Meme: Political Firsts

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!).

A Rant: Totally-Unoriginal-Gate

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?

Students and Politics

Becuase I've posted this piece up so quick, I think yesterdays article may not get a look in on international justice. I would very much like feedback on that article as I still have a write up to do on the subject. Thanks

This piece is a critical look at an article featured in last weeks Weekly Worker on Students and Politics see http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/708/drivenideas.html. I find that from time to time this paper produces some interesting articles, although I'm not keen on their politics of orientating themselves towards the existing left rather than the wider working class. I don't agree with quite a few bits underpinning the article, but some discussion of the questions it raises can be useful

The first thing I want to take issue with is his arguement that student politics is centred in 'old universities' and former polytechnics that have made themselves like the 'old universities'. He sees this as being due to large numbers arts/humanities and social science students.

This doesn't bear up to my experience at all, perhaps it might be analogous to 'traditional student politics' but not revolutionary student politics. Our student politics grows up around activists, true perhaps there is a skew towards the area's suggested above, but i think that is due to things I will discuss below, not an inherent feature of the only students who become political. In fact at both universities I've been at (University of Huddersfield and Bangor University are both quite different) we've had people from a range of degree areas including Music, Journalism, Chemistry, History, Psychology, Sociology, English, Languages, trainee Nurses, Marine Biology and even Buisness Studies.

Our politics as I mentioned grow up around activists, usually groups of a few or more people who will organise stalls, petioning, protests etc. These from the core of the group who usually attract other people around them. The more established a group, the more likely it is to have links with local colleges or local universities depending on where the group starts from. True it is easier to organise at university, but this is becuase of the existence of large student unions, freshers fayre, and the ability to get easy funding for your society. But it a society iether won;t exist or go anywhere without activists.

I do agree with the article that events politicise students, ideas are important.. but they are certainly not the only factor as I shall explain. Ideas always have a larger impact on young people becuase generally speaking they are more open to our ideas. And suprise, suprise many students are young people.

Ideas however, in my opinion, seem to be more of a driving force for more middle class layers of students (or perhaps it may be becuase it's the only driving force for them whereas in others layers of students it is one of several). But there is a contradictory nature to students class position. They are drawn from across the various layers in society. Of course the children of the rich go to university, many students are from middle class background and there a sizeable number from a working class background (like me!). I wouldn't want to speculate on the proportions of each, but i'd say that those from a working class background are sizeable and the same from a middle class background.

I would say generally, that the rich students won't be interested, middle class students are interested from an ideological point of view and thus are somewhat unreliable - they turn up to whatever they fancy - whereas working class students have some real bad material obsticles to get over. The biggest one is usually having to work either whilst at uni (like me) or over the summer (like me again!). Then you've got the overpriced and crap accomodation, cuts (which disproportinately affect poorer students as they can't afford to do extra activities or restarting their degree etc. to overcome this) and so on.

I would argue that it is possible to build struggles in response to students material cirumstances - their have been campaigns against cuts, against cuts to halls of residence or their privatisation, and although the fight against fees at the moment hasn't been that big (due to the pernacious role of NUS), it's important to remember that fees were scrapped once before.

Because of the contradictory class nature of students as a whole, they are undoubtedly influenced by workers moving into struggle - the highpoint of the students movement doesn't coincide with the high point of working class struggles in this country for no reason whatsoever.

Although I don't think the article is particularly good, what it tries to discuss is an important question in terms of how we develop a fighting students movement, that is of a sound theoretical base from which to organise from.

Prisons

Now I know I am a criminology student, and it's in title of this blog, so people are probably wondering why i haven't posted anything on crime and the like yet. WEll I haven't got round to it, although I'm probably going to put something up on the 'riots' of the early 1980'sa in the next week or so (time permitted). Instead I thought i'd leave you with a recent article I wrote for the Socialist.

Reid's prison disaster
HOME SECRETARY John Reid is under great pressure from the media and MPs after several well-publicised crises and humiliations about his department's work in law enforcement. He has also come under attack for reiterating the position that magistrates should only jail the most dangerous and persistent criminals. This is a bid to ease overcrowding in prisons in England and Wales, that are full to the point of bursting. IAIN DALTON looks behind the headlines.
IN NOVEMBER last year, the prison population exceeded 80,000 for the first time ever, increasing at a rate of 2.4% or 1,790 prisoners per year. Britain puts 143 out of every 100,000 people behind bars, now having Europe's largest prison population.
Some of the 139 prisons are overcrowded up to 130% of their capacity. Despite the government making police cells available to accommodate prisoners under Operation Safeguard, in some areas prisoners are accommodated in court cells. All this is whilst government figures tell us that crime is decreasing.
Labour looks set to copy the Tories' policies from the last time there was a prison overcrowding problem: build more prisons, and most likely private prisons. Reid is apparently securing treasury funding for an extra 8,000 prison places. The last overcrowding crisis in the early 1990s was the excuse for the Tories to introduce privatisation in this arena.
Britain now has the largest percentage of private prisons in the world (though the USA has the highest number of privatised prisons). But this 'solution' has been shown to fail. Not only has the prison population risen to take up that capacity, but private prisons are among the most overcrowded.
There has also been an attempt to extend early release, also introduced following previous prison crises. However, despite the keenness to increase the role of electronic tagging (privatised since inception), upwards from the 3,000 prisoners currently released early subject to tagging, it has seen resistance from the courts, and is less likely.
Labour have also been keen to bolster community punishments as an alternative to prison, however, Labour's legislation has increasingly made community punishment an addition to prison, rather than an alternative. The 2003 Criminal Justice Act allows judges to 'pick and mix' various penalties for offenders, leading to increases in both rather than a shift from prison to community.

Discontent

ACADEMIC CRIMINOLOGISTS are keen to point out that the judiciary is 'the crux of the crisis'. Indeed as 97% of all cases are tried at a magistrates' court, determining guilt and sentencing mostly lies in the hands of unelected middle- and upper-class individuals. Many prisoners are debtors or have been sentenced for minor crimes.
The judiciary tend to support heavy punishment, which can be seen in the increase in numbers sentenced to prison and sentence lengths, especially the new indeterminate public protection sentence for current offenders introduced in 2005, which has been imposed on 1,890 prisoners, and is set to increase to over 12,000 in the next five years.
Institutionalised racism is also present. There are disproportionate numbers of ethnic minority prisoners, with disproportionately long sentences. Many from a similar class background to judges get much lower sentences (or are completely let off). However, it is not just the judiciary that are the problem.
Whilst there is not the discontent within prisons of the early 1990s (which saw rioting) conditions are continually worsening as a result of overcrowding and are far from the 'luxury accommodation' right-wing commentators criticise. Up to three prisoners can be accommodated within a single small cell.
Many prisoners get no access to decent education or training facilities, with resulting high illiteracy and innumeracy. Additionally, the increase in prison population has made prisons more understaffed than ever.
Many prisoners are locked in their cells for most of the day, which as POA (prison officers' union) leader Brian Caton pointed out in a recent interview for the socialist means that any supposed rehabilitation cannot occur. The morale and working conditions of staff are deteriorating.
With roughly 60% of prisoners re-offending, how does the prison system actually stop crime? Although New Labour say they have been tough on crime, they have not made the situation any better, and have probably made it worse, for the general public, prisoners and the staff inside the prisons.

Long-term solution

CAPITALIST POLITICIANS from the main parties have repeatedly shown they have no long-term solution to crime apart from locking increasing numbers of people up for ever-longer periods of time, which just the makes the problem of overcrowding even worse. Only socialists have a real solution to this crisis.
A socialist programme to give jobs and training for all on a living wage, with housing and other essentials of life under public ownership and control would be necessary to begin to overcome the present levels of crime.
A socialist programme would call for steps such as releasing all debtors and those in prison for trivial crimes immediately. This would instantly reduce prison overcrowding, and improve conditions for prison staff. Other cases should be reviewed by democratically elected bodies.
Socialists must also campaign for the right to trial by jury in all cases and a democratically elected judiciary earning no more than the average wage of a worker and subject to recall at any time. Privately owned prisons should be returned to the public sector.

Beating the BNP

Last week I indavertently ended up in a SWP public meeting/forum. They had the usual discussionn etc. (which i may comment upon at some point), but what interested me was a little discussion they had at the end about the BNP standing in a local by-election in Calderdale. The BNP won a by-election in the Illingworth & Mixenden ward in 2003, and since then now have two councillors in calderdale (down from 3 at one point). The by-election is interestingly enough in the Illingworth & Mixenden ward, where a sitting Labour councillor has died. Thus the SWP are mobilising against the BNP in this election.
But what are the SWP in Huddersfield & Calderdale doing to stop the BNP, they're out leafletting to get people to not vote BNP. And who are these voters supposed to vote for instead, the Tories, Liberals or Labour, all of whom support the cuts that are allowing the BNP to gain support? What is needed is a new worker's party that can oppose these cuts and help lead the fight against them, the SWP claim RESPECT is this, but they are not standing a candidate or even putting out propaganda for people to join RESPECT (this is to the best of my knowledge). From what I've seen, the SWP seem to have a policy that says that Labour is reclaimable, as can be seen by their failure to call fro the trade unions to disaffiliate from a Labour party that is attacking them and call for a new party (or even join RESPECT). Their approach is best summed up as a stages approach, first we stop the BNP getting elected, and then we do something to support the struggles of working people.
Unfortunately, the SP in Halifax do not have a large amount of members and when discussing whether we could put out propaganda for the formation of a new workers party (and asking people to join the CNWP) we found that due to our conference being this weekend we didn't have enough comrades left to do so (this would have been in addition to the stall we'd already arranged in Huddersfield). It is something we want to do, given the resources and the mobility to do so.
Where we stood last year in Huddersfield we did cut across the BNP vote significantly (their support was minimal in the ward we stood in), and Dr Jackie Grunsell has shown herself as a class fighter, supporting the Unique Care strike, the campaign against Academies, and against nurseries closures and other issues in Kirklees. Hopefully we can build upon this work, and stop the BNP reclaiming the area that was once the 'jewek in their crown'.

Socialist Alternative Radio

I have to admit I like good ideas, and what I'm going to describe is one of them. Comrades in the CWI in Boston, MA in the US have launched Socialist Alternative Radio, to spread the ideas of socialism and marxism across the airwaves. And it's a damn good listen.
Generally speaking the typical show has a look at the previous weeks news, an interview with an activist of some kind (has varied from the Green candidate for governor in Massachussets to other members of the CWI across the US to striking workers), various music, book and film reviews and solidarity anouncements for the local (Boston) area.
So if you're bored on a journey for a couple of hours (like I am a lot), download this to your MP3 player (if you're lucky enough to have one) and listen along. It can be downloaded from http://www.wmfo.org/index.html every week, or listened to live there (or in Boston of course). Just go to Schedule on the site menu and then find Socialist Alternative Radio and click last show.