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

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.

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

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.

Naming and Shaming

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.

Anti-racism stall in Wrexham

This is from The Socialist from two weeks ago, I simply hadn't got around to posting it.

A Socialist Party stall with the slogans 'jobs, homes and services not racism' and 'youth against racism' was set up in a prominent shopping area in Wrexham town centre. Overall our key demands were welcomed and amongst those who stopped to talk, one man highlighted how the Labour Party he once knew no longer existed and said that he doesn't believe anything New Labour say.
Groups of young people signed the petitions and took leaflets, returning later in the day with more of their mates to sign. A couple of OAPs congratulated us on still flying the red flag. Some people gave their names to be contacted regarding future activities. Hopefully this shows the beginning of building the Socialist Party in North East Wales.

More of the Same Proposals on Crime

Monday, 16th June saw a ‘new’ set of proposals to reorganise the criminal justice system to tackle crime. Included this time are proposals to ‘toughen up’ community service by renaming it ‘community payback’ (it was renamed unpaid work not that long ago too!), forcing offenders to wear bright yellow bibs.
To give it that extra New Labour touch, in common with almost every new piece of policy, the probation service is going to be forced to contract the provision of this out.
Other proposals include giving more powers to Police Community Support Officers so they can detain people and hand out on the spot fines. Also included in the proposals are the idea of putting up posters of those convicted (to ‘name and shame’ them) as well as appointing a commissioner to the sentencing guidance council to ‘represent the public’ – the very fact this proposal is there shows how out of touch the government is with ordinary people.

Socialist Approach Needed

Fundamentally, the proposals offer nothing new, they are just another set of suggestions to make New Labour appear ‘tough on crime’. It is an incredibly slight change in style and contains no new substance at all. The whole approach of New Labour, along with the other major capitalist parties is to attack the symptoms of the problem and not the real cause – the capitalist system that they seek to defend.
As capitalism is going into recession in Britain then these problems will only get worse – unemployment will increase, big business will tighten the screws on wages and conditions for those who remain in work. If young people (and many other people for that matter) thought the future was grim over the last few years, under capitalism it will get a whole lot worse.
In response to the bleak future of the profit system, socialists argue for a society that meets people’s needs. Affordable, quality housing, well-paid jobs, provision of activities and youth centres for young people would all undermine the economic basis for widespread crime that capitalism’s deepening crisis is providing.
But this is not all socialists propose. Instead of appointing out of touch people to represent ordinary people, socialists suggest practical measures to fight crime such as democratic control of local policing so that the local community can tackle the problems that it feels most threatened by, functioning within a democratically organised criminal justice system. Then instead of having to rely on ever tougher gimmicks to prove to the public that something is being done about crime, people can see through their own involvement what is being done and have a genuine input rather than being used as pawns by capitalist politicans to justify increasingly repressive laws.

The Labour Party

The recent campaign to try to get John McDonnell a chance to contest for the leadership of the Labour party brought up the question of whether it was possible for the left to reclaim the Labour Party.
Since the 1997 election Labour has lost thousands of members, as of the last council elections the party had been wiped out from 90 or so councils across the country. Furthermore it has sent troops into several countries including most obviously Iraq and Afghanistan, carried through cuts and privatisations as well as passing draconian anti-terror laws as well as pissing off most young people through the introduction of ASBOs.
Of course, CWI members left the labour party earlier than this, with many leading members of the tendency expelled, the labour party moving increasingly to the right and most importantly the labour party failing to lead struggles at that time, most prominently the poll tax. The removal of clause four effectively sealed this degeneration.
Those still in the labour party tell us that the masses will come flooding back to their traditional party. What masses?
It's obviously not young people, if young people were to go en masse anywhere at the moment it would probably be the greens! even the tories can seem to be more appealing than labour. as mentioned before two wars, asbos, a lack of decent jobs has put paid to any want of you people to join that party.
It's not community campaigners either who see there effort ignored or hijacked by labour party members and end up either campaigning or standing against them.
It's not trade unionists, who see their leaders giving millions of pounds to labour and get nothing, and see action taken to protect their jobs and conditions interfered with because it'll make Labour look bad.
It's a disappointment that John McDonnell didn't get on the ballot as this would have really exposed the trade union leaders of UNISON, UNITE, TGWU and others and might have started a debate within society about the ideas he was standing for, instead we are shown what weakness the Labour left has been reduced to, very little influence at all.
All in all I very much doubt there is anything worth reclaiming, and even so the left in the labour party are far too weak to do that.

2007 Elections in Kirklees

Where do I start. Perhaps by taking the good point, the one good point, the BNP failed to gain any more seats, even in their stringhold of Heckmondwike, although their vote increased in some wards they didn't make any electoral breakthrough.
The great disappointment was not getting a second Save Huddersfield NHS councillor, Ian Slattery got a commendable 1,184 (18.64%) votes taking second place but Labour managed to retain their seat. In Ashbrow ward where Mel Mills was standing for the first time as an independent Save Our Services campaigner, she got a respectable 251 votes (5.67%). Not to forget them, Respect got a paltry 169 votes (3.36%), 9 votes less than the by-election they contested in 2006 in the same ward and 70 votes less than the 239 (4.16%) the same candidate got standing for Save Huddersfield NHS in the 2006 local elections (albeit in a different ward).
Labour despite being slaughtered nationally have managed to win back control of Kirklees council (after being led by the Tories last year and the Lib Dems the year before), part of the reason why this was acheived was Labour's opposition to the Liberal-Tory-Green cuts budget that was due to cut weekly bin collections, nurseries and other services (even though Labour's alternative budget was more cuts, just of different less emotive services), another reason was the party's succesful positioning itself as not being the Labour party, instead having 'Save Weekly Bin Collections' or 'The People's Choice' as the tag lines on their banners during the elections.
After speaking to several lecturers of mine who live in the Crosland Moor & Netherton ward, many appeared to have voted for Labour as a vote against the BNP, believing the vote recived by Ian was incredibly good and as a factor which may convince more people to back the campign in the future.
From my point of view, we did seem to have a lot of support in the run up to election day and it was disappointing to lose by so many votes in that ward, however, we have come out of the election campign much stronger. We've had much more active support during the campaign with various people living in the ward helping with the election campaign and several people interested in joining the Socialist Party. We've also seen the emergence of the nurseries camapign into a fledgling political party, contesting an election and receiving a decent vote. Given the short timescale they had, to leaflet the whole of Ashbrow for the election is a commendable achievement and the fact that the candidate is speaking at the Campaign for a New Workers Party conference this weekend is even more significant, a fighting left alternative in Kirklees has definitely had it's foundations set.
Although Labour have won the council on promises of stopping cuts, they as we have already noted will only make cuts in other areas, the party is wedded to Blair's neo-liberal project so thyinsg we found large opposition to such as building schools for the future programme of privatising education and building academies will continue as will other cuts. Only a new party of the working class in the immediate future can fight these cuts as all the main parties stand for these cuts.