 21st of June the Socialist Party’s first North Wales District meeting was held in Rhyl, a demonstration of the growing support for the party in the area as several people who do not have a local meeting to attend, came to their first party meeting. The meeting was opened by Keith Pattenden discussing the recent gains of the BNP in local and European elections and what could be done in Wales to campaign against their racist poison. He examined the reasons for their rise in votes and members over the last decade particularly looking at New Labour’s abandonment of the working class. We discussed how people without a viable alternative of a progressive party can turn in frustration to the BNP to express their anger. However, an important point was made that in this years Euro Elections the BNP vote actually dropped and they won MEPs only because many working class people didn’t vote! This showed how a new workers party is the only way to win over those people who feel utterly disillusioned with the main three parties and give them a positive place to put their vote.

The second session on building the Socialist Party in North Wales was introduced by Bangor Socialist Party branch secretary Iain Dalton. The branch in North Wales has expanded massively over the last half year with members now in several towns in Gwynedd as well as in Rhyl and Wrexham with mnay contacts even further afield, there has also been an influx of sixth form and college students over the last few months too. We reviewed our activities over the last few months from the protest against the onslaught in Gaza we organised to our recent activity around the Youth Fight For Jobs campaign, particularly emphasising the need to link this campaign with trade unionists locally. The importance of our Students Societies was highlighted too, owing too the NUS’s current unwillingness to campaign for students shown by their acceptance of fees and lack of support for UCU lecturers action against cuts was mentioned, particularly at Bangor University where cuts of 10% across all departments are being discussed.

In the week since the meeting we’ve already begun putting our plans into action with a fantastic Youth Fight for Jobs fundraising gig held near Bangor which raised over £100 as well as excellent stalls in Bangor and Colwyn Bay against the privatisation of Royal Mail where we sold record number of papers at both. We are also holding our first party meeting in Wrexham this week, which will hopefully be the beginning of a new branch building on the activity in the town over the last few months.

Titans Scrapped, But Large Prisons Still in Pipeline

2009-06-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

An edited version of this article was published in last weeks edition of the Socialist.

The government’s flagship programme for increasing the prison population, 3 2,500 capacity Titan prisons have been scrapped and instead are to be replaced by 5 smaller 1,500 place prisons. These prisons will still be bigger than all but one of the currently existing prisons existing at the present in the UK. As government finances become tightened due to the impact of the recession, combined with the massive barrage of criticism they faced over the issue of ‘warehousing’ prisoners, the governments plan is to build 2 of the 5 immediately whilst leaving the other three prisons hanging in the area with the possibility of being scrapped.
More over, these new prisons will be privately built and run – proving that Straw and New Labour have learnt nothing from the disaster of PFI and privatisation of prisons and other public sector institutions over the past decade or so.
Yet a report in The Times (6 April) says that even before these new prisons are built twenty UK prisons already hold over 1,000 prisoners each. Colossal sums of money have been spent on prison building in the last few years.
This includes £430 million to create over 4,000 extra prison places and £2.3 billion to be spent by 2014 to create 20,000 new places including the five new 1,500 capacity jails as well as eight new prisons with a combined capacity of 5,400 alongside expansions of existing facilities.
However, the government constantly says that crime as a whole is falling and official figures back this up. So why does the prison population keep increasing, reaching a new record of 83,810 last August?
Certainly the nearly 5,000 prisoners serving (up to January 2009) indeterminate sentences for public protection have increased the figure. This is just one of many new sentences and criminal offences that the government has created over the last few years. Average sentence lengths have been creeping up over the last decade too.
But magistrates are pushing for even greater powers, doubling the length of prison sentence they can hand out up to 12 months. They claim they can deal with 18,000 more cases a year making huge savings for the Courts Service (the average cost of a crown court trial is £18,000 compared to £1,800 for a magistrates’ court trial).
The cases at present can be tried ‘either way’, by a magistrate or judge and jury – so this potentially could restrict such cases to magistrates courts only, removing the right to a jury trial. But should these unelected judges be given more powers?
As we have outlined in The Socialist before, only socialist measures using democratic methods to reduce the prison population and tackling the social issues at the root of crime as well as providing serious rehabilitation for prisoners can overcome the crisis.

Legality and the Lindsey Oil Refinery Dispute

2009-06-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a trend in recent disputes of law-breaking. Of course the thing that has been highlighted in the media is that much of the action taken by workers in these dispute has been illegal. For example, Rob Williams sealing himself into his office after being sacked was technically trespassing, as was the occupations by the sacked Visteon workers. At Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) and other construction sites, the wildcat strikes are of course illegal under the anti-union laws.

Yet in most instances they have been proceeded by illegality on the part of management. The sacking of Rob Williams was illegal, all the proper procedures were simply ignored in their rush to get rid of a militant trade unionist. At Lindsey Oil Refinery the disputes have been over management breaking agreements with the trade unions (not sure whether thats technically illegal - but the principle is the same.

I think the recent disputes demonstrate the class bias within the law where it favours company management over the workers - anything illegal the management does they are able to cost out and work out whether its cheaper to break the law than to face militant resistance. Fortunately, where workers are in position to take action they can overcome some of this bias and acheive a form of justice for themselves as the case of Rob Williams shows.

I'm sure someone can probably do a better job with these thoughts!

Anyways, a few quick plugs:

Latest Socialist Party LOR leaflet http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/latest/7466
New blog based in Wrexham http://wrexhamsocialist.blogspot.com/

Defend the Sacked Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) Workers!

2009-06-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

As people may have heard over 700 workers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) have been given the sack and told to reapply for their jobs today. Below is the latest Socialist Party LOR newsletter. An older one can be found http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/latest/7464 . There is also a support group on facebook which can be found http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=233431010584#

You can also find a report from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8111648.stm and an interview with striker John McEwan and a Total representative http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8108000/8108720.stm

Photo: Workers strike in solidarity at Aberthaw in South Wales

Lindsey Socialist Party Newletter no. 18, 22 June 2009

Supported by Keith Gibson ex LOR strike cttee, Trevor Grewar Hull Amicus/Unite branch chair, John McEwan national stewards forum, Steve Jones LOR steward (all in personal capacities)

ALL OUT FOR 'TOTAL' SHUTDOWN
SOLIDARITY WITH SACKED LINDSEY WORKERS
DEFEND TRADE UNIONISM & NAECI AGREEMENT

By dismissing 647 LOR workers, Total have declared war on trade unionism and the NAECI agreement. This dispute is no longer just about 51 sacked workers, its about the future of our industry. The employers want to break the solidarity of construction workers and smash effective trade unionism so that they can get rid of the national agreement to bring in cheap labour and drive down wages to boost their profits.
We must stand united together to defeat these greedy bosses. They say they won't talk unless we return to work - that's what they said in February, but we forced them to talk. They say we should have an official ballot - but the ECIA are organising to make the ballot illegal! They say we can apply for our jobs back by 5pm today - we won't let them pick and choose. We all came out together, we'll all go back together, together with our 51 comrades.

UNITY IS STRENGTH. WE WILL WIN!

17 SITES HAVE TAKEN SOLIDARITY ACTION

Fiddlers Ferry
Aberthaw
BOC Scunthorpe
South Hook
Drax
Ferrybridge
Eggborough
BP Saltend
Conoco
Staythorpe
West Burton
Ratcliffe
Cottam
Didcot
Stanlow
Wilton
Hinkley

Socialist Party suggestions for taking strike forward:

Monday morning - burn the dismissal notices
Organise 24 hour picketing of Total/LOR
Appeal to tanker drivers and train drivers not to cross
Continue to send pickets out to spread strike nation-wide
Tuesday - mass rally outside Lindsey to be attended by workers from all sites on strike, and supporters
Stewards from all NAECI sites should convene after Tuesday's rally to set up an unofficial shop stewards network
Call for boycott and blockades of Total petrol stations
Contact French trade unions at Total in France for support
Expand the LOR shop stewards cttee into a Strike Cttee to organise - picket rotas, leaflets & placards, press & media, fundraising & hardship fund, trade union support, speakers at meetings, etc.

Messages of support

From Joe Higgins, Member of the European Parliament, The Socialist Party, Dublin , Ireland
"The threatened sacking of 900 Lindsey workers by the Total oil company is an absolute outrage.
As a newly elected MEP I will be raising your case in the European parliament. I would like to add that I will also be calling for the EU directives on 'posted workers' to be withdrawn as soon as possible because they are a licence for European companies to undermine trade union pay and conditions as part of national agreements."

SOLIDARITY FROM SVEN NAESSENS, UNION CONVENOR AT TOTAL, ANTWERP, BELGIUM
"Will give support with email now, leaflet on Monday, and discussion with our management on why you have been sacked. The national trade union secretary has sent emails out to refineries in Belgium."

RAIL, MARITIME & TRANSPORT UNION (RMT) from Alex Gordon (NEC)
"Solidarity to sacked Lindsey workers. We support your cause. Union jobs for trade union members"

MATT WRACK, GENERAL SECRETARY OF FIRE BRIGADES UNION
"Please pass on solidarity greeting to all sacked Lindsey workers from the Fire Brigades Union. Please let us know anything we can do to assist - including financial support, physical support on pickets or whatever is needed. We will circulate any such information throughout the union."

DAVE NELLIST, SOCIALIST PARTY COUNCILLOR in COVENTRY
"Please pass on to your members that we in the Coventry trade union movement will be doing all we can to build support for your campaign for reinstatement."

MESSAGE TO GIBBO FROM YOUNG LOR STRIKER!!
"We'll beat these all day - we'll step it up a gear next week. I'm not giving my life, my kid's life, or my girlfriend's life up for no-one! We'll win together. We'll get a slice of the pie instead of the crumbs they want to take away from us. We will win!"
Plus dozens more...

"Unfortunately Mr.Hardacre, You are politically motivated - in bed with New Labour!"

Whilst we have had dozens of messages of support from other unions and other countries, Tommy Hardacre, our UNITE national officer, sent an email to regional officers on June 17th asking them to tell shop stewards at other sites not to support LOR's action!
We have also been told by a reliable source that he has alleged that the strike is politically motivated by a socialist party.
Why are you not just repudiating, but working actively against our strike?
Could it be that you, and your boss Derek Simpson, don't want to embarrass your New Labour government? The same New Labour government that hasn't scrapped the Tory anti-trade union laws that force us to take unofficial action. The same New Labour our union gives £millions of members' money to.
How dare you attack Socialist Party who are supporting us when you are stabbing us in the back.
Socialist Party members and supporters have been active in supporting construction workers in this industry for years.
Keith Gibson was a spokesperson for the LOR strike committee in Jan/Feb and John McEwan got a start after threatening to picket out LOR because of Total blacking him.
Our members have been at Staythorpe pickets every week and produced regular newsletters (this is No.18) providing information and making proposals on how to take the struggle forward.
The Socialist has carried weekly reports, including ones by Steve Acheson (Fiddlers Ferry) exposing the industry blacklist and Paul McDowell exposing IREM's lack of health & safety.

If you would like to find out more about the Socialist Party, and/or join us in the fightback against the bosses' system - then contact us.

Knights in Parliament and their Corruption

2009-06-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

In my last post on this subject I posed a few suggestions of how to examine the significance of knighted mps in parliament and whether one particular party was any more corrupt than the others. So below I've started with a list of Knighted MPs

(7 Featured on Nasty Knights Blog)
Sir Michael Spicer (Con)
Sir Alan Haselhurst (Con)
Sir John Butterfill (Con)
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab)
Sir Nicholas Winterton (Con)
Sir Menzies Campbell (Lib)
Sir Peter Viggers (Con)

And the rest with any allegations against them (or at least the rest I could find)

Sir Alan Beith (Lib) (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5364659/MPs-expenses-would-be-Speaker-Sir-Alan-Beith-and-his-wife-claimed-177000.html)
Sir Peter Soulsby (Lab) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8039273.stm#soulsby_peter)
Sir Stuart Bell (Lab) (see http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom-theme/guy-aitchison/2009/05/12/sir-stuart-bell-wrong-again-on-expenses and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8039273.stm#bell_stuart)
Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Con)
Sir Anthony Steen (Con) (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/21/mps-expenses-anthony-steen)
Sir Peter Tapsell (Con) (see http://www.louthleader.co.uk/news/Sir-Peter-Tapsell-MP39s-expenses.5325277.jp)
Sir Patrick Cormack (Con) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8043530.stm#cormack_patrick)
Sir George Young (Con) (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8043530.stm#young_george and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5364194/MPs-expenses-Sir-George-Young-claimed-127000-on-London-flat.html)
Sir Paul Beresford (Con) (see http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/ashtead/MP-denies-dental-surgery-claim/article-1009276-detail/article.html)
Sir Michael Lord (Con) (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5431758/MPs-expenses-Sir-Michael-Lord-claimed-8000-for-garden.html)
Sir John Stanley (Con) (see http://www.thisistotalessex.co.uk/searching/MP-reveals-expenses/article-231597-detail/article.html)

So that puts the parties having (Total MPs for each party from UK parliament website http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/stateparties.cfm)

Conservatives - 13 Knights (Out of 193 MPs total = 6.7%)
Labour - 3 Knights (Out of 349 MPs total = 0.9%)
Liberal Democrats - 2 Knights (out of 63 MPs total = 3.2%)

Now the above information needs going through but one or two I think may be clean (if you call having huge salaries and then claiming a fair bit of money legitimately clean!), but certainly there are several more which can be added to the list that has featured on the Nasty Knights blog. It would be interesting to see whether knighted MPs are more likely to have dodgy expenses than 'normal' MPs too.

NB. This is a follow-on post to Knighthoods and Corruption

Billy Bragg Gig - Caernarfon 11th June 2009 - part of the Miners’ Strike Tour.

2009-06-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

From the Socialist Party Wales website http://www.socialistpartywales.org.uk/

Review by Jan Underwood

Under the South Wales Area NUM’s banner with the words “Forward to a Socialist Britain and World Peace”, Billy Bragg treated us to a great concert and political rant, declaring that he was proud to stand in front of those words.

To kick off the evening Billy had found a young group Dan Amor from Penmachno [a feat in itself, as few in the North know where that is!!] They sang beautifully in English and Welsh about various struggles and life in North Wales. Their rebelliousness mostly amounted to different coloured shoelaces, and their sweet harmonies would only contrast Billy’s gruff – however, it was great to see Billy backing local youth.

A hard-line political poet, Patrick Jones from South Wales followed. He really set the scene, staring with an anti-BNP poem. Other poems were daringly anti-organised religions and pro-female. He finished the set with a tribute to Aneurin Bevan and his vision of the NHS ‘free at the point of entry’ ideals, ‘The Healing House’, set to music by Billy.

On to Billy’s cracking start with ‘The Sound of Ideology Crashing’ – no prizes for guessing the topical subject! He continued with several rare Woodie Guthrie songs, arising from a collaboration with Woodie’s daughter, which could have been written today, such that we are still in the same political mess! Onward with many more political rants which included ‘Oh Freedom’, ‘From Red to Blue’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and ‘All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose’. He interspersed ‘I keep Faith’ and ‘There is Power in The Union’ with a call to action. He defined his use of the word ‘faith’, stating: “Faith is international solidarity – there is power in the Union”, linking these two great songs brilliantly.

Whether you love him or hate him, he is a man of action, working constantly at grass-roots level. He even found an opportunity to raise funds for his charity ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ keeping all his fans happy with original signed pictures. He didn’t stop until he had spoken to everyone who wanted a chat and an autograph, which was well after midnight.

The Bangor Socialist Party also had a great night, selling 15 papers, two copies of Socialism Today as well as various books and pamphlets – including a paper and our bilingual pamphlet “The Great North Wales Quarry Strikes” to Billy himself! Countless ‘Youth Fight for Jobs’ leaflets went home with many at the gig. The good feeling spread over to donations on the night (£10), and the following day at a Socialist stall in Bangor, where £15 was raised. If this is his influence, he is very welcome to come again!

VICTORY AT LINAMAR! Rob Williams reinstated

2009-06-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

From the Socialist Party website

100% Victory! Rob Williams has been unconditionally reinstated as convener at the former Visteon / Fords car parts factory from tomorrow!
Rob and all the Linamar workers want to thank everyone for their solidarity. There will be a victory event in the near future.
Rob Williams was summarily sacked from Linamar for being uncooperative with managment.
See Action to defend union rights and Rob Williams dispute at Linamar: management given notice of strike for background information to the dispute.
This means that the demonstration on Saturday will not be going ahead.

Election Results: Round-up and a little bit of Analysis

2009-06-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Where to begin....

Well I think the thing that has stuck in the mind of most on the left in Britain has been the election of 2 BNP MEP's in the North West (Nick Griffin) and Yorkshire and the Humberside (some bloke I can't remember the name of but he had been chair of the National Front). Yet they did this on the back of a lower vote in those regions than they received in 2004.
And this points us to the startling feature of these elections - the collapse in the vote for Labour - nationally they were down 7% to 15.7% behind both the Tories and UKIP. Indeed the Tories actually topped the poll in Wales!
But the collapse in Labour's vote wasn't to do with Labour voters switching to other major parties like the Tories and the Liberals - they simply weren't coming out to vote and many of them won't come out to vote Labour again - such is the stink over the last few weeks, particularly from the expenses scandal, but the economic model they presided over has collapsed and in a similar way to what appears to have happened in Germany and France, they don't really have an alternative to it.
What this result has done, I think, is exposed that the strategy of relying on turnout, of saying don't vote BNP doesn't work. What we must do is put forward a positive alternative - and give workers a political voice that represents their interests and seeks to rectify their grievances.
And this is where I feel No2EU - Yes to Democracy comes in. Okay so the name was a bit crap, the platform was vague and limited and it achieved a small (but marginally better than what I personally expected) 1.01% of the vote nationally coming behind the SLP, but I still stand by the decision of the Socialist Party congress to take part in the coalition.
For one thing it meant that the RMT union has stood candidates in an election against the Labour Party and signs are that it will do the same in a general election, which I think will help hasten other unions to do the same. Also it meant that Socialist Party members were taking part in elections everywhere in the country - not just targetting a few specific wards or constituencies - which I believe meant people were more willing to take our material and read it. Which is especially good considering we published our own material, of course supporting No2EU but also, emphasising the points we felt were most important and allowing us to go beyond the limited No2EU platform. In North Wales this has meant we have been able to gain contacts in the last two months outside areas we are currently organised in (and in North Wales organised can be a little loosely applied due to the shear geography of the area). Take a look at the report that Socialist Party members and sympathisers in Wrexham have written http://www.socialistpartywales.org.uk/news/2009-06/8-wrexham-stall-report.html and this is an area where we didn't have any members til very, very recently.
I am reliably informed that the total left vote (that is of No2EU, SLP, SSP & SPGB) was 340,805 which is 2.25% which apparently is the highest left vote in European elections on a UK wide scale. This needs to be built upon with a challenge in the general election when it gets called and the organising of that challenge needs to be done now.
Which brings me onto the Greens. Their vote was the most increased in the election up some 2% or so, despite them not getting any new MEPs elected (they retain their current 2). Given they came close to beating the BNP in the North West should No2EU not have stood?
I don't think so - for a start I would argue that there are many working class people who probably wouldn't have voted Greens who did vote No2EU. More fundamentally however, is that simply backing the Greens would have put off the task for another election of trying to build an independent political voice for workers - and much as socialists and the Green Left within it may want the Green Party to become that, I don't think it can or will. However, I would welcome collaboration between the Greens and a new workers party (certainly when neither can contest all the seats in an area), but the key point is that that party needs building immediately otherwise working class votes will keep going to the far right as a protest and potentially worse.

Rest of Europe

By far the best result of the elections for me was the news that the Socialist Party's (CWI Irleand) Joe Higgins had been elected as an MEP in Ireland as well as winning 6 council seats in the elections.
But also SYRIZA in Greece got 4.7% and one MEP and the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Block) got 10% of the vote (not sure how many MEPs this translates to). I have to say though I'm finding it hard to find out the results for various groups in Europe so any comments people can leave to help would be appreciated. But the general gist is that in Europe the left (and I mean the actual left) has gained slightly.

UNISON

Also released today were the election results for the UNISON NEC with 6 Socialist Party members elected onto the UNISON NEC - Roger Bannister (North West), Glenn Kelly (Local Government) and Jean Thorpe (East Midlands) retained their seats. They have been joined by April Ashley (Black Members), Vicky Perrin (Yorkshire and Humberside), and Hannah Walter (Northern) - however several other on the left have lost their seats.

Knighthoods and Corruption

2009-06-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm late posting about all the expenses stuff - criminal!

Well it should be, I'm not the first one to point out the comparison between the treatment of MPs who get to keep their gains with the minor punishment of resigning their seats and experiencing public shame to that of people struggling to get by on benefits who face possible imprisonment. If anything surely the punishment should be high for MP's who have both stolen more and are public figures who should be more accountable. Obviously, within the Socialist Party we have a policy of workers MPs on workers wages and expenses open to inspection which I think would be a damned good way of stopping this. But this isn't what I wanted to blog about today.

In the last few months a rather interesting website, Nasty Knights, has been set up after one of the authors of the Bent Society blog noticed that several knights (sir) had been involved in somewhat dodgy dealings. But over the last two weeks or so the blog has been inundated with posts as the expenses scandal broke and knighted MPs were up to their necks in it. So far the blog has chronicled 7 Sir MPs, they are

Sir Michael Spicer (Con)

Sir Alan Haselhurst (Con)

Sir John Butterfill (Con)

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab)

Sir Nicholas Winterton (Con)

Sir Menzies (Ming) Campbell (Lib)

Sir Peter Viggers (Con)

Personally, I think studying corruption and knighthoods is actually a farily interesting idea - especially seeing as it seems to be so common. I do have some suggestions to move this forwards though, especially with regards to knighted MPs.

Firstly, of the 7 presented above, 5 are Conservatives - does this mean that Tory knights are more corrupt or that only these have been highlighted? Also is the scale or type of claim important as regards to the party?

Secondly, how many more are there? What proportion of all the knights in parliament are they? And just how many knights are there in parliament anyway?

I think looking at these questions may help us get a decent picture of the extent of corrupt knights in parliament and help in getting some sort of baseline to study other areas of knighthood and corruption.

Money can't buy love . . . or Joe either

2009-06-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

I've republished this here beacues I though ti was fairly interesting, hope you readers agree. This is taken from the Irish Times website - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0602/1224247881156.html

On the canvass with Joe Higgins :The candidate is no grip ‘n’ grinner, in fact he prefers his presence to speak for itself, writes KATHY SHERIDAN

FOR ANYONE who has suffered near asphyxiation in the galloping grip ’n’ grin of a Bertie-style canvass, Joe Higgins is a worrying spectacle.
He answers his own phone and has no lackeys to do his bidding or set up media opportunities. He does it all himself. He decides where to locate, helps set up a trestle table with a couple of activists and then he sort of loiters around the St Stephen’s Green entrance with a pile of “Punish Fianna Fáil and the Greens” leaflets.
Most of the passersby in their shorts and singlets are firmly focused on the women’s marathon and have nowhere to stuff a leaflet anyway. All in all, it has the makings of a calamity of a canvass.
Joe Higgins is no grip ‘n’ grinner. The notion appears to repel him. “Politicians go round grabbing people’s hands and imposing themselves on reluctant bystanders,” he says with droll distaste. Furthermore, “babies also have a civil right not to be kissed by every passing politician”.
He likes to let his presence speak for itself. “You let people who wish to engage with you come and talk to you.” All very live and let live, until you spot the slogan – “The best fighter money can’t buy” – on the huge Higgins poster being shifted close to a trader’s cowboy hat and shades stall. “Lads, lads, don’t, you’ll alienate those people there,” he implores, demonstrating precisely where his sympathies lie.
It’s obvious that no fat-cat slush funds have gone into producing the flat, dated black and white posters. The party has budgeted €28,000 for the entire local (with 11 candidates) and European election campaign. Since he lost his Dáil seat, the 60-year-old former school teacher has been surviving on the “small pension” from his 10 year Dáil tenure, supplemented by the fee for his Daily Mail column.
He lives on less than the average industrial wage, he says, and his mortgage – taken out in 1995 – has another six years to run. MEP pay should be something akin to the average industrial wage, he reckons, and if elected, he vows to be a “workers’ MEP on a worker’s wage”.
The fact that the last Irish Times /TNSmrbi poll puts him on “level pegging with the main right-wing candidate in the country” for the last MEP seat in Dublin, doesn’t appear to have induced any lather of excitement, possibly because where he really wants to be is in the Dáil. “I’m committed to going back to the Dáil in three years time . . . ” he says, offering no apology for it.
“Fianna Fáil has three TDs who are standing for Europe . . . I don’t see a Chinese wall between those positions. They’re all a platform to fight for the ordinary people. Different venue, one mission.”
Anyway, he regards the newspapers who commission the polls as “establishment mouthpieces”. “We rely on going directly to the people . . . But the poll is an indication of how things are changing,” he concedes.
“Insofar as it’s an indication of a mood in society at a particular time, it certainly blends in with the mood on the streets and housing estates . . . People are disgusted that a cabal of speculators, big developers and big bankers were given such power . . . A child socialist would have told them that it would crash but they didn’t see it because they were blinded by greed.”
Meanwhile, the loitering-not-looking strategy is working, well-wishers approach the candidate in a steady trickle.
A Tyrellstown woman actually asks for a leaflet (is this a record?). “Please spread the word among your family and friends . . . ”, says Higgins to them all. Frank, a taxi driver, says afterwards that Higgins “has principle – he’s more action than words and he’s not afraid to speak out. But tell me, what do MEPs actually DO?”.
Nick Robinson, a 35-year-old school teacher with plans to emigrate in the absence of a full-time job sums up the views of several : “I’m middle-class with two third-level qualifications and though I wouldn’t necessarily support his policies in full . . . it really comes down to integrity. And he has it”.
Between times, Higgins tries to work up some outrage at Mary Harney’s public intervention on behalf of FF’s Eoin Ryan – “the cheek of her . . . the arrogance of her really” – before producing his own press statement.
Calling Harney’s endorsement the “kiss of death” for Ryan, he reads on with obvious enjoyment: “The hapless Eoin must have felt his political lifeblood chill . . . She also says Dublin voters must ‘not shoot themselves in the foot’ . . . Can she not see that virtually the whole of Dublin have their ‘political guns’ pointed in the same direction and it is not at their feet!”
Has anyone hurled abuse at him so far today? “I rarely get abuse and where I do, it’s from a right-winger”, says the man who has never knowingly passed up the chance of a lash himself.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

Bangor Socialist Student & Youth Conference

2009-05-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

Taken from Socialist Party Wales website - www.socialistpartywales.org.uk

Young Socialists from North Wales received a helping hand from comrades from the South for an all Wales day of action last Saturday in Bangor. The day started with a successful ‘Youth Fight for Jobs’ protest in Bangor.

Report by Sarah Mayo

Workers and students stopped to take our bi-lingual leaflets and sign our petitions and our well travelled ‘YFFJ’ banner attracted a lot of attention (this banner has previously visited Cardiff, Pontypridd and Swansea!)

This was followed by the conference itself, which had sessions on the role of the police, the world economic crisis and a practical session on organising campaigning stalls. Iain Dalton introduced the first session with an emphasis on how the police form a key part of the capitalist state machine and defend private property rather than act in the interests of ordinary people. For example, the police are quick to arrest shop lifters but incredibly slow to respond to domestic burglaries in working class areas. Nevertheless, as workers turn to the police on this issue, it’s important we raise the demand for the democratic control and accountability of the police. There was a far ranging discussion on the socialist analysis of everything from speed cameras, police repression of protesters to domestic violence!

Next, Joe Fathallah gave an excellent and succinct Marxist analysis of the world economic recession and its impact on workers and youth. The economic crisis was inevitable: capitalism is unable to overcome the basic contradiction of ‘boom and bust’ because working class people can’t afford to buy back the goods it produces . The previous long boom could only be sustained by cheap credit and mounting debt for so long. Whilst we are conditional about how long this recession will last, it is clear that workers and young people will be forced to fight back.
The discussion centered on the tasks for socialists, including our socialist programme on the economy, the role of the revolutionary party internationally and the campaign for a new mass workers party here and internationally.

The conference finished with a practical session on running a campaigning stall, with comrades sharing ideas and tips, including how to lay out the stall and how to deal with typical responses to our petitions. This inspiring day finished with an excellent fighting fund collection and a well deserved drink in the pub afterwards.

Socialism and the Zombie Apocalypse

2009-05-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, crime is a pretty grim thing to blog about, hence why about half the posts on this blog aren't at all about crime or criminology. But occasionally I amuse myself with rather random stuff, and just a few minutes ago I spotted this group on facebook

Only Socialism can defeat the threat of the coming zombie apocalypse

Here's the blurb :-

Basic Info

Type: Common Interest - Self-help

Description: A group to" organize before they rise".

Reason number one: Anyone who've seen a zombie flick knows that the threat of zombie flesh eaters are just secondary during the apocalypse. The real danger lies in humanity's incapability to work together. Therefore, in order to fight zombies, humanity needs real democratic power over the means of production through socialism and a planned economy!

Reason number two: Come on, its fun!

Sri Lanka - United Socialist Party leader on death list, Days of victory celebrations humiliating all Tamils

2009-05-24T03:40:00.000-07:00

From the CWI wesbite http://www.socialistworld.net/, picture is of the death list

by Elizabeth Clarke, CWI

The Committee for a Workers’ International has received a copy of a vile communication put out by Sinhala chauvinist hate-mongers in the wake of the defeat of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam. Amongst the portraits of those they want killed are NGO activists, Indian politicians and five Sri Lankan politicians including Siritunga Jayasuriya, Secretary of the United Socialist Party (CWI Sri Lanka).

As readers of this site will know, the USP has maintained a courageous stand in defence of the rights of all Tamil-speaking people and for a united struggle against land-lordism, capitalism and imperialism with socialist policies. It has had its criticisms of the methods and approach of the LTTE, but has spoken out against the war-mongering of the Rajapakse regime and the slaughter of thousands of Tamil civilians. It has also spoken out against the vast and inhumane camps in which the government is holding prisoner hundreds of thousands of refugees.
“They are not just celebrating a military victory over the LTTE,” Siritunga said in a statement, “But a communalist victory over the Tamil nation. It is a humiliation of all Tamil-speaking people, including in the Hill Country, in the South and in the East.
“No Tamils are enjoying this so-called victory except the three Judases who have sided with the Rajapakse government – Thondeman of the Ceylon Workers’ Council based in the tea plantation area, Karuna (the ex-Tiger leader, now a minister) and Douglas Devananda (the Tamil politician expected to become the stooge Chief Minister of the northern ‘province’ of Sri Lanka).
“My name is being mouthed by ministers on the TV and shouted by frenzied people in the streets. I am being labelled as a “traitor”, as “unpatriotic” and even as a “coward” who should be killed. All this because we speak out against this chauvinistic, autocratic government.
“We fear for the lives of the people in the camps – many of whom will die without food, water and medical attention. Young people will be accused of LTTE sympathies and be ‘disappeared’ by the regime…In this way the Rajapakse government seeks to ‘solve’ the national question. We have been challenging him to say what his political ‘solution’ is and he stays silent. We will pursue our demand for equal rights for all Tamil-speaking people to the end.
“We will not be silenced by death threats and insults. The Sinhalese workers and poor people who are celebrating today, imagine that peace means prosperity and a better life for them. They will not only be expected to suffer more deprivation to pay for the government’s war debts and for the capitalists’ crisis, but the emergency powers of the government will be used against any who try to organise strikes and other actions. Our party is struggling to survive against the onslaught of propaganda being thrown against us. We welcome the international solidarity campaign launched in Tamil Nadu earlier this year and urge it to continue its work.
“We also ask all readers of this horrible news to consider supporting our party in one of the darkest periods in its history. We will prepare for a new period of united struggle against this dictatorial government and against the capitalist system that spawns war and oppression, of which we have seen more than enough.”

Donations to assist with urgent measures necessary defend the USP and its secretary, Siritunga Jayasuriya, against physical attack should be sent to Campaign Sri Lanka.

Donate on line (add the words 'Campaign Sri Lanka' to the comment box) or send cheques to Campaign Sri Lanka c/o Committee for a Workers' International, PO Box 3688, London, Britain, E11 1YE.
For a new article on the latest situation in Sri Lanka go to http://stoptheslaughteroftamils.org/

Review – “Chekisms” A KGB Anthology by Vasiliy Mitrokhin

2009-05-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

Ever eager to learn criminological lessons from the Russian Revolution I’ve been looking for interesting material on the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. As part of understanding the events of the Russian Revolution we need to be able to examine the bodies used to prevent or deal with criminal activities and whether these were the best methods.

The volume under review covers not only the Cheka but also the OGPU and KGB. It consists on Mitrokhin’s own notes and manuscripts that Mitrokhin had smuggled out of the USSR when he left in 1992. The material is quite revealing, discussing the formation and several early cases of the Cheka, but also dealing with the repression against Trotskyists and others in later years.

Of course my interest lies with early years of the Soviet regime, but Mitrokhin’s material here is mostly his own notes which are full of his own opinions. And these opinions are similar to the ‘original sin’ of Bolshevism idea where Lenin and Stalin are equated, but in this case they are viewed as just more tyrants in a long line of them. Thus Mitrokhin tries to portray Lenin as changing his mind over the need for repressive force after the revolution, even though in his works, including State and Revolution, Lenin points to the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to repress what remains of the capitalism system.

The big problem I have with this approach is that to truly understand the development of the Cheka, one needs to examine very closely the conditions it was created and developed in and what opposition it was attempting to overcome. Let us not forget that a civil war raged in Russia and that there were assignation attempts on Bolshevik leaders during this period. A detailed study of this period would allow us to come to an opinion as to the necessity of such an organisation preceding from material facts and not just pure moral sentiments. Whilst this book includes some material that could be useful for doing that, it fails at that task itself.

Celyn – The Welsh Green Left Review

2009-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone who regularly checks out the Socialist Unity blog will probably have seen a few posts announcing the publication of a new left magazine in Wales, Celyn along the lines of the Scottish Left Review which aims to be a discussion journal between lefties in several parties and others, (The editorial statement says the editorial board consists of ‘people from Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Communist Party as well as trade unions, the peace movement and other campaigning organisations’.) although I do believe the two main people behind it are Marc Jones (former Cymru Goch member and current Plaid Cymru councillor) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru AM).
When I was in Wrexham a few weekends back I picked up a copy and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it. To my mind its not like a journal that allowed debate between different trends on the left wouldn’t be useful. But the nearest that Celyn gets to this is a page about the European Elections which features statements on the European elections from Plaid Cymru, Labour, the Greens and No2EU (and the layout is such that the Plaid Cymru piece stands out quite a bit from the others).
But to my mind the magazine falls short of this, but also in terms of attempting to offer a direction for the left in Wales. For example in Leanne Wood’s column she rightly condemns the funding cuts to the Assembly government and demands the money from the Westminster government, yet she doesn’t offer a strategy for forcing the government to give up this money.
Or the report on the Citizens of Bangor Deserve Better demonstration a few months back (see report on this blog) which whilst making the odd correct point (including about the main speaker at the demo) draws outrageously pessimistic conclusions. We even get a small mention (as ‘a small group of enthusiastic Trotskyist students’, there were about 12 of us there and we weren’t all students), yet the suggests that no-one was offering any demands or a programme for change. But we were there doing just that, with placards that were taken up by people, leaflets and our publications. I spoke from the platform and did just that, and additionally there was a speaker opposing council housing privatisation too. Perhaps the author of that article should have tried to do something similar instead of carping on from the sidelines!

It also doesn't feature anything about the issue of tuition/top-up fees in Wales - which there has recently been a bit of an uproar about within Plaid Cymru.
I did quite enjoy the last page of the magazine, the spiky bit which features some short amusing pieces as well as an advert for the Radical History Tour I attended last weekend entitled ‘Finally a date for the revolution!’, as its name in Welsh ‘Chwyl-dro’ could also translate as Revolution. But this doesn’t make up for what I think are the failings of the magazine, which to be honest could be better, so I for one won’t be taking out a subscription.

UNITE March for Jobs in Birmingham

2009-05-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

North Wales Socialist Party acheived a new record today - for getting members to stuff outside of North Wales. Usually we are hamstrung by the sheer cost of stuff -paying for a £50 ticket to get to stuff in London usually limits how many of us can go to stuff and usually we tend to club together to pay for things. But the demo today had free coaches so we managed to get a whopping 4 of us to something (actually we had more go to the Socialist Party Wales Conference, but i won't count that), which would have been even more if members weren't either working/having an operation on their foot/grounded 'til the end of their exams/students visiting home.
I travelled down on the North West Wales UNITE coach, where Socialist Party members were conspicuously young. Indeed the entirety of the rest of the people on the coach were UNITE members, shop stewards and full-time officials. We also had a member travel down on the North East Wales coach where the story was fairly similar too.
The demo itself had a few thousand on it, mostly UNITE members, although there were a few other trades unions that had mobilised for it too, i've been led to believe that the local UNISON branch was amongst them. I was on the Youth Fight For Jobs contingent which, to be fair wasn't the largest (but that said most of our uni/college students have exams at the moment - and the SP UNISON caucus was this weekend where we have a fair few young members too).
Anyways - the platform at the end of the rally was full of the usual platitudes (and Digby Jones too) So I scarpered off to the National Shop Stewards Network meeting to hear Rob Williams speak about his victimisation at Linimar (although when I went it was pissing it down too!).

Holyhead worker victimised for speaking his own language

2009-05-14T08:11:00.001-07:00

Taken from the Socialist Party Wales wesbite (www.socialistpartywales.org.uk)

A Bangor Socialist Party member

The front page of the North Wales Daily Post on May Day splashed a story of a worker at the Holyhead Morrisons store who had felt compelled to quit his job after being told not to speak Welsh. The last straw was when he asked another worker in Welsh to move some items into the store warehouse, when the store manager (who only speaks English) was passing by. The manager asked him not to speak in Welsh as he thought the workers might be talking about him. According to a Morrisons spokesperson the worker was having a conversation with the manager when the incident occurred. On the face of it, this amounts to bullying a worker into speaking a particular language.
The 2001 census showed that over 20% of the population of Wales spoke Welsh, but this increases dramatically in North West Wales, with 69% and 60% speaking Welsh in Gwynedd and Anglesey respectively. This means that Welsh is the first language of a sizeable proportion of workers in the area. Indeed in the quarry industry, which 100 years ago was the area’s main industry, the North Wales Quarrymens Union conducted all its business in Welsh. Moreover, being forced not to speak Welsh has echoes of the period of the emergence of capitalism in Wales which saw English bosses ban workers from speaking the language in order to maintain their dominance, and children who only spoke Welsh at home forced to speak and study in English at school.
In the present case, the worker's trade union, USDAW, did not initially take this issue up, although they are now investigating it. That was left to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society) who have organised a picket outside the store to demand the right to work through the medium of Welsh. They have raised the need for the Welsh Assembly to have legislative powers over the Welsh language which should include the right to work through the medium of Welsh. Whilst this is undoubtedly correct, it doesn't go far enough.
Under capitalist society there are plenty of rights on paper, yet often the bosses can ignore them when it suits their needs. Workers have always had to fight for their rights, such as the right to vote or the right to belong to a trade union, which have been fought for. In reality, only workers organised via the trades union movement can guarantee those rights. Workers should have the right to communicate with people in any language that the person they are talking to is comfortable talking in. They shouldn't be bullied into speaking into any particular language just because a manager wishes to pry on their conversation

Support the Sit-In at London Met University!

2009-05-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know the backstory of whats been happening at London Met University over the last few months I'll quickly fill in the details.
A few months ago it came out that London Met management had been over-reporting the number of students by about 7,000 and given that universities recieve a certain amount of government money per student in funding it has been 'over-paid'. London Met has been ordered to pay back the money (which has obviously been spent) as well as having its funding cut by £15million a year.
As a result university management are making savage cuts to courses and facilities at the university as well as planning on axing 550 jobs!
Save London Metropolitan University campaign has been set up to fight these cuts with the participation of students as well as the UCU and UNISON branches at the university. The campaign has already scored a success forcing the resignation of Vice-Chancellor Brian Roper. Staff took strike action last week, and yesterday at 5pm students occupied a canteen in the Commercial Building.

For more info check out

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=46966049540
Blog: http://savelondonmetuni.blogspot.com/
Press Coverage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8045195.stm

Send solidarity messages to: savelondonmet@gmail.com

There is going to be a protest outside the building this evening at 5.30pm to support the occupation. Details:

COMMERCIAL RD, CITY CAMPUS 5.30 – 6PM TUESDAY 12th MAY

All students and others should support this campaign in any way they can.

Youth Fight for Jobs Launch Conference

2009-05-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between 100 and 150 (the room made it a bit awkward to tell, plus people who were there either only in the morning or afternoon) attended the launch conference of the Youth Fight for Jobs. After some good opening speeches by Alex Gordon from the RMT executive (speaking in place of Bob Crow), Tracy Edwards from the PCS, James Kerr and a Belgian CWI member, the timing of the rest of the opening session clearly went awry as they jammed in a few short contributions from a Tamil student, a member of the SP from South Wales speaking about the sacking of Linamar (ex-Visteon) convenor, Rob Williams and a hip-hop group At Risk of Offending. There simply was too much stuff attempted to be fitted in which meant that the plan of having contributions from the floor didn’t really work.
After a short lunch break the conference split up into workshops. I had been asked to chair the session on ‘What Is The Cause of Unemployment?’ Given it was only a small session (I think the debate on the European elections attracted the most attention), we were able to get into a bit of depth on Marxist economics and also able to discuss the working conditions of those who do have jobs too.
The next session took motions to the congress, all those submitted (which can be found on the Youth Fight for Jobs website) were passed, although a few of them were amended slightly, whilst the age limit for the campaign was remitted to the newly elected steering committee to discuss.
The Conference concluded with a closing rally with a speaker from the CWI in France, a Lindsey Oil Refinery worker and Sean Figg, the newly elected National Organiser for the campaign.
Speaking with comrades after the conference, we were a little disappointed with the attendance, but this is partially due to a number of reasons. In North Wales, it was a combination of lack of money to pay for people getting to London as well as several college students who have been grounded until their exams are over.
Yet the composition of the conference was fairly good. There were a sizeable number of young PCS members there, indeed the PCS Young Members Committee had submitted several motions to the conference as well as the East Midlands PCS NOMS branch and the Student organiser for UNITE was in attendance. In contrast to what a certain ex-member of the Socialist Party has been repeatedly stating online, whilst including university students in the campaign, it isn’t dominated by them as the presence of a substantial number of young workers at the conference showed. Indeed, the delegation from North Wales consisted of a college student and a shop steward.
The conference also received greetings from the workers who occupied the Prisme factory and featured sessions with speakers from the Lindsey Refinery dispute and one of the Visteon Conveners. From a shaky start with the morning session, the conference finished on a good note, despite me missing the last train back to Bangor.

Review – Appeal To Reason by Rise Against (2008)

2009-05-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

A slightly edited version of this review was carried in this weeks issue of The Socialist

I’d guess that the name is perhaps the biggest clue to the fact that Rise Against are quite a left-leaning political band. Their angst-ridden punk rock/hardcore sound has driven them through several albums and has continued to propel them into their latest album, Appeal To Reason. Whilst the album is instantly recognisable as a Rise Against album to a fan, it doesn’t just repeat the style of previous albums, rather deepening it and finding new variations within that style, quite impressive for a four piece punk rock band.

The bands sense of timing combined with some great lyrics makes this a powerful album, for example within the song Re-Education (Through Labor) describing how events will wash away the mis-education people suffer as people “…won’t believe the lies that hide the truth.” Or the environmentalist anthem Collapse (Post-Amerika) with its lines describing the chaos global warming could potential wreak on the planet and asking how it is possible that some still seek to deny this is happening and stall the drastic measures needed. Or their self-deprication in Entertainment with the lyrics “All we are is pretty faces, Picture perfect bottled rage, Packaged synthesized versions of you.”

One of the best songs is Kotov Syndrome, named for a chess term for a move made where the player has spent to long deliberating and rushes a bad move before he runs out of time, focuses on the insecurity offered to ordinary people by capitalist society. The song also features a particularly good lyric “There, high on the watchtower, keeping the peace, whatever that means” is a biting critic of imperialist nations attempts to impose ‘peace’ on their own terms upon the world through the invasions in the Middle East.

But the song that steals the album, is the sole acoustic song, Hero of War. The song graphically depicts the life a young man who signs up to the armed forces and goes through a tour of Iraq. The song depicts the brutality of the occupation with the beating of prisoners and the murder of innocent civilians and how this changes the young man. If you like this genre of music then listening to this album is a must.

Rob Williams sacked by brutal bosses - Step up the struggle

2009-05-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Rob Williams, trade union Convenor of Linamar Swansea, was sacked by the Linamar management last week, and then temporarily re-instated following militant action by the Linamar workforce.

Disgracefully, however, Rob today had his sacking confirmed. Negotiations between Linamar management and Tony Woodley took place all day in London, but Linamar did not shift.
Meanwhile at the Swansea plant Linamar revealed their brutality. Massive intimidation of the workforce took place - including foremen going around the shop floor threatening workers with the sack if they dared walk out in support of Rob. The bosses even went to the ludicrous lengths of removing the door from Rob’s trade union office.

This brutal action by Linamar is an attempt to return to the nineteenth century. What Linamar do not realise, however, is that all hell is going to break loose when workers, both in the Swansea and the wider labour movement, hear how Rob and his members have been treated.
The official reason for his sacking was “irretrievable breakdown of trust” - one of the most blatant excuses to behead a trade union organisation ever used in any factory. Rob’s record in standing up for his members, both inside and outside the factory, is second to none. However, what is at stake here is not the fate of one individual but the right for workers to be represented by the best militant fighters.

This sacking has to be totally opposed. The union has promised rapid action to organise a ballot for an official strike, but the anti-trade union laws mean this could still take up to a month between the ballot and the strike action actually taking place. That time, which must be kept a short as possible, needs to be used to pull out all the stops in support of Rob. Messages of support and donations should flood in.

If Linamar are allowed to get away with this, no convenor or shop steward, either in the already weakened car industry or in the wider trade union movement is safe. Allow the employers to inflict a defeat here and no trade unionist, shop steward, let alone a convenor, will be able to put their head above the parapet without the bosses seeking to cut it off.

Workers are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Big business is doing their utmost to make sure that it is the working class that pays for the crisis. Militant, fighting trade unionism – symbolised by Rob Williams and the union organisation in Linamar – must not only be preserved but strengthened in order to prepare the working class for the capitalist offensive that is under way in Britain and worldwide.

Continue to phone protests to:

Head of Swansea Linamar Brian Wade 01792 656339
Personnel Manager 01792 656238

Messages of protest to linda.hasenfratz@linamar.com
Messages of support to Rob Williams: robbo@redwills.freeserve.co.uk
and Socialist Party Wales: socialistpartywales@btinternet.com

May Day Celebrations in North Wales

2009-05-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

The celebrations in North Wales basically went from bad to good. To start with we had the travesty of Wrexham Trades Council cancelling their May Day march (due for last Saturday)allegedly due to a leaflet going out advertising it being a little critical of the government. Pathetic or what!

Instead it was replaced by a few performances by some bands which made it appear more like something organised by the Salvation Army rather than by the labour movement. Instead, North Wales SP members made the best of a bad situation giving out some anti-BNP literature and then meeting to discuss with some contacts.

The Sunday turned out much better with around 30 or so turning up for a Radical History Tour near Llanberis looking at the area's trade union history organised by a few local members of the IWW. The walk was a good 3 1/2 stroll past old quarries and the famed union rock, which was the only place local quarriers could meet to discuss union business.

(Another photo from the walk)

STOP PRESS: Key union activist sacked

2009-04-29T05:37:00.000-07:00

Socialist Party member Rob Williams, the Unite convenor of the Linamar car parts factory in Swansea, was called into the directors’ office of the plant on Tuesday 28 April and told that he was being sacked for “irretrievable breakdown of trust”. This blatant victimisation of one of the leading left-wing shop steward activists in the car industry was met by an immediate production line walk-off by the day shift. They surrounded Rob’s union office after management called in police to forcibly remove Rob from the building.
Rob has been very active in the campaign of the sacked Visteon car parts workers and has recently visited all three of their plants. His sacking is likely to be linked to his role in this struggle. The Visteon Unite convenors are demanding that Rob be reinstated and they, alongside many others, are calling on Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley to also back the immediate reinstatement of Rob.

Linamar is feeling the economic pinch and has recently announced 140 redundancies.

Messages of support should be rushed to
Rob Williams: robbo@redwills.freeserve.co.uk
and Socialist Party Wales: socialistpartywales@btinternet.com
For ongoing information see www.socialistparty.org.uk

Euro elections: Challenging big business and the far-right

2009-04-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

This article comes from next month's issue of Socialism Today. I re-post it here because it deals well with the reasons that the Socialist Party are supporting this initiative and summarises the strengths and weaknesses of the coalition too.

In this year's European elections working-class people have a positive alternative to vote for. A new electoral alliance, No2EU-Yes to Democracy, has been launched to oppose the EU's big-business agenda. It will also mount a challenge to the divisive, anti-working class, far-right BNP which has, in the past, benefitted from the protest votes in Euro-elections. HANNAH SELL reports on this important initiative.

THE NATIONAL UNION of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) has initiated an electoral alliance for the European elections that will be contesting all of the seats in England, Wales and Scotland in the elections on 4 June. This is a temporary platform for the European elections, entitled No2EU-Yes to Democracy, with initial support from the RMT, Socialist Party, Solidarity-Scotland's Socialist Movement, the Indian Workers' Association, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), the Morning Star newspaper, and others.
It is the first time since the formation of the Labour Party that a trade union has taken an electoral initiative on an all-Britain scale. The transformation of the Labour Party from a workers' party at base - albeit with a capitalist leadership - into an unalloyed party of big business has left the working class without a mass party for well over a decade. The absence of such a party has been a central factor in holding back the confidence of workers to struggle in defence of their pay and conditions. The fact that the RMT has taken this step, however tentative, is therefore enormously positive.
The programme of No2EU-Yes to Democracy is very limited. Nevertheless, it seeks to oppose the European Union (EU) from a working-class, non-nationalist standpoint. The programme is more limited, for example, than the People's Charter, which is itself very far from being a rounded-out socialist programme. The charter sets out a broad programme for dealing with the current economic crisis and putting 'people first'. Signed by a number of union leaders, MPs and prominent lefts, it aims to collect a million signatures, a faint echo of the People's Charter of the 19th century Chartists. Nonetheless, the fact that No2EU is taking a step towards solving the crisis of working class representation, whereas the People's Charter deliberately avoids the issue, makes the former far more significant.
The candidates for No2EU-Yes to Democracy include leaders of the Lindsey oil refinery construction workers who went on strike in January and of the Visteon car components workers currently blockading their factories. Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, will be heading the list in London, and a number of RMT regional officers will be standing around the country. Coventry Socialist Party councillor Dave Nellist heads the list in the West Midlands. In the North West, the regional UNISON NEC representative and Socialist Party member, Roger Bannister, is heading the list. In Scotland, Tommy Sheridan is second on the list. Other candidates include car workers fighting job losses, postal workers resisting privatisation, health workers, teachers, fire-fighters and other public-sector workers. This list offers an alternative to the pro-capitalist parties, and its candidate lists are dominated by some of the most combative sections of the working class in Britain today.
There are one or two exceptions, notably Steve Radford, a councillor for the small Liberal Party, which split away from the Liberal Party when it merged with the SDP in 1988. He is on the list in the North West, having been proposed by the CPB. Clearly, the Liberal Party is not a workers' party and, in the past, Radford attacked the Liverpool 47, the Labour councillors, led by Militant supporters, who defied Margaret Thatcher's Tory government from 1983-87. However, all electoral blocs require some compromises. Some, of course, would be unacceptable and would lead to a break of the bloc. This, however, is an acceptable compromise. In the recent, period Steve Radford has taken a radical stand, has come out against the war in Iraq, and has been involved in anti-BNP campaigning. He has also agreed to the programme of the No2EU initiative.
No2EU-Yes to Democracy is partially motivated by an understanding of the urgent need to provide an alternative to the far-right racist British National Party (BNP). There is a real danger that the BNP could capitalise on the anger with New Labour and succeed in winning one or more MEPs in this election. The BNP will never be cut across by bland campaigns pleading with people not to vote for racists. The implication of such campaigns is that workers should vote for the pro-capitalist parties in order to stop the BNP. Only the development of a genuine working-class alternative, combined with a serious campaign against the BNP, will be able to effectively undermine them. This electoral initiative is taking an important step in that direction by offering a left, anti-EU alternative.
Some suggest that the Greens can play that role, particularly in the European elections, as they have two MEPs. However, the Greens are not a workers' party and are not capable of appealing to the section of disillusioned and angry workers who could consider voting for the BNP.

Programme

OF COURSE, WHILE No2EU's motivations and candidate lists are, overall, very impressive, when deciding whether to support an electoral initiative it is essential that socialists look not only at who is behind it, but also what programme it is standing on. The programme of No2EU consists of a few demands, centring on issues relating directly to the European Union. These are:

Reject the Lisbon treaty.
No to EU directives that privatise our public services.
Defend and develop manufacturing, agriculture and fishing industries in Britain.
Repeal anti-trade union European Court of Justice rulings and EU rules exploiting workers.
No to racism and fascism, yes to international solidarity of working people.
No to EU militarisation and an EU army.
Repatriate democratic powers to EU member states.
Replace unequal EU trade deals with fair trade that benefits developing nations.
Scrap EU rules designed to stop member states from implementing independent economic policies.
Keep Britain out of the eurozone.

The EU has not been central in most workers' minds up to the present time. However, recent developments have made it more of an issue, at least amongst those workers who have been directly affected, and perhaps increasingly amongst a wider layer. It was central to the Lindsey construction workers' strike. It was under the EU Posted Workers Directive and subsequent European Court of Justice (ECJ) rulings that the Italian-registered company, IREM, was able to employ workers not covered by the union-enforced national construction industry agreements.
No2EU's programme takes up the different aspects of the EU's neo-liberal laws. These laws arise from the support of this government, and all European governments, for neo-liberal anti-working class policies. EU laws provide them with an additional lever with which to drive through their pro-big business programmes. For example, the EU's public spending criteria gave New Labour an excuse to privatise capital projects like new schools and hospitals, by means of private finance initiatives and the disastrous public-private partnership on London Underground, which increase the costs of public services and subsidise corporate profits. The government's plan for the part-privatisation of Royal Mail, the first step to its complete sell-off, is linked to the EU's 2007 Postal Services Directive to introduce a deregulated postal services market.

A neo-liberal charter

THE LISBON TREATY is just the latest in a long line of EU treaties that demand privatisation and other neo-liberal measures. However, it goes further than its predecessors. It is, in reality, the European constitution, repackaged after it was rejected by referendums in France and Netherlands. New Labour promised a referendum on the treaty, but then reneged on that promise after the 2005 general election. The Lisbon treaty has only been put to the vote in one country, Ireland. When a majority of the population rejected it, the response of the leaders of Europe was to demand a new vote, to take place by October 2009, in the hope that the Irish voters would 'get it right this time'. Despite the colossal pressure the Irish ruling class is applying to make sure it gets the result it wants second time around, it is not certain of success.
In all the referendums - France, the Netherlands and Ireland - the establishment argued for a 'yes' vote. In all three countries, the 'no' vote was strongest in working-class areas, reflecting deep-seated anger with Europe's ruling elites, and an understanding that the treaty is a neo-liberal charter.
The treaty lays the basis for further privatisation. It calls for a system in the 'internal market' to ensure 'that competition is not distorted' and calls for uniformity in measures of liberalisation. This is a thinly disguised code for hiving public services off to the private sector, starting with the most profitable.
Lisbon would also further undermine democracy as it gives to the European Commission, an unelected, appointed body, the task of negotiating trade agreements on a global basis. The Commission has a consistent record of proposing privatising public services. The European parliament, the only elected body, has always been little more than a rubber stamp. Under Lisbon it will have a few more rights but will still be able to do no more than act as a check on the Commission.
Individual member states would no longer have the right of veto. If there is a dispute between individual member states and the European Commission it will be the unelected European Court of Justice (ECJ) that will have to make a decision. The ECJ has repeatedly shown in whose interests it judges. For example, in the Laval judgement it concluded that trade union action in Sweden against Laval for employing Latvian workers on €9 an hour, rather than the nationally agreed rate of €16 an hour, had interfered with a company's 'freedom to provide services'. This was a legal precedent for the idea that trade union action is only legal if it does not interfere with the freedoms of big business - in other words the rights of the big corporations trumps the rights of workers every time. It was this, and other similar judgements, that were used against the Lindsey workers. The EU is making it easier for big business to conduct a race to the bottom, where employing workers from countries where labour is cheaper is used as a means to force down wages in countries with higher wages.
No2EU is an electoral bloc, bringing together different organisations and individuals, around a minimum programme for a specific campaign. As in the nature of any genuine electoral bloc, every supporting organisation works together to build No2EU-Yes to Democracy, but is free to put forward its own programme. Our material in support of No2EU-Yes to Democracy goes much further than the list of demands of the campaign, giving a clear socialist approach.
While No2EU is not yet a mass alternative, it involves sizeable forces, including RMT, a significant and combative national trade union. It is motivated by a working-class reaction against the capitalist EU project. Far from being nationalist, it has 'yes to international solidarity of working people' as one of its demands. What is more, in his public statements, Bob Crow has had a clearly internationalist approach, for example saying that "we want a workers' Europe, not the bosses' EU", on the BBC's Daily Politics show.
This initiative is a huge step forward. It offers an alternative to the majority of trade union leaders who continue to cling to the trouser legs of New Labour. In the Socialist Party we also hope it will be a step towards the development of a new mass left alternative. It offers a challenge to those trade union leaders, some even on the left, who have called for Britain to join the euro currency. They have done so partly because they were under the illusion that, because neo-liberalism had gone much further in Britain than in most other European countries, joining the eurozone would improve the rights of workers in Britain. This was completely incorrect. In reality the EU and the eurozone have been used as a tool by the capitalist classes to accelerate the drive to implement neo-liberal policies, aiming to catch Britain up, or even to overtake it. Where there were individual EU laws that were more progressive than British law, such as the maximum 48-hour working week, the British government simply opted out.

Europe in crisis

THE PRO-EURO trade union leaders also believed that a united Europe was going to take off. As has been argued in this magazine, a completely united Europe is utopian under capitalism. When the world economy was booming integration was able to go a long way. The capitalist classes of Europe are driven towards integration in order to create a counterweight to the economic power of the US, and now the growing strength of China and Asia. It is this need to establish an economic, political and even military counterweight to these rival economic blocs that is behind the EU.
Such is the modern scale of production, technique, investment and management that the multinationals and transnationals which dominate world trade plan their operations on a world, never mind a European, scale. This shows the potential for a democratic socialist plan, on a national, European and then a world basis, which would liberate the productive forces from the constraints of capitalism. However, as long as capitalism remains the big corporations cannot more than partially surmount the barrier of the nation state. They are, almost without exception, still based in, and tied to, particular countries.
They are reliant on the market and the political superstructure of their home nation. An intrinsic part of that political superstructure is a national consciousness which the capitalist class exploits in order, for example, to win support for its wars, but which is not, obviously, entirely under its control. At the same time, an international class consciousness also exists amongst the working class and labour movement. This is not static, either, but increases at times of heightened class struggle. In the past, this was shown by the huge international workers' support for the miners' strike in Britain in 1984-85, and has recently been shown by the support amongst Italian trade unionists for the Lindsey strike.
Although EU integration has gone some way, one indication of its limits is shown in the way it is still seen by voters. While this varies from country to country there is nowhere where the European parliament is considered to be anything more than an extremely poor second, in terms of its importance, to national parliaments. According to the EU parliament's own website, 54% of people across the EU say they are not interested in the European elections, while only 34% say they are likely to vote!
Europe, like the rest of the world, is now engulfed in the worst economic crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. Some countries outside the eurozone might hope that joining would ameliorate their economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund, for example, has been suggesting that Hungary, Latvia and other Central and Eastern European states should be allowed to join as 'quasi members'. The European Central Bank, of course, quickly ruled out taking any responsibility for these states.
However, while some governments might hope that the eurozone would provide them with a refuge, the countries inside are trapped in a prison. The Irish economy is in freefall, expected to contract by 7% this year. No readjustment through currency devaluation is possible so long as Ireland remains within the eurozone. Italy's exchange rate, to give another example, taking into account inflation, is estimated to be one third higher than required by the terrible economic position facing the country. This economic crisis could shatter the eurozone, if the poorest states have no choice but to escape from its prison. Another possibility is that the richest countries, particularly Germany, which is reluctant to bail out the poorest nations, could refuse to pay in to ensure the continuation of the euro.
Even if the eurozone survives this crisis intact, an escalation of the already increased national tensions between the different member states of the EU is inevitable. As we warned, there will be a recoil from the capitalists' attempts to create a united Europe with all the dangers of increased nationalism that this will bring.
No2EU-Yes to Democracy has a vital role to play in offering an alternative to nationalism. In one sense, it is more developed than many of the anti-EU or Common Market (formed in 1957, the precursor to the EU, set up in 1993) campaigns of the past because, far from blocking with the capitalist anti-EU parties, it is an attempt to provide a left alternative to them. It is not a coincidence that most of the same organisations that dismiss No2EU as nationalist also made the fundamental mistake of opposing the Lindsey oil construction workers' action, an all-out unofficial strike which won a tremendous victory, on the completely false grounds that it was nationalist.

Splits at the top

IT IS UTTERLY utopian to suggest, as Labour MP John Cruddas has recently done, that it is now possible, as a result of the economic crisis, to reforge the EU as a social democratic project. Cruddas argues that "the mandate of the European Central Bank must be broadened to include social objectives and the prevention of unemployment". He goes on to suggest that, if this takes place, the chances of Britain joining the euro would increase.
The ruling classes of Europe are divided on what path EU institutions should take in the next period. Just as New Labour's increased state intervention has been, as the Financial Times put it, "not to bury capitalism but to rescue it", so will any changed policy by the bodies of the EU be tailored to the needs of big business. At this stage, however, the EU is acting as the last defender of crude neo-liberalism. For example, EU finance ministers are demanding massive public spending cuts from a whole number of countries including Britain, which has been given six months to come up with plans to cut £35 billion to meet the Stability and Growth Pact finance rules.
They hope that by forcing through the Lisbon treaty they will be able to guarantee the continuation of untrammelled neo-liberalism. This is nonsense, of course, and they are already being forced to alter their approach in the face of reality. The European Commission treaty, article 87, for example, prohibits state aid. Yet European governments have pledged at least €1,873 billion to bail out their financial sectors, including €360 billion by the French government, €500 billion in Germany and €515 billion in Britain. Faced with a devastating economic crisis the various national ruling classes brushed aside the EU rules, treating them for what they are, words written on a piece of paper. The EU rules then had to be adapted to the actions of individual governments. Whereas the European Commission objected to the nationalisation of Northern Rock, it has since accepted a whole number of full and partial nationalisations, including Bradford and Bingley in Britain and the Anglo Irish Bank in Ireland. This is justified on the ground that these are emergency measures, but it gives an indication of how far the neo-liberal norms are breaking down in the face of crisis.
This in itself shows the limits of the power of the EU. Governments are happy to submit to its rulings as unbreakable when it suits them to do so but are also prepared to ignore them when they do not suit the interests of capitalism in their country. Some of the supporters of No2EU-Yes to Democracy do not always fully recognise this and suggest that it is EU diktats that are responsible for neo-liberal measures. This goes too far. In fact, of course, New Labour has been the most neo-liberal in a host of neo-liberal governments, and has introduced EU diktats with enthusiasm, because it has suited its purposes to do so. But it has been equally prepared to brush them aside in defence of the banking system.

No model democracy

THERE IS ALSO a danger that, while correctly attacking the lack of democracy in the EU, some supporters of the campaign can fall into giving the impression that the UK parliament is the alternative. A constitutional monarchy with an unelected second chamber, Britain is no model of democracy. Neither the House of Lords nor the monarchy is just a harmless tradition - like morris dancing or playing conkers. Just witness the way that Peter Mandelson recently sent the bill to part-privatise Royal Mail to the House of Lords for its first reading, rather than the House of Commons as is customary, in the hope of giving it an easy passage. The monarchy still has formal power to dismiss a prime minister and the government. This was last used in 1975, not in Britain but in Australia, when Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General appointed by the Queen, dismissed the Labour government. Although the monarchy today has far less social weight than it did in 1975, in the future, a desperate ruling class would be prepared to use its reserve powers.
Appearing to present the British parliament as democratic is one of the possible potential pitfalls of the position of the campaign that victorious candidates would only nominally hold their seats and would not sit in the European parliament. A discussion on how to proceed on this would be made by a national convention of the forces involved in the campaign, if candidates are elected. However, the Socialist Party argued against the current position, putting the case that, while no capitalist parliament is genuinely democratic, it is better for workers' representatives to sit in them both in order to use them as a platform from which they can gain publicity for their programme, and also to take whatever measures are possible to defend the interests of the working class. The possibilities for the latter are extremely limited in the European parliament, which can largely do no more than act as a check on the European Commission, and has no right to propose legislation. Nonetheless, even there, left MEPs have occasionally been able to have some effect. For example, an MEP from the Socialist Party in the Netherlands - a broad left reformist party - in 2007 was able to successfully move an amendment which blocked the requirement that all local and regional public transport be put out to tender to the private sector.
One of the main reasons for the campaign's position is the fact that the European parliament is accurately seen as a gravy train - MEPs will be earning nearly £80,000 a year after the June elections. Therefore, No2EU has rightly made it clear that no successful candidate will make any financial gain as a result. This points to the most effective means to deal with the issue, that is, to make it clear that anyone elected would only take a worker's wage, as Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall did when they were Labour MPs and supporters of the Militant Tendency (now the Socialist Party), in the 1980s. Instead of the bloated parliamentary salaries, they accepted the wage of a skilled worker in their constituencies, donating the rest to the workers' movement. Their expenses and accounts were circulated to local Labour Party and trade union bodies for scrutiny.
However, while we argued against the campaign's position to only nominally take any seats, nonetheless, as long as it is explained well, it will be understood by many workers. Bob Crow has responded to questions on the issue by asking 'can anyone name five MEPs?' This hits the spot because, in as far as most workers think about the European parliament at all, they consider it an irrelevant gravy train. Dave Nellist has responded by explaining about the convention the campaign would hold to discuss the way forward, but adding that, when he was an MP, while assiduously attending to his constituents' interests, he spent most of his time campaigning outside of Westminster, speaking at 1,500 public meetings, and that he would do the same if elected as an MEP, concentrating on building a movement in Britain and in Europe against the EU's neo-liberal agenda. He has added that at least when he went to Westminster there was the possibility of moving bills, but that this does not exist in the European parliament.

A first step

ELECTORAL PROSPECTS FOR the European elections are very difficult to predict. No2EU has been launched late in the day, and has limited financial resources. However, regardless of the number of votes it receives, it is a very important break in the situation. A certain comparison can be drawn with the launch in 2004 of the WASG (Electoral Alternative for Work and Social Justice) in Germany, which came initially from a layer of middle-ranking trade union officials and protests against attacks on living standards and workers' rights.
It was not initially clear how far the WASG would develop, however it was absolutely correct for Sozialistische Alternative (SAV - CWI Germany) to enthusiastically work to maximise the its potential. The WASG led to the setting up of Die Linke (The Left party) which received four million votes in the 2005 general election. The development of Die Linke has not been straightforward, with the leadership moving to the right and leading members of SAV excluded from membership. Nonetheless, it is a step towards independent representation for the working class in Germany.
In Britain we do not yet have a new mass left party - or a significant step towards one such as exists in Germany, France and Greece. However, we are faced with an important beginning. We have the leadership of a militant trade union that is prepared to take the responsibility for initiating the development of a political voice for working people - at least in the European elections - that will oppose all the capitalist parties and provide an alternative to the far-right, racist BNP . They will undoubtedly face attack from the capitalist media for daring to stand up. Marxists and socialists have a duty to offer every assistance in ensuring the campaign is a success.

Questions on Crime to a Venezuelan Consul

2009-04-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my blog post about NUS Conference, during that conference I managed to quiz a Venezuelan consul about crime in Venezuela, below is a brief summary of what we discussed.

The discussion started with me asking a general question as to the effect of crime in Venezuela.
In response, the consul noted the problem of crime, in particular violent crime has beset Venezuela for a long time, yet he believed that the Chavez regime has managed to make inroads into it. For example, he cited life expectancy (increased from around 50 years to 70 years), which he admitted was mostly down to improvements in medical care, but he also believe this was due to lower levels of violence in the country. But he also pointed out that violents crime was historic - for example, earlier in Venezuelan history when European immigrants were invited to settle in the country, many refused becuase they believed it was too dangerous.

We then moved on to talking about prisons, as Venezuela does have notoriously overcrowded prisons.
Again, the consul noted that this is a big problem - but did inform me of a process of 'humanisation of prisons' which has been taking place over the last year which he believed to have been quite succesful - given I hadn't heard of it he recommended I look it up on the internet which I have done (See this article http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3260). One thing that he did mention was some of the projects that have taken place to help Venezuelan prisoners to learn useful skills - mentioning one prison creating a classical music orchestra for example.
Yet conditions in Venezuela still rank below those in the UK's overcrowded prisons. To illustrate this he mentioned a scheme for transfer of prisoners between Britain and Venezuela which British prisoners incarcerated in Venezuela can opt to transfer to serve out their sentence in a British prison and vica-versa. Of those who have taken the offer up, the traffic has been entirely one way - from Venezuela to Britain.

Although we weren't able to talk for too long, I think there are some interesting points which need to be examined - particularly with regards to the prison reforms.

Review - Damming The Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment by Peter Hallward

2009-04-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

Is is the first of three posts about Haiti - the 5th anniversary of the second coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide would have been on February 29th this year (had there been one) and this article comes from the March 2009 issue of Socialism Today.

DAMMING THE FLOOD tells the tale of Haiti over the past two decades. This Caribbean nation had been the scene of the successful slave revolt which threw off French rule way back in 1804, but it had suffered economic isolation and ‘underdevelopment’ from the vengeful imperialist powers ever since. It was only in 1987 that it began to emerge from the dictatorships of Papa Doc and Jean Claude Duvalier.
The book begins with the period leading up to Haiti’s first democratic election in 1990 when a Catholic priest from a liberation theology background, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, won a large majority in the presidential elections at the head of the Lavalas (the flood) movement. He was elected on a pro-poor platform with his regime lowering food prices and increasing the minimum wage. He also attempted to reign in the army which had acted with impunity during the dictatorship and the few years after, and it was this that precipitated his overthrow in 1991, which unleashed a torrent of repression on the Lavalas movement.
In exile in the US, Aristide tried to negotiate for his return to the country and the removal of the coup dictatorship. He was eventually restored to power by the US in 1994, for which he made many concessions towards neo-liberal imperialism. He introduced World Bank and IMF sponsored ‘structural adjustment plans’ and the privatisation of some state enterprises, although he also dismantled the armed forces.
His successor as president, Rene Preval, Aristide’s first prime minister, continued these policies. Yet support for Aristide remained very high, and he again won an overwhelming majority in the 2000 presidential elections (now as the candidate of his own party Fanmi Lavalas). But yet again, despite many pro-poor policies (such as again increasing the minimum wage), he made concessions to imperialism in order to restore international aid they were withholding to strangle his regime.
Former soldiers, backed by the ‘democratic opposition’ (local capitalists and politicians that had fallen out with Aristide) launched a wave of guerrilla operations from the Dominican Republic that overwhelmed Northern Haiti and eventually led to Aristide being forced into exile in the Central African Republic by the US. Yet this overthrow, in February 2004, was not without opposition from the people who took to the streets to demand Aristide’s return, in a manner reminiscent of the mobilisation of the Venezuelan masses to demand Chavez’s return after the 2003 coup attempt in Venezuela.
The despicable role of the imperialist powers is nowhere more clearly shown than in its ‘humanitarian intervention’ forces which, rather than trying to prevent abuses of human rights, actively perpetrated them, in particular repressing the remnants of Fanmi Lavalas with many deaths and its leading activists thrown into prison. This clearly shows how the imperialist powers will intervene in a country, not to protect ordinary people, but to defend their own economic and strategic interests.
Peter Hallward’s book has several strengths. Firstly it is clearly very well researched and he is able to quote from a variety of sources to refute several myths that have been promoted by various groups (including some well-known human rights organisation) about the period. These include a dispute over a technicality in the 2000 elections, how Aristide left the country in 2004, and the links between the armed forces and various oppositional groups. He also explains how such myths originated from the biased opposition press which, after being repeated without verification in the US, became unchallengeable ‘facts’ for much of the rest of the worldwide media.
Hallward also interviewed many of the participants in the Lavalas movement and the Fanmi Lavalas party and thus provides a clear view of the amount of support that Aristide still holds to this day, despite his exile. Hallward actually compares him to Chavez (however, Chavez is clear on the need for socialism and Aristide is not in the slightest) as both movements in Venezuela and Haiti clearly depend on their leading figures to a large extent. Yet there are similarities with the social organisation basis of Evo Morales in Bolivia too, as Fanmi Lavalas still continues to operate with well-established leaders and is not wholly dependent on the figurehead leader. This is clearly evidenced by the actions of the Latortue regime (the dictatorship that replaced Aristide) in imprisoning these leaders so they could not contest elections.
However, there are a few obvious weaknesses in the book too. One is the continual insistence by Hallward that there was no other route that Aristide could have taken apart from compromise with the major imperialist powers (in this case the US and France). He gives two reasons for this. The first is that Haiti was dependent on foreign aid and that as Haiti ground to a halt without these funds Aristide could not carry out his pro-poor initiatives. Yet a resolute programme to nationalise the major parts of the Haitian economy (especially the assets of those funding the armed opposition) would have countered this. It is true that, as Hallward notes, large sections of the economy are geared towards export. But an appeal for further assistance from Cuba and, during his second term, Venezuela – who both before and since Aristide’s presidency have had significant trading agreements with Haiti – could have overcome economic dependence on foreign aid. Of course, due to the nature of those regimes it would not be guaranteed that they would have come to Aristide’s aid, but such an appeal would certainly have been supported by the workers and poor of those countries, and would also have pointed towards the need for a socialist confederation of those countries with Haiti.
The second reason Hallward gives is related to the first. He argues that because Aristide had no armed forces he could rely upon he was therefore at the mercy of foreign armies if they chose to invade, and also the armed opposition. Yet at the same time Hallward praises Aristide’s pacifist stance, which meant that Aristide ended up demobilising the spontaneous attempts of Haitian workers and poor to defend themselves against the opposition forces.
This is linked to another issue that Hallward is weak on, the existence of pro-Aristide gangs (referred to by the opposition as chimeres). As he states the gangs, led by some Lavalas supporters, formed in the wake of the first coup to defend themselves and the communities they were based in from paramilitary violence. However, the gangs also relied on criminal and thuggish activities to support themselves. But such gangs would not have existed if Aristide and other Lavalas supporters had mobilised a movement aimed at stopping either of the coups in their tracks. Such examples can be found from history, such as the mobilisations that stopped the attempted coups of Kornilov in Russia in 1917, of General Spinola in Portugal in 1975, or even the ‘tancazo’ plot to overthrow Allende in Chile in June 1973. Such mobilisations could also have formed the basis for opposition to foreign military intervention. Although around 200 years ago, the slave revolts in Haiti show that technically superior foreign armies intervening into a social revolution can be successfully defeated, especially as at this time the US was already tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One certainly can see another resemblance between the events in Haiti in recent years and the Haitian slave revolution. Like the brave, but continually compromising Toussaint L’Overture, Aristide made concessions where he should have been decisive. The main ingredient that has been missing from Haiti over this period is a revolutionary party that will take decisive measures – more in the manner of another slave leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines – which could bring about the necessary conditions for the real freedom and liberation of the Haitian masses, a socialist Haiti and socialist world. This conclusion is not presented in the book, but it is the task that Marxists will have to take up in the country. Despite these criticisms, however, this is an excellent book and deserves attention.

Rugby League: In League with big business?

2009-04-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

This features in this weeks issue of the Socialist - despite Rugby League having a traditionally working class background, I haven't ever come across any writings by Socialists on it. The photo is of the George Hotel in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire - the birth place of Rugby League.

AS TOP-flight football becomes more and more under the control of ridiculously wealthy individuals and businesses, we can learn from the creation of another of England's most played and supported sports.
Rugby League was born out of the northern working class' desire to play sport without fear of reducing their meagre incomes or putting their jobs at risk. By the late 19th century the three major British sports had already begun to form league structures, with football even forming a professional body in 1885.
But sports, whose rules were largely formed and made official by the upper class, were mostly amateur. This prevented the working class from taking a full role. Workers faced long working days, poor nutrition and often did hard physical jobs. Organised sport at a high level was often left to those with the money and lifestyle to support training sessions and regular matches.
In rugby, increasingly popular in the north, especially around West Yorkshire and Lancashire, a generation of talented working-class players had become frustrated at being forced to miss games because of work or to miss work through injury.
The owners of northern rugby clubs were forced to reflect this anger. So when the southern-dominated Rugby Football Union refused to allow working players to be compensated for missing work due to rugby the northern clubs broke away, forming what became the Rugby Football League.
Its creation reflected the working class' growing power. RL became, for the northern masses, a rallying point and an example of the pride felt in watching fellow workers allowed to perform at their best - a sensation far from that felt watching football's Premier League today.

The revenue game

Bearing its history in mind, the formation of the top-flight British Super League, is a betrayal of the values that the sport held on to for most of the 20th century. Super League was formed in 1996, bringing with it higher TV revenues but imposing some serious changes in the game.
One was the shift to a summer season which, due to matches being played on firmer ground, made the game much faster. This necessitated ever fitter, more superhuman players, generally limiting the playing of the sport at a high level to those with a naturally large frame and powerful physique.
Also negatively, it led to cheap US-style commercialisation of the sport, with cheerleaders and silly name changes. Historic teams such as Bradford Northern and Wakefield Trinity became Bradford Bulls and Wakefield Wildcats.
The new Super League, trying to draw in a new rugby league market, included 'expansion' teams in areas with no RL traditions, such as northern France and London. Neither fared well financially nor drew in supporters.
The economic calamities didn't stop there. In 1999 the RFL reduced the number of top-level teams, offering clubs a £1 million bribe to merge. This was taken up by teams struggling financially. Hull Sharks and Gateshead Thunder merged, as did Huddersfield Giants and Sheffield Eagles, robbing communities of local teams.
The latest development is Super League's franchise system, imported from the US sports world. It removes the threat of relegation, thereby guaranteeing TV revenues and encouraging greater investment in clubs. Yet the criteria for entry to the franchise are mostly financial - how well the team plays or their fan base are secondary considerations.
The spectre is there of RL becoming like the football Premier League. Already a few big teams tend to dominate the league, while more fans are priced out of watching their local teams play (adult ticket prices increased dramatically under the Super League).
Top RL players are still closer to their communities than in football; the sport has retained its working class fan base. Leeds Rhinos captain Kevin Sinfield visited the Yorkshire Post strikers' picket line last month.
But rugby league has degenerated, aided by the profit-hungry league owners and media backers. This reinforces the need for democratic planning of the sport by representatives from the local areas, supporters' groups, players and coaches.

Record Amount of Visits on Tuesday (and other things)

2009-04-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, Leftwing Criminologist received a large spike in visitors as you can see from the rather dodgy graph in this post. In fact at 245 unique visitors this is the highest number I've ever had in a day by a long shot. Now, much as I like people to come visit and read this blog, I don't really go out of my way to get people to visit, I usually get around 50 unique visitors a day when I've posted that day or somewhat less when I haven't. Obviously I think the spike had a little something to do with the Red Dwarf review posted the day before, but if the odd one or two got interested in criminological ideas from a left-wing perspective then so much the better.

Anyways, onto other things - speaking of criminology from a left-wing perspective, I wanted to flag up another post by Phil at A Very Public Sociologist on what should socialists do about the police? In case people haven't guessed this leads on from the stuff at the G20 and also the arrest of direct action protestors recently - also for a decent summary of blogging on the police and the G20 read the most recent Carnival of Socialism over at HarpyMarx.

Given my lack of posting all that much over the last month or so, you may think that the next month could be similar. But rest assured, I've actually got quite a few posts in the bank ready to appear including a short series of posts on Haiti, some posts on Police Chief Constables, some comments on crime and criminal justice in Venezuela and more. Stay tuned!

Anyways, as ever I've been adding new links to the blogroll, but I haven't plugged any of the formally in the blog yet (in fact I've just checked and I haven't plugged any new blogs since January!), so please welcome An American Nightmare and Vengeance and Fashion, both of which are well worth checking out.

Review: Red Dwarf: Back To Earth

2009-04-13T05:37:00.000-07:00

Where to be begin? I think I can safely say that they weren't the best Red Dwarf episodes ever.

For me the first episode wasn't that good at all. It just wasn't funny. The most amusing part was the Cat's diving costume. Instead we had what appeared to be quite high end special effects which just looked completely out of place. At times the odd thing looked good, like the rememberance garden, but for the most part it just made everything look too shiny and clean and just not Red Dwarf. I think I'm amongst a number of people who hate the overuse of CGI in programmes - usually cos it attempts to cover up a poor plot.

And thats before we get into them re-using gags from old series too. And I also wonder whether the lack of a studio audience (all but series 7 had one) had any impact on it, I feel that the actors timing might have been better with it and they might have come up with some funny bits too. I felt that the episode wasn't horrible, but I can't think of anything good to say about it.

Fortunately the next two episodes were better. I guess the whole TV characters realising that they are TV characters has been done before, but I thought it wasn't done too badly. More to the point I actually laughed during those episodes. They still weren't as good as classic Red Dwarf shows though, one of the main problems was that everything just seemed a little overdone, amusing things went on so long that they weren't as funny as they would have been if they had ended sooner, either that or they appeared to obviously have been borrowed from earlier series (the main exception I can think of is where Sophia Winklemans character explains how it is ethical to kill holograms like she plans to do to Rimmer and he promptly pushes her in front of a moving vehicle). The episodes weren't like you could hate them, but someone could and should have done something better with them.

But what I do want to address is some of the comments made by Phil at A Very Public Sociologist made in his review (see http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2009/04/red-dwarf-back-to-earth.html)

Firstly I want to take up the division between the series that he creates, which are

1) Series 1 and 2 (early Red Dwarf)

2) Series 3 to 6 (mid-aged Red Dwarf)

3) Series 7 and 8 (Red Dwarf post Rob Grant)

I think this division is wrong, we need to be more exact about the changes in location for the series, change in writers and change in cast. Instead I think it should be split up as follows,

1) Series 1 and 2 (On Red Dwarf, Grant and Naylor writing, crew-Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Holly)

2) Series 3 to 5 (On Red Dwarf, Grant and Naylor writing, crew-Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten, female Holly)

3) Series 6 (On Starbug, Grant and Naylor writing, crew-Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten, Female-Holly)

4) Series 7 (On an enlraged Starbug, Naylor by himself, crew-Lister, Rimmer(for part of the series), Kochanski(for part of the series), Kryten, Cat)

5) Series 8 (On Red Dwarf (in the tank), Naylor by himself, crew-Lister, Rimmer (alive), Kochanski, Kryten, Cat, Holly, Hollister and others)

The shift from series two to three with two different charcters (one new) changed the shape of the show, but not as much as happened in later series with the set changing each time as well as the cast and also shifting from having a studio audience to a film-like version then back to a studio audience again. Every time you change things it means the programme is going to turn out differently.

Basically, my problem with Phil's version of the development of Red Dwarf is that for him series 1-6 are great and 7-8 (as well as Back to Earth) are bad and it's all Doug Naylor's fault. This is way too simple for my liking and I don't think its completely accurate either.

I think there are good things about series 7 and 8 for a start, for example I really like Tikka To Ride, the first episode of series 7 (the recap at the beginning of that episode from series 6 is excellent, as is the recap at the beginning of series 6 - miles better than Back to Earth). And the bunk scenes in series 8 are rather good (perhaps if Doug Naylor had had at least one of these in Back to Earth the first episode might have been better, I think he writes those really well). But most importantly they are a different kind of Red Dwarf to the earlier series. (and by the way there are some crap bits in some of the earlier series too - using Rhyl as a location for an exotic resort, for example!)

But there is a point to Phil's comments about Doug Naylor writing stuff by himself. When writing comedy its generally advisable to have a partner writing with you. It's almost a necessity as you need to bounce your ideas of someone else to make sure other people find them funny and tease out any humour to it's full potential. If they plan on making further Red Dwarf episodes then the issues I've raised simply have to be addressed.

A Rant: Totally-Unoriginal-Gate

2009-04-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

Why, why, why?

Why the hell do almost all scandals need to have the word gate shoved after them?

I mean Watergate, fair enough, that was the name of a place at the centre of that political scandal. And perhaps you can get away with using it a few mote times with something that was quite similar as a reference to it.

But adding gate to the end of any short word to do with a scandal is just plain sloppiness. It makes you wonder what journalists did before Watergate - or did no major scandals occur til then and Richard Nixon just let the permissive scandal society in?

I even found a list of gate scandals thats far from complete, but even that is a big list http://wapedia.mobi/en/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix?t=1.#1.
Over the last few years we've had Jowell-GATE, Bertie-GATE, Sachs-GATE, Ferrari-GATE, Goodwin-GATE, Bonus-GATE, Lie-GATE and the latest (and what sparked off this rant) is Sleaze-GATE.

Of course there is the alternative that sometimes gets involved when large sums of money are given in return for something, Cash-for-?????, but I'll let that one slide as that doesn't get used so much.

Is it that much to ask for someone to come up with something new instead of recycling the same old 3o-odd year old label?

Review – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

2009-04-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

After having this book recommended to me several times I finally got around to reading it over the last few months. And the reasons that it was recommended to me, for its exposition of the capitalist system and a vague explanation of how Socialism could work are very good. The chapters which feature the debates the workmen have about socialist ideas are excellent parts of the book.
Yet, for me there were several things I disliked about the book too. Firstly, at 700 or so pages, I felt that the book was overly long for the story it was telling. Secondly, I found the story quite depressing. Not that that is a reason necessarily to dislike it, but what was most depressing was the fact that the Socialists were just abstractly arguing for their ideas without trying to engage in struggles alongside other workers. There is one bit towards the end when the main character, Frank Owen, finally stands up to his employer to defend an apprentice at the company, and I found myself thinking ‘at last!’.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists depicts the brutality of capitalism for the working classes excellently, and despite the gap since when it was published those same conditions apply in similar form today. But whilst you’ll find an exposition of Socialist ideas in the book, what you won’t find is how to bring these ideas to the working class.

3 Days of Purgatory: NUS Conference 2009

2009-04-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Whilst radicalism in Britain was seeing a revival around the G20 protests, some poor sods on the left drew the short straw and had to make the annual trek up to Blackpool for the NUS Annual Conference.

However, the conference started off with a pleasant surprise for me – it only took us 3 hours from Bangor to get there - it usually takes me that long to get to Manchester if I’m lucky!
The conference reflected the situation that NUS finds itself in at present – the vast majority of the motions were fairly pointless and without substance. Most of the motions with any substance had been proposed by groups and students unions on the left which tried to bring into conference the voice of the energetic movements that had developed. Unsuprisingly, amendments of free education, supporting the gaza occupations, recognising the success of those occupations etc. all got voted down. The only motion that did get passed was an amendment by Sussex against Ultra-vires that saw Wes Streeting speak for it (we believe he was deliberately baiting the Organised Independents).
Conference also featured some of the worst chairing I’ve ever seen with some NEC members blatantly deciding to ignore delegates wishes. We also saw a motion of censure being passed against Hind Hassan and Rob Owen.

The left was noticeably weaker than the last time I had gone to NUS conference. Another Education is Possible (SWP) were a lot smaller than the last time I’d seen them they maybe around 40 delegates. Education Not For Sale were also smaller – with around 10-12 delegates. Our delegation was very small – however, we’d have been around the same size as ENS if we hadn’t sent people down to the G20 protests instead of NUS Conference – our delegation of 5 was holding the ‘fort’.

Another presence at the conference was Communist Students – but it wasn’t Communist Students that’s associated with the CPGB – instead it was the CPB attempting to reclaim the name. Whilst they didn’t have any delegates they did run a stall and put on a fringe meeting which they asked us to speak at about the No2EU campaign. Indeed they were very friendly to us through the whole conference – allowing us to put copies of my election leaflet on their stall.

The CPB fringe meeting was small but very interesting – due to the smallness of it I was able to quiz the guest speaker, a consul from the Venezuelan Ambassy, about crime and criminal justice in Venezuela (post coming shortly!). We also had a brief discussion on how the No2EU election campaign was developing. I also went to two fringe meeting organised by the SWP – the first was a debate between Rob Owen and Wes Streeting which went over most of the same old ground. The second was the SWSS fringe on ‘How Can Palestine Be Free?’ There were two speakers – a SWSS student who talked about Zionism – unfortunately most of his contribution was stuff to do with the guy who came up with it rather than an actual analysis of its development and influence today. The second contribution was that of Michael Lavalatte who spoke about how we can solve the conflict there – a contribution which was good in some ways – stressing the need for socialism and opposing the Hamas tactic of firing rockets into Israel – but was still vague. Unlike the SWP fringe I went to three years ago, this time they allowed a handful of contributions from the floor (although they ignored Dan Randall of ENS who had his hand up first) and another Socialist Students member came into the discussion pointing out the inverse relation of the strength of Zionist ideas to the strength of the working class in relation to Russia and Germany before commenting further on the working class being the force for socialist change in the Middle East, including in Israel. The SWP seemed to have clearly prepared for us to come in on this point as they began attacking the very idea that the Israeli working class could be a force for change saying that the official labour movement is tied to Zionism and excludes Arabs (but that doesn’t stop Israeli workers organising outside that, like we are doing with NUS). The SWSS speaker then also started replying to stuff we’d never said – one memorable point he tried to make was that the Palestinian working class (which we hadn’t mentioned) is very small – he said around 20% of the population (but the working class were only 5% of the population when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia!)

For me, the struggles of students mostly lay outside that conference. But compared to the expected weakness of our intervention we made a good intervention into the conference, making several good speeches (including mine for the block of 15 – I didn’t get elected by the way). We also did a mildly successful stall in Blackpool on the Wednesday lunchtime. But I guess the best moment for the left in the conference was when Dan Randall (ENS) got elected onto the new trustee board with the highest number of first preference votes running on a anti-trustee board platform. (the appointees to the board include the Sheffield Uni vice-chancellor who threatened his own student with court action and a director of Lloyds TSB bank – which says it all about the board). James Haywood (AEP) was elected to the block of 15 and Dan Swain (AEP) was elected to the democratic procedures committee.

NUS conference - 31 March to 2 April: Students need a mass fighting organisation

2009-03-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

From this weeks issue of the Socialist. A version of this article also appeared in Seren, the newspaper of Bangor Students' Union.

Most students have to borrow thousands of pounds each year to pay tuition fees and living costs which mount up into colossal student debts. Many students also face an uncertain future with a large growth in graduate unemployment last year, a situation which looks unlikely to improve any time soon. On top of this it is likely that fees will be increased.

Iain Dalton, Candidate for NUS 'block of 15'

On 25 February there was a national march against tuition fees. In the past this would have been organised by the National Union of Students (NUS), using its resources to ensure that students can voice their opposition to fees. But the NUS has abandoned the struggle for free education. Instead, in an attempt to fill this void, a coalition of left student groups, including Socialist Students, and student unions organised a demonstration.
For a long time the official leadership of NUS has been in the hands of Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party and their co-thinkers. NUS did not organise a serious campaign against fees, failing even to organise a major demonstration on the day of the vote in parliament to introduce fees, despite a strong mood of anger and opposition. With one of the closest votes, such a tactic could have potentially swayed the extra few votes needed to defeat fees.
Since then the NUS leadership's role has become progressively worse. For example, the whole basis of the most recent NUS Wales lobby of the Welsh Assembly is based on acceptance that the Assembly is going to stop paying part of the tuition fees (currently up to £1,890) for Welsh students who study in Wales. That money is instead to be spent on bursaries, which are means tested and do not come near the huge levels of debt students face. This approach is based on the NUS leadership's belief that nothing can be done to stop the cap on fees being lifted.
The recent NUS governance review has been all about consolidating this do-nothing leadership and weakening the democratic structures.
In fact, the two most significant student movements this year bypassed the NUS nationally; firstly the wave of sit-ins against the invasion of Gaza across the country and secondly the small, but significant anti-fees demonstration.
NUS certainly needs change - but it is a change in political direction that is needed. Socialist Students provides a strategy for fighting attacks on students. That is why I am standing as a candidate in the NUS Block of 15 elections.

Anger in North Wales - Hundreds March in Bangor; Teachers demonstrate in Rhyl

2009-03-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

There seems to have been a flurry of protesting across North Wales last week, the first report was something I was personally involved in and was a weird protest with passersby stopping and cheering on the demonstration as it passed by and was greeted by a huge mass of people in the city centre (our estimate is perhaps on the low side!)

Hundreds March in Bangor

‘The Citizens of Bangor Deserve Better’ – is the Facebook group set up a few months ago in protest atthe poor leadership of the local council. People are desperate for affordable housing, but local developers building houses for their own profit which usually consists of student accommodation and is a source of anger in the city. The recession has brought the closure of around fifty shops, adding to the lack of jobs in the city. The city also lacks a cinema and lost its theatre recently.

The list of problems is endless and with the council allowing endless amounts of expensive private student accommodation to be built, increasing service charges and taxes and not seeking to create new public amenities which residents have been asking for, they decided to get active.They know that the mass reserves of money taken by the council, rumoured to be at £47million could be used to improve services in the area. A lot of discussion on these issues was seen in the local press. The leaders of the county council were interviewed about their response to the protest group and gave poor answers, in answer to one question about improvements to youth clubs and play areas they answered that they were doing up the library!

Saturday saw the first public action of the group, a demonstration of around 100 people who were greeted by at least 100 or so more people when we arrived in the city centre, lots of shoppers also stopped to cheer on the marchers. Once there, three speakers addressed the rally, including Iain Dalton from the Socialist Party. He pointed out that the government had given billions to the banks, but only a small proportion of that would be needed for what we were demanding. He also held up the example of the struggle of the Militant-led Liverpool City Council in the mid-80’s and contrasted it with Gwynedd Council’s dumping of cuts onto ordinary people. Another speaker spoke out against the threat of privatisation of local housing, which will further worsen the situation of unaffordable housing. The Socialist Party and Socialist Students helped to organise the protest, particularly with regards to drawing up the demands of the petition, helping to advertise the event and giving ideas at meetings. There was also a strong Socialist presence at the protest with a contingent on the march and the sale of 22 copies of the Socialist and several pamphlets. The campaign will continue with talk of potentially setting up a new party to represent ordinary people in Bangor, with plans of an open meeting and further actions to take the campaign forward.

Teachers Protest in Rhyl

Over 40 teachers, members of NASUWT took one day strike action in protest at plans to axe two six form facilities in Rhyl, North Wales. The council’s plan to close Rhyl High School Six Form and Blessed Edward Jones Sixth Form would mean that the only sixth form provision in the town would be at Llandrillo College.
The action was well supported with almost 100% turnout on the picket line at Rhyl High School, where the governors are controversy supporting the councils proposals. Rex Phillips, NASUWT organiser, told The Socialist, “Aswell as the threat to teachers jobs and conditions, we are also concerned that transferring all Sixth Form provision to the FE sector means there will be no local democratic accountability. We are disappointed that the school’s governing body is supporting Denbighshire County Council. This is in contrast to Blessed Edwards, where the Governors and the Head teacher are very supportive”.
A initial public consultation revealed 240 out of 250 responder were opposed to the plans for a single six form. The one day action is unlikely to be the end of the dispute and further action is being considered, with union members at Blessed Edward Jones being balloted-results are to be expected early next week.

Brunstrom Watch: I Meet Brunstrom

2009-03-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, so you’ve read the title and you’re probably wondering what any self respecting Marxist is doing meeting a police chief constable? Well, a few weeks ago he came to the university to give a talk (which actually replaced the lecture I usually have in the room at the same time as the talk). I can’t remember the title of the top of my head, it was something to do with constitutionalism, wales and policing. Nor did it help that I missed the first few minutes of the talk.

By the time I came in he was talking about the Government of Wales Act (2006) (I assume he was talking about the setting up of the Welsh Assembly prior to this). What he said was significant about this act was that it created a new form of law, Welsh Assembly Measures which if approved by Westminster give it powers over those things. Put he also pointed out that Part 2 Section 5 of the Act gives the Welsh Assembly powers to use this to create new criminal offences, which can have penalties of up to £500 fine and/or 2 years imprisonment (which I think is in section 2??).

What this has led to over the last few years has been the creation of some slight differences in the laws between England and Wales. Brunstrom pointed out three areas that this was so; environmental laws, animal cruelty laws, truancy laws. In each of these areas he spelt out the differences that were emerging. The one which I remember the most clearly was in relation to animal cruelty, to do with the docking of dogs tails. Apparently due to different laws in different parts of the country (and Ireland) its led to a small smuggling trade in dogs to lop their tails off.

He then talked a little about how policing in North Wales differs from other parts of the country. One factor was the 1993 Welsh Language Act which applies to the police and consumes £0.75m a year of the North Wales Police budget. There were also differences in road traffic policing (due to both North Wales and South Wales having one major road which all traffic passes along), emergency service control and the police council tax precept.

But he concluded with some more remarks on the Welsh language and the possibility of full (or elements of) autonomy of Welsh Criminal Justice. In it he pointed out the creation of a separate court region for Wales since April 1st 2008. He also noted the first ever wholly welsh language murder trial took place at Caenarfon Crown Court in 2007 (R v Ellis) and the announcement that a new prison will be built on the former site of Friction Dynamex in Caenarfon, which will be able to recruit directly welsh speakers from the local community (there is no prison in North Wales at the moment).

During the questions a few things were alluded to. Firstly, his view of politics and himself. He said that as a serving police officer he can’t comment on political issues – but by this I think what he really means is party political manueverings. Two things suggest this, firstly the fact that he is outspoken on various policing and social issues in North Wales, but secondly, the anger he had at other police chief constables who had supported the governments proposed increase of detention without trial.

I asked a question about how he thought the public viewed him for raising the controversial topics in the press. He answered that he thought he had a duty to raise these issues as he thought they were important, but were something that politicians wouldn’t do as they were too afraid of losing votes. In his own words, he could do this because he was an opinionated appointee rather than someone who had to seek election. He also said that he didn’t care what people thought of him, although be believed that people welcomed the fact that he raises issues and think that that improves police confidence.

He also got asked about the national question in Wales and he said he favoured a Welsh republic as part of a United States of Europe and that he believes that Wales will be in a similar position to Scotland in the near future.

As for what I thought of the man himself. Well, he’s very self-confident, indeed, to a point where he comes across as very arrogant. However, he’s quite intelligent at the same time and really up for his views to be challenged and criticised. Meeting him, leaves you not knowing what to make of him, but with some respect for him on at least one level.

Socialist Party Congress 2009

2009-03-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the Socialist Party's Congress in London, and I finally managed to be able to get to it. And what an exciting weekend it was! There is now an official report on the Socialist Party website at well as highlights of the first day - see http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/7050 and http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/7069 (please note these keep expanding as I was linking to this i've seen that Peter Taaffe's introduction to the discussion is being uploaded).
On the blog I want to add my own thoughts.

I didn't exactly have the best start to the day. The other delegate from Bangor branch had stayed at mine and we had to get up around 4.30pm to catch the train down to London. Which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that we had a power cut and had to get dressed and pack stuff up etc. in the dark.
Anyway, needless to say we got to the Congress in one piece. The first session was on the economy/british perspectives - seeing as there's quite a bit of stuff on this session already on the website I won't go into detail and get on to the bits of the day that most people reading this will probably be interested in.
That is the official delegation from the RMT which came to the congress and addressed us in the middle of the economy session to invite us to take part in the No2EU Yes to Democracy initiative. Like most people that day they mentioned the Lindsey Oil Refinery dispute quite a bit (which seemed to be their guide as to who to approach about the initiative - they seem to be wanting to exclude the SWP for instance). They also said quite a bit of stuff which made the Yes to Democracy bit of the name make quite a bit more sense - the whole point in their draft programme about repatriation of powers - partially stems from that the new EU constitution will stop governments from re-nationalising privatised companies (ie. the railways).
Later on we had a discussion about whether to take part in the initiative or not. The jist of the reason why we decided to take part revolved around this being the first time a national trade union has decided to present an electoral challenge to the Labour Party - an important prescident. However, the initiative could get a momentum of its own too and develop much further. There was also some interesting discussion on the EU itself, Peter Taaffe introduction to this session pointed out that Militant had been opposed to the EU at its inception and had, through the Labour Party Young Socialists, organised a demo under the slogan 'Not to EU, but yes to a Socialist Europe'.
Obviously we think the name and programme and way its been announced are quite a way from ideal, but one of the other negative's people have been mentioned is also this business about not taking office if elected. In a further evolution on this, the RMT have said that successful candidates could officially become an MEP and use that platform but won't physically go to Brussels.

The second day was a discussion on party building where Bangor branch received a lot of praise in the introduction - the only problem being we weren't there to hear it as we got lost on the way to congress (I blame the directions!), although I was one of the first people to contribute to the discussion, explaining how we'd started out in Bangor at the university and then spread out and about how hectic the last six months or so have been with the branch tripling in size (incidently another person has joined the Socialist Party since the congress), beating NUS in a referendum, organising a succesful protest against the slaughter in Gaza etc. I also highlighted the work we were doing in regards to translating some material into Welsh. There were reports from elsewhere too, which were generally quite positive. The day also saw a session on the youth and student stuff where the other delegate from Bangor (Brother R to use AVPS speak) spoke about how we've attempted to build Socialist Students at his college with some results (although we keep getting thrown off campus by the management). One thing that came across was the large amount of media publicity the youth fight for jobs campaign has been getting in local areas.

The Trade Unions discussion span over two days (it wasn't two days in length though! just in case you misunderstood that) and was really interesting with debates about the party's work in UNISON and PCS especially - the former obviously referring to the witch-hunt. Next was the session on publications were I again spoke discussing the importance of members contributing to the Socialist and also raised a few other points in regards to developing publications further which were taken up by other speakers, such as having a full-timer for the party website. Finally conference concluded with a report from the CWI which focussed mainly on the convulsions taking place in Europe and the development of the CWI sections there, although one interesting anecdote was that we got a complaint from the BBC when the CWI website went down earlier in the year!

As for general stuff - the congress saw us sell out of Bangor Socialist Party branches new bilingual pamphlet on the North Wales Quarry Strikes (a second printing coming in the next week or so, copies are available for a £1). My overall impression was of a very youthful congress attended by 275 people. What I thought was really good was that we managed to get in pretty much everyone who wanted to speak into discussions too. Having missed three in a row before this, i defintely want to be back there next year.

Workers Occupy factory in Dundee

2009-03-05T06:43:00.000-08:00

From the Socialist Party website - www.socialistparty.org.uk

Interview with Matthew - Young worker in the occupation

An occupation is taking place at Prisme Packaging in Dundee. It started at 5pm on Wednesday 4th March after the twelve employees were told their contracts were being immediately terminated without redundancy pay.

"On Monday we came into work as normal and the Managing Director came in and gave his letter of resignation. So we phoned the company secretary who was actually on holiday. We were told to speak to a guy called Alan Dand. On Tuesday he called us and an administrator came to look at the accounts. Then the company told us that they didn't have enough assets to pay for the administrator and said "Looks like we're just going to shut the door".

We were told that the director and a legal representative were coming to tell us our rights but in fact the legal representative was for the director and wouldn't tell us anything.

They won't even tell us who owns the company! We demanded that we be given a letter how much we were entitled to in redundancy payments, our P45's and statutory redundancy forms.
When we received the letter it stated how much our statutory redundancy payments were and that we were entitled to wages, pay in lieu of notice and accrued holiday pay. Then the next sentence of the letter said "Unfortunately, we do not have any money to make these payments to you.".

They said there were other routes we could take to get our redundancy payments but all they have suggested is speaking to the Citizens Advice Bureau.

After receiving these letters we were told to leave and come back at half nine in the morning but we decided we're not leaving until we receive what we're entitled to. We're not giving them the opportunity to lock the doors while we're out so we end up with nothing."

Naming and Shaming

2009-02-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

In their all consuming quest to appear 'tough' on crime, government ministers are looking at plans to distribute leaflets to 'name and shame' offenders who have been convicted in local courts. Apparently, making calling community service 'Community Payback' instead and making those on it where high vis jackets simply isn't enough posturing for the government.

'Tough' Measures for Trivial Crimes

According to a report in the Guardian (25/02/09) "Lack of confidence in community payback is one of the primary reasons governments feel forced to build more expensive prisons". To the government's and the media's way of thinking the response to crime needs to be good hard punishment to deter the offender and others from committing more offences. But what good does this actually do?
One of the of adopting measures on the basis of 'toughness' is that it makes them very unlikely to do anything about the reasons why someone is actually committing a crime. Having a criminal record excludes people from certain jobs, and prisons are not exactly the places to send people if you want them to come out completely reformed (with a 60-odd% recidivism rate). Naming and shaming someone for a trivial offence only will serve to add to this problem.

Aim some 'Tough' Measures Elsewhere

Whilst those guilty of minor offences are to be named and shamed, people causing far greater damage often escape unnoticed. And by this I don't just mean the big bankers and the recently exposed fraudsters - I mean those responsible for devastating cuts to local public services, for huge job losses, destroying the environment etc. Indeed, the one area where naming and shaming might be of some use is with people who try to make themselves appear 'respectable'.
But this isn't really what I want to get at. 'Tough' measures need to be taken to put our economy into the hands of ordinary people so masses of profits won't just be tucked away in some Cayman Islands account but be spent on providing meanigful jobs for people, decent homes etc. so that those who commit crime for economic reasons (or reasons flowing from that) have no need to do so.

Demo Against Fees

2009-02-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went down to London for the day to take part in the national demo against fees which has being organised by various left-wing student groups.

The demo wasn't huge, but at a turn out of a round a thousand it was a little bigger than I expected (Although Socialist Worker has put it at 800). Socialist Students had around the same number on the demo as SWSS, and then there were small groups of ENS, Revolution, Communist Students and Socialist Appeal members on the demo as well as some other small groups.

What was unusual for me about this demo was that I was a steward, which was a new experience. Nothing major happened, so the only major stewarding things I did was warning people to move around parked cars!

Stop fees, No to cuts, Save education

2009-02-22T02:51:00.000-08:00

Article from the back page of this weeks The Socialist.

FOR YEARS the government, echoed by the National Union of Students (NUS) leadership, has told students they would get a fantastic job at the end of their course to pay off their student debt. But as the economy went on the slide last year, so did many final-year students' employment prospects.

Iain Dalton, Bangor Socialist Students

Now students increasingly question the current system of funding university education. And it's not just job opportunities in jeopardy. As The Socialist previously reported, several universities face big cuts in funding which threaten them with potential bankruptcy.
The government's director-general for research and science, Professor Adrian Smith, blames these crises on the government taking too long over the question of raising the cap on tuition fees. He says neither Labour nor Tories want to touch the question, afraid of the backlash that they might face.
The government and university vice-chancellors are looking at three options, increasing fees, raising interest on student loans or making cuts to courses. None of these options are acceptable to students.
Despite the recession, all the main parties still support the capitalist free market and this is reflected in their plans for education. Ideally, they want a US-style system where student debt can run over £100,000. The next step for them is to further lift the cap on tuition fees, probably to around £7,000 a year, although many university vice-chancellors are pushing for more.
As the bailouts to the banks show, the government can find plenty of money when it wants to. But it wants to give it all to its fat-cat friends in the banks and other industries while we bear the costs of the crisis they caused.
Figures released by the PCS civil service union revealed £21.5 billion in uncollected corporation tax as well as £25 billion lost through tax evasion. Why not spend this money on education and other public services instead of letting it slide into the back pockets of the rich?
Socialist Students has been at the forefront of campaigning against fees and cuts, organising protests around the country. In Bangor, Socialist Students has won the support of Bangor Students' Union for the Campaign to Defeat Fees.
But where has the national voice of the student movement, the NUS, been in all this?
The pro-New Labour NUS leadership are celebrating their victory in getting a 'governance review' passed that will transform the NUS into little more than a charity for students rather than a national union. Students though have been increasingly by-passing them.
Such is the case with the demonstration against fees on Wednesday 25 February in London. This is organised by various left/campaigning groups including Socialist Students and the Campaign to Defeat Fees.
We encourage all students to join our contingent on the demonstration and discuss with us how to build the fight-back for free education across the country.

Protest Against Fees

Wednesday 25 February. Assemble 12 noon
SOAS, Malet Street, London WC1

Fight for your future!

Straw Attacks Prison Officers’ Pay and Conditions

2009-02-17T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Prison Officer’s Union (the POA) looks set to reject the governments latest pay offer. Whilst the 4.75% pay deal over 3 years may seem not so bad against the backdrop of a recession, the deal is tied to a ‘modernisation’ package which includes creating a two-tier workforce in prisons of ‘residential officers’ (ie. Current prison officers) and newly created ‘operations officers’ that are supposed to have the same training but with less pay and less duties (seems like the prison equivalent of PCSOs). Around 30% of all prison officers are to be operations officers by 2010.
This will obviously save the government lots of money, according to the POA press release of 13th Feburary 2009, these proposals alongside others will save £240million in 2009 and upto £500million over the next few years. And if Prison Officer’s reject the deal, the BBC state “Straw said that if the deal was rejected this week he would have to "take stock" of a previous pledge to limit the market-testing of prisons to the five whose service level agreements come up for renewal over the next five years.”
But one potential upshot of the policy is the government spending less on prisons – is this a good thing? As Brian Caton, POA General Secretary, stated in the same press release “POA members want a ‘fair days pay for a fair days work’, we want prisons to be fit for purpose and not warehouses. We demand safe prisons that have adequate professional staff to serve the public.”
The government policy is one of continuing their ongoing expansion of the prison system whilst attacking staff conditions and the resources that actually go into rehabilitation and safety within those institutions. This will not benefit neither staff nor prisoners and should be opposed.
As I wrote in September 2007 in the Socialist

“Socialists argue for a radical decrease in the prison population. Many people are locked up due to debt and poverty.
Moreover, sentences handed out by courts have crept up in length and the proportion sent to prison for more than 30 years, despite the crime rate going down over recent years.
To implement this reduction, socialists call for the democratic election of judges, subject to recall.
Moreover, we demand the release of all people imprisoned for fine defaults, ASBO defaults and other trivial offences, with democratically elected bodies to review all other cases.
Socialists do not necessarily oppose building new prisons. But we would argue that any new prisons need to be part of a plan to reduce the jail population, through replacing older prisons with newer ones, which held fewer prisoners but with more facilities and better conditions.
This would free up staff to reduce the prisoner-staff ratio, whilst providing better prison facilities. But these prisons should not be built and run by the private sector with their history of providing poorer quality prisons.
Moreover, socialists demand that privatised prisons are renationalised too.
Such a programme would reduce the overcrowding crisis in prisons. However, to tackle the problem of crime a socialist programme is needed that would give jobs and training for all on a living wage, with housing and other essentials of life under public ownership and control.
Prisons should be geared towards helping offenders overcome any problems such as not being able to read or write.”

Book Review – Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott

2009-02-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

With this January being the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, I thought it was about time I delved a little more into the history of the island in preparation for the very successful public meeting Bangor Socialist Party held last week.

The real strength of the book is Gott’s presentation of the pre-revolutionary history of the island. Apart from knowing the island had been invaded by the United States during its struggle for liberation from Spain, I knew relatively little about the country in this period. Gott’s presentation of this period is very illuminating.

Yet the part that most people would be interested in is his account of the 1959 revolution and the regime led by Castro afterwards. However, for me this is the weaker part of the book. I felt that Gott covered it fairly superficially, you are reading it waiting for him to go into further detail. There are some exceptions such as Castro’s relationship with the Soviet Union and the support given by Cuba to anti-imperialist conflicts in the third world.

I suppose this is somewhat clichéd, but I just get the feeling that Gott is approaching Cuba from a different direction to me. Gott seems to approach it from middle-class intellectual’s point of view and various trials, middle class opposition groupings etc. take up the focal point of his narrative and you are left wondering what the ordinary peasants and workers thought of what was going on. He also takes the view that all that Cuba had to do with socialism was just words whilst they had Soviet support, and that element of Cuba is now gone due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also, mistakenly, seems to believe that Cuba had returned to Capitalism with the reforms instituted in the 90’s that led to the creation of the dual dollar-peso economy.

As I said at the beginning, the early parts of Cuba’s history are really interesting reading. The latter part, although still interesting, leaves the impression on you of events that are only half-analysed. It is a book of two halves, but the latter doesn’t undermine too much the strengths of the former part.

Socialists on the Criminal Justice System – Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky

2009-02-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth piece in my series examining writings by various socialists that relate to the criminal justice system. This piece will examine the ninth chapter of their ABC of Communism, entitled “Proletarian Justice”. The chapter can be found online at the Marxist Internet Archive at

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/09.htm

The chapter begins with a brief view of the authors summary of justice under capitalism. Their summary of this institution is summed up in this quote
“This estimable institution is carried on under the guidance of laws passed in the interests of the exploiting class. Whatever the composition of the court, its decisions are restricted in accordance with the volumes of statutes in which are incorporated all the privileges of capital and all the lack of privileges of the toiling masses.”
They do also briefly discuss the effect of allowing the working class some say in deciding judges or judgements through elections and go on to say, “Thus originated trial by jury, thanks to which legal decisions made in the interests of capital can masquerade as decisions made by the 'whole people'.”
Needless to say, I find their take on this a little one sided as it doesn’t take into account the fact that even illusory elements of popular control over the justice system are concessions wrung from capitalism.
Bu this is not the bulk of the work, which is really an attempt to argue for a different vision of a justice system and also to defend steps taken in this direction by the Soviet regime. Indeed, in the very next section of the chapter they explain why they have not taken up the demand of the Second International “…for the popular election of the judiciary…”. They explain that such a position isn’t possible under the Soviet regime as they are enacting laws to eradicate capitalism, they can “…hardly accept the representatives of capital or of the landed interest as administrators of the new laws…” and thus they characterise the courts of the workers state as thus
“In the old law-courts, the class minority of exploiters passed judgement upon the working majority. The law-courts of the proletarian dictatorship are places where the working majority passes judgement upon the exploiting minority. They are specially constructed for this purpose. The judges are elected by the workers alone. The judges are elected solely from among the workers. For the exploiters the only right that remains is the right of being judged”
They then continue the attack on capitalist justice, stating
“In bourgeois society the administration of justice is an exceedingly cumbrous affair. Bourgeois jurists proudly declare that, thanks to the gradation of lower courts, higher courts, courts of appeal, and so on, absolute justice is ensured, and the number of miscarriages of justice reduced to a minimum.”
But this isn’t really the case they go on to explain. The huge about of bureaucracy requires a lot of expense by those attempting to pursue legal action and thus “Well-to-do persons, being able to command the services of highly paid lawyers, can carry a case from court to court until they secure a favourable decision; whereas a plaintiff who is poor often finds it necessary to abandon his suit on grounds of expense.”
They then go on to explain how they have tried to speed up court processes to make them accessible to workers. However, they explain that these courts are still developing and are not developing as fast as they like due to the civil war that was occurring at that time.
This leads neatly into the next section which discusses the revolutionary tribunals. As they state, the popular courts are seen by the Communist Party as the normal courts of a workers state. The revolutionary tribunals in their view are a supplement that has been made necessary by the brutality of the civil war. They argue that their function is solely to deal with the enemies of the revolution, and in their view that likens them to the Red Guard more than the courts, which is why they are under the control of the Soviets rather than being directly elected by the workers.
They then move on to discuss punishments in a workers state. Firstly they briefly justify the existence of the death penalty at that time by the existence of the civil war, and then they move on to arguing that the workers courts are much more lenient than capitalist ones. They go on to ascribe this difference to
“When we come to consider the punishments inflicted by proletarian courts of justice for criminal offences which have no counter- revolutionary bearing, we find them to be radically different from those inflicted for similar offences by bourgeois courts. This is what we should expect. The great majority of crimes committed in bourgeois society are either direct infringements of property rights or are indirectly connected with property. It is natural that the bourgeois State should take vengeance upon criminals, and that the punishments inflicted by bourgeois society should be various expressions of the vengeful sentiments of the infuriated owner.”
They note that whilst there are still elements of ‘professional criminals’ around, they see this as due to the later becoming engaged in this behaviour under capitalism and therefore seek not to punish as if this is their fault. They note the shift from pure prison sentences (enforced idleness) to enforced social labour, which they see as necessary to restore the damage done to society by the ‘criminal’. The various elements of the system, they note, are geared “in such away as to give the offender full opportunities for moral regeneration.”
The final section attempts to look at the direction that the justice system will move in the future. To start with they argue that things thrown up to deal with the civil war specifically (revolutionary tribunals, red army, extraordinary commissions etc.) “are transient” and “will no longer be needed” after the end of the civil war.
They go on to argue that the worker-elected popular tribunals will remain until such a time as classes have been abolished – in the case of the ruling class they see this as a fairly short perspective, in the case of the peasantry a longer period. Whilst these class divisions still exist then they argue that there will still be conflicts that need to be brought before the court. Additionally, they argue that “…anti-social offences arising out of personal egoism, and all sorts of offences against the common weal, will long continue to provide work for the courts.”
Ulimately they conclude that
“As the State dies out, they will tend to become simply organs for the expression of public opinion. They will assume the character of courts of arbitration. Their decisions will no longer be enforced by physical means and will have a purely moral significance.”
The piece is somewhat simplistic and doesn’t really get into some of the more interesting details of the justice system in the early period of the revolution. But then it is a piece trying to explain in simple terms the ideas of the Communist Party, and we really shouldn’t explain much more from it than that. Interestingly though, there is a small list of further reading on the topic that the authors suggest, noting that works on this topic by socialists are ‘scanty’. This piece does, however, serve as a giving a good indication of the hopes the Communist Party associated with its justice system and the justifications they gave for some of how it functioned, and is thus valuable for those reasons.

Assembly learning grant ‘reorganisation’

2009-02-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

From the Socialist Party wales website.

by Glyn Matthews

The Welsh Assembly plans to reorganise the way in which the funding of the Welsh assembly grant (WAG) is to be administered. The proposal is that from 2010 the top-up grant for fees will be scrapped and instead the WAG will simply constitute a larger maintenance grant. On the surface, this simply sounds like a bureaucratic and unnecessary change to the system without any damaging effects. If we analyse the proposals in more detail it is quite clearly an attack on education. Currently only a thirdof students in Wales are eligible to the maintenance grant but many more are eligible for the top-up fees grant. When this is gone they will not receive any part of the WAG as the are not changing the eligibility of the maintenance grant, leaving many students having to take out larger and larger loans to cover the cost of their loans.

The other side of this is those students who will lose the fees grant but will receive a higher maintenance grant. Once again on the surface this sounds fine. However, Jane Hutt the Welsh education minister said: “much of the £61m used currently to fund the tuition fee grants should be added to Assembly Learning Grants. These are means-tested grants available to help pay for students’ living costs.” This shows clearly two things, firstly this will mean a further extension of means testing in education which all socialists should oppose. Secondly without stating the amount of money involved is this new ‘scheme’ Jane Hutt does omit that not all £61m used now will then be used by using the word ‘much’ rather than ‘all’

Despite this, both the assembly government and Welsh universities have welcomed the proposal with all the Orwellian language they can muster by presenting this as an improvement. At this stage we can only speculate why, but clearly if the fees are not being paid for by the assembly any longer then it would open the door for Welsh universities to charge higher and higher top-up fees as this will no longer be a drain on the assembly budget. This clearly shows the need to take action now before it is too late!

The role of the NUS in all off this seems to be silence. There is absolutely no mention of this on the NUS website. Once again the NUS leadership has shown their inability to be a campaigning organisation leaving Socialist Students to take up issues without their backing.

Socialists demand

A fighting campaign led by NUS Wales to defeat these proposals.
For an NUS organised demonstration in Cardiff with all Welsh universities students unions’ to provide transport to the demonstration.
For the NUS nationally to back to campaign and extend the campaign to the rest of Britain by supporting the Campaign to defeat fees and the national demonstration on February 25th

My Run In With The Law

2009-02-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve said I’d blog about this for a while but I haven’t gotten around to it yet, until now.

Allow me to set the scene, I was travelling home after visiting my girlfriend for the weekend. Due to it being a Sunday and train companies doing repairs usually on that day, my journey needed to take a diverson via Liverpool (actually only about 10 minutes of the 2 and ½ hour journey was as it is supposed to be!). There had been a lot of waiting around that day and this had aggravated my sciatica (trapped nerves in the spine) which causes me pain in my leg.
So anyway, I get on the Merseyrail train from Liverpool to Chester and whilst I’m sitting there my leg starts aching. Seeing a sign that says not to put your feet on the seats – I notice that between the seats there’s a shelf, so I put my foot on there to ease the aching. The next thing I know, three ‘Enforcement Officers’ appear. Now, for people who haven’t seen them before – they basically look a bit like police officers wearing high visibility jackets etc. (as you can see in the pciture above from the company's website).
I was basically told that I was violating a Merseyrail bye-law ‘for having my feet on the seat’. After I protested that blatantly my feet were not on the seat – they said there was a notice down the other end of the carriage that said that the little shelf technically counted as part of the seat. They then proceeded to take my name, address and details. All of this was recorded on a small camera the enforcement officer was holding whilst her two colleagues stood behind her menacingly. To be honest, I was really scared during all of this, and kind of just did whatever they said.
They left me with a little card and told me to ring the number on it if I wanted to avoid going to court over it. The card reads

“A report will be filed with our Prosecution Team, which may result in you being prosecuted for a breach of Merseyrail Byelaws. If you are found guilty we will be asking the Court to award a contribution to our costs of £150, the Magistrates will also impose a fine of up to £1000 and/or 3 months imprisonment”.

Now when I rang up I was offered to pay a £50 fine instead of going to court and sign a form that admitted I was guilty of putting my feet in the seat. Now I feel that the whole situation was ridiculous, yet I couldn’t afford to go to court and lose – I could barely afford the £50 (after rent and council tax, I have about £150 to pay for food, utility bills and anything else).
I doubt any poor person is in a position to contest such penalties. Furthermore, are people who actually put their feet up on seats that big of a social problem that it’s worth having gangs of these ‘enforcement officers’ equipped with video cameras? To me it looks like a money making scheme adopted by the rail company, rather than tackling incidents of behaviour that is actually dangerous.

Some Cases of Humanitarian Intervention

2009-02-06T11:20:00.000-08:00

This is the second part of a recent essay I wrote on the moral justifiability of humanitarian intervention. This section examines several case studies of humanitarian interventions. I'd refer the reader to the previous piece for some general background and discussion of humanitarian intervention (see comments box for link).

Also, one further point. Readers will note the example of Bangladesh in this essay. In this instance I included it in the essay because I was basically taking Walzer at his word on the situation there. As I will develop in the final section of the series, I don't think Humanitarian Intervention by a capitalist country is necessarily ruled out, certainly historically it isn't, but it is very unlikely.

Whilst we would argue that moral justification is guided by general considerations as above, every particular intervention must be justified in its own context. In this sense we are guided by the approach undertaken by Michael Walzer in looking at historical cases to generate these general considerations. In passing we will note that the examples used are ones the writer of this essay way already familiar with, and thus could perhaps be slightly unrepresentative. But nevertheless they yield important facts bearing upon the subject of this essay and are thus valuable in this sense.
It is the case of Haiti that we shall turn to first. As Hallward (2007) discusses, Haiti has had two humanitarian interventions into it in the last 15 years. The first occurred in 1994. The Lavalas government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been overthrown by a military coup in September 2001, and after negotiating with the US government was returned to power by a US force which intervened humanitarianly to disarm the Haitian army and paramilitaries. As Hallward (2007) discusses there were several factors that related to the decision to do this, not just humanitarian considerations, including the stream of Haitian refugees coming to the US and its political relationship with the army junta that governed Haiti was deteriorating. However, Hallward (2007:52) goes on to point out that

“It is more than likely that the occupation that began in September 1994 may prove, in the long run, to have been just as damaging to the interests of Haitian democracy as the first US occupation of 1915-34. It gave the occupying power profound and temporarily irreversible influence over the reconfiguration of a state apparatus more compatible with its own practices. As the soldiers themselves began to leave over the course of 1995, a whole swathe of para-civilian advisers, trainers and consultants remained behind to administer the consequences of their work…”

Although the military intervention took place over a short period of time, it gave the US government economic and political influence over the country which played a pivotal role in the second coup against Aristide in 2004 which led to the second, and much longer humanitarian intervention. In this case the backdrop was an insurgency, which Hallward (2004) argues was secretly supported by the political opposition to Aristide who were themselves funded by US government aid.
The humanitarian intervention in 2004 to the present was again premised on disarming the ex-army and paramilitaries, yet the US troops deployed in Haiti, at best, did not do this for several months, as Hallward (2004) after discussing journalistic reports that identify US troops colluding or directly participating the murder of people in the suburbs of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, charges the US government as having “…direct complicity in the mass murder of Haitian civilians…” (Hallward, 2004:258).
Indeed, Hallward (2007:52) states that humanitarian intervention “…has come to replace traditional forms of military action as the primary means of neo-imperial control.”
It would be inaccurate to state that this example is anything but justifies humanitarian intervention on its own. But we should not draw our conclusions on the basis of just one solitary example. Indeed, in his book, Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer (2006) compares two different examples, those of the US intervention into Cuba in 1898 and Indian intervention into Bangladesh in 1971.
The Cuban example appears to be somewhat similar to the events that occurred in Haiti in 1994, which differed in the fact that it was war from independence from Spain, yet the consequence of the intervention was similar in that the US imposed itself economically and politically on Cuba, even establishing a military dictatorship in the immediate four years (Gott, 2004), in the aftermath of the intervention. Indeed, the intervention in Cuban life by the US government at this point and the years afterwards have surely impacted on the hatred on the ‘yankee imperialism’ in Cuba today.
The Bangladeshi example differs in some fundamental ways, although like the Cuban example above, the humanitarian intervention was in support of an independence movement. As Walzer describes, it

“…is a better example of humanitarian intervention – not because of the singularity or purity of government’s motives, but because its various motives, but because its various motives converged on a single course of action that was also the course of action called for by the Bengalis. This convergence explains why the Indians were in and out of the country so quickly, defeating the Pakistani army but not replacing it, and imposing no political controls on the emergent state of Bangladesh. No doubt, strategic as well as moral interests underlay this policy: Pakistan, India’s old enemy, was significantly weakened, while India itself avoided becoming responsible for a desperately poor nation whose internal politics was likely to be unstable and volatile for a long time to come. But the intervention qualifies as humanitarian because it was a rescue, strictly and narrowly defined.” (Walzer, 2006:105)

The distinction that Walzer makes here between the two interventions is summed up when he says that the Indian intervention coincided with what the Bengali population wanted. What makes a humanitarian intervention different from a military intervention in the interests of the intervening which hides behind humanitarian phraseology, is that very factor of being subordinated to a large extent to the interests of the repressed population.
Another consideration that we could make is that of a type of revolutionary war as a type of humanitarian intervention. This may seem like an odd conception to the reader, as a revolutionary war is an attempt to carry forward a new revolutionary type of government in one country into another ‘at the point of a sword’. Yet, consider the following, an uprising occurs in a country, the government of said country attempts to crush it; if a bordering revolutionary country then intervened militarily to stop the repression (which it is likely would include killings) – would this not be a military intervention for humanitarian means?
To further examine this question we will look at the advance of the Soviet Red Army on Warsaw in late 1920. It will be noted that this came first after an offensive of the Polish army against Soviet Russia which turned into a retreat. As Trotsky (2005:527) explains in his autobiography “There were high hopes of an uprising of the Polish workers. At any rate, Lenin fixed his mind on carrying the war to an end, up to the entry into Warsaw to help the Polish workers overthrow Pilsudski’s government and seize the power.” This is not a humanitarian intervention, as it is only coming to the support of a hypothetically existing population that is being repressed rather than an actual one. However, if the Polish population was in danger at that time, ie (an uprising had occurred or was imminent before the decision to march on Warsaw). This is the consideration Trotsky reports he made himself at this time and thus opposed the offensive. It also is what several previous uprsings in various European countries at this time, for example Bavaria in 1919 (Watt, 2003), had counted upon occurring. This would have, in some ways, paralleled Walzer’s example of the intervention into Bangladesh that we have examined above.

Socialist Party Wales Conference 2009

2009-02-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not blogging much but I've had a very busy week, including going down to Swansea at the weekend for the annual Socialist Party Wales Conference with five other people from Bangor. The report below is taken from the SPW website (http://www.socialistpartywales.org.uk/) and a version will be appearing in the Socialist.

The capitalist crisis which deepened even further in the last few weeks formed the background to the Conference of fifty members of SPW in Swansea on February 1st. Naturally it was the subject of the first conference session, with Lynn Walsh, editor of Socialism Today, leading the discussion.

Report by Iain Dalton (Bangor Socialist Party)

Lynn pointed out that events were proceeding at a rapid pace at the moment, with the crisis becoming deeper around the world and capitalist leaders becoming despondent as their system spirals out of control. But whilst Socialists are by no means immune from the hardships that all workers will suffer during this recession, we are in a good position to try and give a lead to the inevitable struggles that will take place over the next period as we have correctly predicted the crisis in our materials. The beginnings of a fight back by the working class worldwide in the last week was discussed, particularly the wildcat strikes of construction workers across the country where our comrades had intervened to help to steer the anger towards the capitalist firms who use EU regulations to bring in foreign worker at lower pay rates and worse conditions and not against the workers themselves

Campaigns

Ross Saunders (Cardiff West Branch Secretary) to report on the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign and on the plans being made to develop that both nationally and in Wales. He pointed out that youth unemployment was already large and is set to grow much bigger

The Conference also heard from Yahya al-Faifa, exiled Saudi Trade unionist who is facing deportation by the Home Office. His inspiring struggle to organise Saudi workers which led to his exile and his efforts in supporting workers struggles in Wales, gave comrades determination to spread the campaign further throughout the labour movement.

Organisation

The final session of the conference was introduced by Alec Thraves, SPW Secretary. Alec reported on the growth of our organisation with new branches in Bangor and Cardiff (in Cardiff the old branch has subdivided as it has grown into East and West) as well as an emerging branch in Newport. He noted the dramatic growth in the party (increasing 25% in the last six months) with already 10 new members joining so far this year and old members revitalised by the developing crisis. Alec also re-emphasised the tremendous role Welsh comrades play in financing the party, with comrades making large sacrifices with membership subscriptions, but also through smashing Fighting Fund targets every quarter. This was reinforced by an excellent collection of over £900 at the conference.

The last year has seen the Party in Wales breaking new ground with solid growth in South as well as beginning to put down roots in the North too. This was reflected in the conference attendance of many new and young comrades who left reinvigorated and with the feeling that these will be exciting times for Socialists after the previous difficult period.

What is Humanitarian Intervention and can it be justified?

2009-01-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

I've recently been writing an essay on the morality of humanitarian interventions for my course at uni. I've decided to publish it on the blog because I think it raises quite a few interesting questions. I've basically broken it down into two parts, the first looking at humanitarian iuntervention in general, and the second looking at several case studies (although as a further case study I'd like to refer readers to my article for the Socialist on the congo which briefly discusses the failings of the intervention there http://leftwingcriminologist.blogspot.com/2008/11/democratic-republic-of-congo-civil-war.html). I'm going to supplement these parts of the essay with a further piece on Capitalism, Socialism and Humanitarian Intervention. I hope people enjoy reading these, but I'd like people to remember that this was originally written as an essay an thus its style flows from that. Additionally when writing essays I need to justify things that i usually imply in other written pieces on the blog, so I have ignored certain issues or talked about things in a manner that doesn't bring those issues up. That is part of the reason for the additional third section.

When any major internal conflict breaks out within a country which leads to a serious deterioration of human rights, it seems that one of the stock responses of many international organisations is to call for international intervention in that country for humanitarian reasons? Yet should this be the automatic response, is such an act justifiable morally?
This essay seeks to examine that question by first by first discussing humanitarian intervention both in terms of what it is and how we can make moral judgement upon instances of it. We shall then examine a selection of case studies which will allow us to draw some lessons as to when humanitarian intervention can be justified. Finally, a conclusion will summarise the main arguments of this essay.
Before we begin the essay, it is important distinguish between two different judgements of the morality of war. As Walzer (2006:21) explains,

“War is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt…Medieval writers made the difference a matter of propositions, distinguishing jus ad bellum, the justice of war, from jus in bello, justice in war... Jus ad bellum requires us to make judgements about aggression and self-defence; jus in bello about the observance or violation of the customary and positive rules of engagement…”

In this essay we shall mostly be concerned with the former, jus ad bellum, only touching on jus in bello where the relevant actions during the war reflect upon the jus ad bellum.
Given that Human Rights Watch is one international human rights organisation that has called for humanitarian intervention in the past, it is worth examining the definition that the head of that organisation, Kenneth Roth, gives. Roth (2004:1) states that it is “The use of military force across borders to stop mass killing…” Thus, we have the three main principles of humanitarian intervention. It is firstly an intervention of a foreign body (be it another country or a regional/international organisation). Secondly, it is an intervention using military force that moves into the affected country and therefore differentiates itself from force projected from outside a country. Thirdly it is in response to the possibility of mass killing.
Of course, simply defining what events may constitute a humanitarian intervention does not justify a particular intervention that is justified on humanitarian grounds. Indeed the article we have just quoted from goes on to criticise the Iraq war, which some of its defenders sought to justify upon humanitarian grounds. Indeed, Roth goes on further to explain what in his opinion would justify military force for humanitarian reasons,

“Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not… rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.” (Roth, 2004:4)

However, it is important to note that humanitarian intervention will possibly not be the only objective of a power in intervening for humanitarian reasons, as Walzer (2006:101) notes “Indeed, I have not found any, but only mixed cases where the humanitarian motive is one among several. States don’t send their soldiers into other states, it seems, only to save lives.”
Roth (2004) also argues that it is irrelevant to the judgement of whether a humanitarian intervention is justified if either there are more needy place which haven’t been intervened in or the intervening power has been complicit in repressing the populace.
So the question is posed, given that states intervene for other reasons as well as possible humanitarian ones, how do we work out when such a humanitarian motive for armed intervention is morally justifiable? When can military intervention be justified for humanitarian ends? We would argue that it is only by actually achieving those ends that military intervention becomes justified.
As Trotsky (2001:49) states, “A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.” He later adds, as regards to what means can be used (it needs to be noted that he is putting forward what he believes should be the morality of the workers movement),

“That is permissible which really leads to the liberation of humanity… Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression... Precisely from this it flows that not all means are permissible. When we say the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves…”(Trotsky, 2001:50)

For humanitarian intervention, then, mimicking the arguments in the above quote, we can justify it if it not only stops mass killings from occurring but also leads to a reduction in the possibility of the said population being put in jeopardy again. An intervention which stops an immediate killing, but then led on to much worse brutality would only make the situation worse. The reader should bear this in mind when reading the examples we will later discuss.

Will Israel's Leaders Be Put Before a War Crimes Tribunal?

2009-01-23T11:32:00.000-08:00

Details of what some suspected weeks ago are now beginning to emerge from Gaza. Yes, the Israeli regime has used 'illegal' weaponry in its war upon Gaza. James Caspell at La Lutte Continue! has reposted an al Jazeera article with the details of these, but i'll briefly summarise them here. Doctors are reporting that Israel has used Dense Inert Metal Explosives (Dime) weapons which explodes into tungsten dust - the metal in this may possibly be radioactive too. Amnesty International has also confirmed that it believes that the Israeli army has used white phosphorus weapons too, it basically causes really, really bad burns and is very difficult to put out.

Yet despite the clamouring of many around the world for the Israeli government/army to be tried for use of these inhumane weapons on civilians, will this actually happen?

Well Israel isn't a part of the treaty that created the International Criminal Court and Gaza isn't officialy classed as a state, so its unlikely that route would be used. Yet it could potentially be possible to create some sort of special tribunal like was done for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

But the problem is Israel (and it's US backers) are hardly likely to let anyone be tried. In general, people only face war crimes tribunals if they have a) lost power and b) lost internal or international support. The current Israeli government hasn't done either at the present. And if it were to lose the upcoming Israeli elections, it would be to a party further to the right of it, who would hardly likely to give them up of their own accord.

That said, it is theoretically possible that a new government may give up other people if it is put under a lot of pressure - both internationally, but crucially within Israel itself. It may choose to scapegoat them for a crisis it gets itself into at a future point. But as it stands I would say it is highly unlikely at present.

NUS leadership severs links with students

2009-01-22T08:19:00.000-08:00

Socialist Students statement on the passing of the NUS Governance Review. I've been writing an essay for the last week so it'll be business as usual once that's finished.

Build a mass movement for free education

The NUS extraordinary conference on January 20 in Wolverhampton saw the culmination of a campaign by the NUS (National Union of Students) right wing leadership, many of whom are Labour party members, to remove democratic structures in the national student body. This is taking place at a time when students are being threatened with a big increase in tuition fees, but the priority of the NUS leadership is to destroy their own union's democracy, rather than to fight in students' interests.
In order to force through these changes, the student union bureaucracy was mobilised to ensure debate was kept to an absolute minimum. Officers against the removal of democracy were locked out of emails, whilst the NUS leadership 'accidentally' sent emails to all the delegates. Without going through annual conference, these changes have been put through by two extraordinary conferences, one called at such short notice that many delegates were not elected, the most recent in the university and college exam period.
The new NUS constitution will mean that it is virtually impossible for students to propose motions to conference that will then get discussed on conference floor, that the final say on all national campaigns is in the hands of self-selecting bureaucrats, and the obligation to elect delegates to conferences is open to removal for some students unions. NUS is now far more akin to a charity that lobbies for students interests than a trade union, a body that has the potential to carry out mass action through the involvement of its members.
As Socialist Students have pointed out many times, this process has happened above the heads of the vast majority of students. The NUS leadership has rendered itself increasingly irrelevant to students' lives by refusing to take any large-scale action for over two years, and downplaying action that has taken place in order to misrepresent the real feelings of students over issues like university fees and student debt.
But the British government is in the midst of an economic crisis, and is imposing draconian attacks on people claiming benefits; it will also seek to make big attacks on students and young people in the future in order to cover the costs of bailing out the rich bankers and the capitalist system. Already graduates are being asked to work below the minimum wage for wealthy multinationals, as part of the governments National Internship Scheme (see here). A report for the government, quietly published over the Christmas holiday period, recommends big increases in the amount universities can charge students. These attacks will provoke huge opposition and mass movements from young people and students. The NUS will not be in a position to effectively lead these struggles, with new generations of activists looking mostly elsewhere. It will be out of these struggles, and mass action, that a genuine new student movement will be built.
Socialist Students has initiated the Campaign to Defeat Fees, which has won broad support from those beyond Socialist Students ranks. It has led the way in terms of national action against fees, organising days of action over the course of the last two academic years which have involved hundreds of students in over 50 universities and colleges around the country. It has also won support from students in Bangor University in a referendum, against the arguments of the leadership of NUS. In addition to campaigning on fees and debt, Socialist Students have also organised many protests over the recent destruction in Gaza in places like Keele and Bangor, campaigned against privatisation in Sussex, Exeter and Northumbria, and much more. Socialist Students, and the Campaign to Defeat Fees, have an important role to play in building campaigns against raising the cap on university fees and in building a national fightback against attacks.
Unfortunately, there is currently no mass force amongst students that is capable of giving effective leadership to the student struggle and of starting a discussion about building a new national body with serious weight behind it. Socialist Students argues for a broad left to bring together all genuine activists to be built in the coming period.
In the absence of such a broad left the NUS will remain, in the eyes of the government, the media etc, the established voice of students for now. Many students unions view their relationship with the national body as a means of getting discounted beer and other goods, through NUSSL, rather than primarily as a political one. Large numbers of College and FE students unions, largely without the same resources for full time staff as university HE students unions, will not have been aware of the undemocratic changes to NUS. Changes in voting for NUS conference delegates will happen on a student's union-by-students union basis, and will be a gradual process. Without mass developments outside NUS, it is possible that a layer of activists could still even be attracted to the NUS, only to be sorely disappointed once reaching national events. Although extremely unlikely, it is also not impossible that the NUS could still play a role in campaigning for student rights, even organising demonstrations if it feels under pressure and is worried about losing its dominant position as 'the' voice for students. Therefore it is unlikely that these fundamental changes to the NUS will be fully felt immediately. Only as a result of mass action led by activists outside the NUS will the domination of NUS be undermined.
This will not necessarily be a lengthy process however. A march has been called through London on February 25, actively involving a modest number of students unions and campaigning student groups, including Socialist Students. This has been organised outside of the NUS structures, in opposition to the NUS leadership's inactive strategy, although supported by NUS-affiliated students unions. Socialist Students put a motion to the body that is organising this action, calling for it to take on more flesh and become the embryo of a new national campaigning centre. This is opposed by Socialist Workers Student Societies (SWSS) and the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) because of fears they will not be able to dominate it. The AWL state, in a document they distributed at a Socialist Students national council,

"We should use Sussex [Students Union] as a starting base of the new centre [to replace NUS] – Sussex could provide a fraction of its current NUS affiliation fee...
"The Open Planning Meetings for the demonstration should continue after the demonstration... but it is unlikely that they will 'morph' into a new organising centre. They are too loose to form a nucleus or a base, and an attempt to 'firm them up' would be fraught with difficulty. Separate meetings and conferences should be held to create the new body – and when Sussex constitutes it, the new organising centre should be presented to the Open Planning Meetings as a fait accompli"

Amongst student activists, Sussex has an important reputation as a campaigning students union. Activists within the union, who have been involved in organising the march on February 25, will have an important part to play in building a new body. But we do not agree that one union can substitute itself for the whole student body, much less establish a new centre and present itself as a fait accompli to other groups of students entering activity. Because of the methods of the SWP and the AWL, the march on February 25 has been organised in a nebulous manner, one that is open to undemocratic manoeuvres and does not carry as much weight as it could do. A march, even a smaller one, will be a positive step forwards, and a national body that has led this and organised this could be in a significant position. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the open planning meetings will be transformed in order to take full advantage of this. Any steps towards forming new national bodies need to be based on mass action, on a genuinely democratic approach involving new layers of activists as well as bringing together student activist groups and students unions. That may come through local students unions, but many of these bodies have also attacked internal democracy.
New bodies may also develop around and without these local structures as well.
If the loose grouping that has called the February 25 march does not take on flesh, it will be a missed opportunity. Socialist Students will strive to ensure that that does not happen, but it is clear that the end of NUS has opened up a period where there may well be a series of false starts and missed opportunities. We will attempt to ensure that we discuss the situation regularly within our ranks, whilst prioritising campaigning against attacks on students and workers conditions and rights.
We will continue to play a role in the NUS structures, and not abandon any activists that are attracted to it by false hopes, or any possibility of gaining a wider audience of students for our ideas of struggle and socialism. Whilst there is no new national body, we do not call for students unions to disaffiliate from the NUS. But as part of our campaigning, we will raise the idea of building genuinely representative bodies for students, that fight against attacks and for improvements, and endeavour to build the fight back alongside students with the strategy of building mass movements.

Students occupy at Kings College

2009-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

This report was just e-mailed to me from the Socialist Students national organiser, and I post it here to share the news.

Despite the ceasefire, a number of students are still protesting on campuses against the war and against universities links to the arms trade. Occupations of lecture halls involving 40-50 students have taken place over the last week at Kings, Birmingham, SOAS, Essex and LSE making similar demands to the occupation at Kings below. Socialist Students has also played a key role in organising protests of hundreds in Bangor and Keele.

Today from 10 am, 40 students have occupied a lecture hall at Kings College in London. Socialist Students society members are present.

The students have made various demands on the university management relating to the recent onslaught by the IDF on Gaza.

These include

Immediate withdrawal of the honorary doctorate awarded to Shimon Peres the President of Israel who has led military campaigns in the occupied territories and Lebanon
That Kings College disinvests from arms companies supplying the IDF and the arms trade in general
That Kings College fully funds the studies of 5 students from Gaza
That Kings College makes a donation to organisations carrying out medical aid in Gaza
That students involved in the occupation are not victimised and suffer no repercussions

Various lecturers have been invited to speak to the occupying students. Socialist Students is arguing for a student led debate and discussion over the political issues involved in conflicts in the Middle East and for links to be made with campus trade unions in pressuring the university to disinvest in arms companies.

Socialist Students
020 8558 7947
PO Box 858 London E11 1YG
socialiststudents@hotmail.com
http://www.socialiststudents.org.uk/

Hong Kong: Nepali security staff demand a living wage

2009-01-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

Mon, 19 Jan 2009.

Security company G4S has not raised wages for thirteen years

Miu Dak Kit, chinaworker.info, Hong Kong

Today, 19 January, a group of about 200 G4S security officers protested outside the Securicor Centre headquarters in Lai Chi Kok, Hong Kong. A high police presence, including many plain clothes officers watched from the sidelines as an angry but peaceful crowd blocked half the street in front of the Securicor Centre. G4S is the world’s largest security company, operating in over 100 countries.

There are about 600 Nepalese working for G4S in Hong Kong, making up one in four of its employees. Hong Kong’s large Nepali community is a legacy of the Gurkha soldiers who served in the British Army here in Hong Kong until 1997. And herein lies the problem: G4S practises a discriminatory employment policy. It grades Nepalis as either GSO (Gurkha Security Officer – one with an army background), or NSO (Nepalese Security Officer – one without an army background) and pays each group differently according to their classification; HK$33 (US$4.25) an hour for GSO and HK$28 (US$3.60) an hour for NSO. Both GSO and NSO do exactly the same job, but this is not why the employees are outraged. Despite their classifications, G4S is hiring ex-Gurkhas and classifying them as NSO, and thus paying them lower wages. This makes a mockery of any classification system they have in place. The Nepalese workers are demanding equal treatment and the abolition of discriminatory, arbitrary classifications.

Their other demands include a basic minimum wage of HK$14,000 per month (US$1,804) and an overtime rate of $50. They are also demanding that contract staff should get a permanent post when they reach the age of 45. As these workers told chinaworker.info, they have not had a wage increase in the previous 13 years! These demands could hardly be described as unreasonable.

The workers demands were issued on 12 January with an ultimatum. Today’s protests were in response to the management’s intransigence. Representatives from the Nepalese workers and their union, HKCTU (Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions), presented their demands to the management in front of company headquarters. The next step will depend on the management’s response. At a time when new anti-discrimination legislation is being discussed in Hong Kong, and given the amount of discriminatory practices in all walks of Hong Kong life, protests like those seen today are necessary and likely to increase.

G4S – global giant with anti-union reputation

G4S, formerly known as Group 4 Securicor, is headquartered in Denmark but listed on the London stock exchange. The company employs over 570,000 workers globally and is no newcomer to controversial practises. In the US, its subsidiary Wackenhut won the contract from the Bush administration in 2007 to deport migrants across the Mexican border. While G4S global profits rose 17 percent in 2007 to 312 million pounds (HK$3.6 billion), it has been accused by trade unions of a series of violations including not paying its workforce in Africa a living wage and using “intimidation, instigating police and military forces” in its dealings with unionised workers.

“15,000 jobs are at stake in France and Germany because G4S would prefer to increase its margins by focusing on parts of the world where it is not challenged by strong unions. In some countries G4S doesn’t even increase workers’ pay for overtime. In at least one country, it cuts workers’ pay in half. This is something that our global union can’t tolerate if we are going to raise standards in Europe or anywhere else,” said Lars Lindgren of the Swedish Transport Union in a statement in March 2008.

One of the most famous cases of G4S trampling on workers rights was in Jakarta, Indonesia, two years ago. Even the US State Department Report on Human Rights in Indonesia, published in March 2006, featured this dispute involving G4S. In July 2006 the Indonesian Securicor workers had a substantial win. The campaign group formed to support these workers continues to support other Group 4 Securicor workers. This is an example of working class internationalism and solidarity that is necessary especially in standing up to global giants such as G4S. Workers at other G4S branches around the globe, and other trade unionists, should send messages of support to the Hong Kong Nepali security workers in their fight for an end to discrimination and for a living wage.

see Chinaworker report for more pictures http://www.chinaworker.org/en/content/news/618/

Bangor Socialists and local residents stand up and say “NO” to Israel’s attack on Gaza

2009-01-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

On the 17th of January, Bangor University Socialist Students, Bangor Socialist Party members and other local residents, trade unionists and college students braved the cold winter wind to take part in a protest against the continued attacks by the Israeli military on the Gaza strip. Socialist Students had been canvassing University Halls of Residence, and doing stalls outside the local college and in the city centre in the days leading up to the protest with vast amounts of support shown towards the demands for an end to the conflict.

Sean Homan, Bangor University Socialist Students

Starting at 11am a stall was erected upon Bangor high street and petitions were signed by many approached by volunteers. At noon, the high street rang with the sounds of “ one, two, three four, stop the bombing stop the war” along with other such chants. The protest was later joined by a march into town from the local mosque by an estimated group of around 70 people, with a further and thus larger rally on the high street. Both rallies were addressed by Iain Dalton, Bangor Branch Secretary of the Socialist Party who called for and end to the blockade of Gaza and united working class struggle in the region and worldwide The turn out throughout the day was over 100, with people from all generations young and old taking part.
Over 30 copies of the Socialist were sold in addition to 20 sold during the previous week and £30 was collected for the fighting fund. 3 people asked about joining the Socialist Party and many others expressed an interest in attending our public meeting on the crisis the following day.

Vote Robbie Segal for USDAW President!

2009-01-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Note: A report of the Bangor Gaza protest will appear sometime tomorrow on this blog. It was a good protest, and from what I've heard so were ones elsewhere.

The ballot opens for the USDAW President and Executive Committee elections on Monday 19th January. Robbie Segal will be standing for the post of President but also for re-election to her current Executive Committee position. I'd like to encourage all members of USDAW to vote for her. To give people a flavour of her campaign I've posted links to a few things below

Stop Job Cuts (Article from this weeks The Socialist on USDAW elections)
No festive joy for shop workers (Article from previous weeks The Socialist on unionising at a warehouse)
Christmas is Over and the Cutbacks Begin (Article on cutbacks at Morrisons from the Activist blog)
The Activist Issue 13 (Newsletter of Socialist Party members and supporters in USDAW featuring New Years greetings from Robbie)

Protest yn erbyn y lladdfa yn Gaza / Protest against the slaughter in Gaza

2009-01-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

If anyone's wondering why I haven't posted for a day or two it's cos i'm helping organise this! (and therefore I probably won't post til after this)

12.00yh wrth y Tŵr Cloc yng nghanol Bangor
Dydd Sadwrn 17 Ionawr
Dewch â phosteri a baneri

12.00 o'clock, by the Clock Tower in Bangor City Centre
Saturday 17th January
Bring placards and banners