A Note on the Approach of Marxists to the Police

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.

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.

BNP get police to arrest socialists

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.

Euro elections: Challenging big business and the far-right

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.

Socialist Party Congress 2009

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.

Stop the Slaughter in Gaza

Socialist Party leaflet on the current attacks on Gaza. There is a national demo being called on Saturday in London as well as several other protests around the country.

Mass struggle is the only way out

Israel’s government’s rule has been a chain of scandals and failures, most recently the impact of the world capitalist crisis.
Now they are trying to save themselves from defeat in February’s elections by means of a wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in this long planned attack.
Abu Abas, Mubarak and the Arab League leaders condemn the massacre. But they were complicit in Israel’s starving of the Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants by Israel’s 16-month siege. These regimes willingly carry out the dictates of imperialism. Mubarak’s authoritarian regime in Egypt collaborated in the imprisonment of the Palestinians by preventing free movement of goods and people on Egypt’s border with Gaza. Mubarak even met Israel’s foreign minister Livni on the day before Israel’s attack.
Bush, and Obama, have refused to force Israel to immediately halt the carnage. Bush used similar brutality in the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. While Miliband makes feeble calls for a cease-fire, the White House does not criticise the massive Israeli onslaught and blames Hamas for provoking these attacks on Gaza. Bush supports the Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Gaza while condemning the consequent Hamas rocket fire into Israeli cities.
Hamas’ rocket fire cannot defeat the Israeli state’s oppression of Palestinians. The Israeli ruling class do not care about the working class inhabitants of the towns bordering Gaza, but uses their plight to justify the war. The Hamas leadership use the rockets as a means to hide their lack of any strategy to liberate the Palestinian masses from the Israeli siege. The Israeli government does not defend the real interests of ordinary Israelis, rather it exploits their fears.
Every gain made in the history of Palestinian struggle has been the result of active mobilisation of the masses. Tragically for Palestinians neither Hamas, nor Fatah, nor the Arab regimes, have a strategy to defend the masses and stop the Israeli state’s slaughter.

* For an immediate end to Israeli attacks. For and immediate end to the siege.
* For escalation of demonstrations and protests against the war, in the Middle East and internationally.
* No trust in the world powers or the United Nations. The Palestinian masses must trust their own struggle and appeal for support from the working masses internationally, especially in the Middle East, including Israel.
* Organize the masses in self-defence. Mass action by Palestinians and Egyptians to break the siege that imprisons Gaza.
* For united struggles by the workers and poor to overthrow all the capitalist regimes in the Arab states and in Israel. For worker’s governments across the Middle East which can end the cycle of violence by resolving the contentious issues in the interests of working people and start to create a society run for the needs of ordinary people.
* For a Socialist Palestine and a Socialist Israel as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.

Towards Effective Green Left Unity

The following statement has already appeared on the Nation of Duncan and A Very Public Sociologist. There has been some discussion posted on AVPS already (whilst I encourage people to check the debate this blog does have a slightly different readership to AVPS). The statement is sort of self-explanatory and I believe is due to be published in this Thursdays issue of the Socialist. - Oh and there are some criminology posts coming soon!

The following is a statement produced by the Socialist Party following correspondence between the Lewisham Socialist Party and the Lewisham Green Party after a Green Party candidate was revealed to be on the membership list of the BNP:

ONE of the Green Party candidates who stood in Telegraph Hill ward, south London in the 2006 local elections appears on the list of alleged BNP supporters recently leaked to the media. This ward, in the London borough of Lewisham, is represented by two Socialist Party members, Ian Page and Chris Flood, who have been councillors there since 1990 and 2003 respectively.
When the list was published Lewisham Socialist Party was asked to comment. Aware that the list, leaked by disgruntled BNP members, did not necessarily imply support for the far-right party, we contacted the individual named, who informed us that he had never been a supporter of the BNP and their racist ideas.
We accepted his assurance but, as there were others on the list who have been Green Party members and who have also been BNP supporters, we also wrote to the Lewisham Greens for their views before we made any public comment.
Darren Johnson, a Lewisham Green councillor and London Assembly member, replied, saying that, “knowing him as I do”, he was convinced that the individual concerned had been “the victim of a malicious prank” and had given “no indication whatsoever that he shared the obnoxious views of the BNP”.
But Darren Johnson also conceded that their ex-candidate, who had no campaigning record in Telegraph Hill, “has had no active involvement in the Green Party for the past two years”, in other words, since the 2006 elections.
This raises a wider question: even if, as it appears, the candidate was not sympathetic to the BNP’s poisonous ideas, why did Lewisham Green Party conclude that he was a better representative of anti-cuts, anti-privatisation and pro-environment policies in Telegraph Hill than the sitting Socialist Party councillors, Ian Page and Chris Flood?
The Socialist Party has consistently approached the Green Party to discuss whether we could come to an electoral agreement, at least to not stand candidates against each other where possible. Through the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, for example, we discussed this with the Green Party’s national election officer, who confirmed that such agreements could be made by local parties.
The Socialist Party and the Green Party have important differences. The Socialist Party believes that fundamental change is necessary to save our environment, which can only be achieved by democratic public ownership of the major companies that dominate the globe.
On Lewisham council the Green councillors have not always backed the Socialist councillors’ proposals to resist the pro-market agenda of the establishment parties – New Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. But there is sufficient agreement, we believe, for us to seriously discuss possibilities for electoral agreements.
Unfortunately that has not been the approach of Lewisham’s Greens. Their strategy in the 2006 elections was to stand as widely as possible, regardless of who they were standing against or the record and commitment of their candidates.
The Greens stood three candidates in the three-seat Telegraph Hill ward in 2006, who each polled around 400 votes – well short of winning but far more than the gap between the New Labour candidate elected as the third ward councillor and the third-placed Socialist Party candidate, Jess Leech. Was it really necessary to stand in Telegraph Hill and allow New Labour to slip in? Especially as there were other, New Labour-held wards, in Lewisham where the Greens only stood one candidate?
Darren Johnson hasn’t accepted our offer to discuss what lessons from all this there may be for the future. But the Socialist Party plans to stand more widely in Lewisham in the next local elections in 2010 along with, we hope, local trade unionists and representatives of different campaign groups fighting to save council housing, defend education, and keep our NHS safe from privatisation. They too will expect that Lewisham Green Party would co-operate to maximise the electoral challenge to the establishment parties.

Additionally commentary from Neil Cafferky from the Socialist Party national office -

I should emphasise at this point that this is NOT an attack on the Green Party for having an election candidate who has since appeared on the BNP membership list, although it is reasonable to seek clarification from the Greens regarding their knowledge of this person’s politics in response to quires from voters in the area. Nor is the Socialist Party trying to dictate to the Green Party who or where they can stand. That is, of course, a decision that must be taken by the members of the Green Party themselves.

What the Socialist Party is seeking from the Green Party in Lewisham, and elsewhere in the country, is clarification on their relationship with the rest of the Left on the electoral field.
With the new mood of co-operation on the Left following recent setbacks in the quest for a new workers party and with the possibility of an general election in the summer it is vital that the strongest possible challenge is put up to all the establishment parties by socialist, trade unionists, community activists and environmentalists.

Hopefully this can be the beginning of a discussion between socialists and Green Party members on the best way forward to challenging the rule of profit, big business and environmental destruction.

Socialism 2008 – Review – Socialism and Left Unity by Peter Taaffe (2008)

Whilst this isn’t really a session at Socialism 2008, this book was launched there and is a critique of the ideas and methods of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It does take up some of the points that were debated in the session at Socialism 2008 on Building a Revolutionary Party (of which there is a video of on the Socialist Party website - http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/6614).

The book begins with some general points about why the Socialist Party (SP) thinks debates on the methods and ideas of organisations are important for serious attempts at left unity. The first section proper discusses the origins of the SWP and the Socialist Party and their ideas in relation to Stalinism – particularly criticising their idea of the USSR and other states as being state capitalism and the problems with this definition. The next chapter begins with focussing on how these ideas led to problems after the collapse of Stalinism in the early 1990’s and their idea of this decade being “the 1930’s in slow motion”.

It then moves on to discuss the approach of the SWP towards the anti-capitalist movement – in particular their use of the slogan – another world is possible - compared to the SPs – a socialist world is possible. It also takes up Trotsky’s transitional programme, what the SP believes to be the misapplication of the idea of transitional demands.

Next up is the attitude of the SWP to the rest of the left – its role in relation to the Socialist Alliances and also the role of its sister organisation in Germany. To this the approach of the SP is contrasted with that of the SWP, particularly how the SP argued for a federal approach in that organisation with the SWPs ‘rule or ruin’ approach. It then deals with the RESPECT saga too. This area is then dealt with again later in the book in a section entitled “United Front Today and the Left in Germany”.

The book then goes discusses a few incidents in the trade unions in the 90’s before taking up disagreements in the PCS and NUT between the SP and the SWP. The section after this discusses the SWP’s anti-fascism work – after discussing the successes of the Anti-Nazi League – it critiques what the SP believes were some of its failures – it’s “Don’t vote Nazi” slogan which leaves open the possibility of voting for other capitalist parties and the lack of democracy within that organisation and then deals with the role of Unite Against Fascism in recent years.

The final section deals with the internal regime of the SWP, in particular the use of top-down bureaucratic methods when dealing with serious disagreements inside the organisation giving examples of the expulsion of their US sister organisation and in relation to break up of RESPECT and then contrasts this with the SP and the CWI.

Although the book is a critique of the SWP and many of the arguments may be familiar to people already, the book touches on many other points which are of interest to anyone on the left in terms of history, theory and various movements. The debate on revolutionary ideas, organisation and methods will become increasingly important and this book is worth reading for anyone who agrees with the necessity of this, especially current members of the SWP.

Plaid and Crime

This is a review of Leanne Wood's recent Plaid Cymru policy statement 'Making Our Communities Safer' - which can be found at http://www.plaidcymru.org/uploads/publications/319.pdf. This has already been discussed on the Socialist Unity blog see http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=2324. This review can also be found on the Socialist Party Wales website.

A document by Plaid AM Leanne Wood

Reviewed by Iain Dalton (Bangor SP)

Crime has been ever more increasingly in the press over the last few years as one of the biggest issues affecting people. However, we have been fed a programme of populist, punitive schemes to combat crime by this New Labour government that have only made the problem worse. Thus it is welcome that Leanne Wood, a ‘left’ Assembly member for Plaid Cymru and former probation officer has written a document challenging these policies and attempting to outline an alternative policy for Plaid Cymru.

After the summary and recommendations, the report begins by stating “Community life in Wales is at risk. UK Government attacks on public services and the historic lack of a Welsh economic policy has meant that community viability has had to depend upon the whims of the market. Whilst there have been some winners, most communities and the people living within them have been losers.” Undoubtedly cuts to public services have had a dramatic impact across the UK and especially in Wales which to a great extent has not in some areas recovered from. But it is not just the UK government that is affecting these cuts, the Welsh Assembly and local councils have happily passed on budget cuts to cuts to services, despite moaning about it rather than taking practical steps to do something about it. For Wood, safe communities are the key to fighting crime, a safe community is one in which someone (and those they care about) can move around in free from fear.

Wood correctly points out the abject failure of current government policies to tackle crime. She points out that the imprisonment rate for the UK (I assume she means England and Wales as Scotland is a separate jurisdiction) 50% higher than France, Germany and Italy and that (much more shockingly in my opinion) 72% of the male prison population (the vast bulk of the prison population) have two or more mental health disorders. Wood also points of the re-offending rate and how this is linked to drug and alcohol dependency which is very prevalent among offenders.

Wood also comments on how sentences are increasing, pointing out the 34% increase in prison sentences for women for driving offences, and makes several other comments regarding female prisoners including the large proportion sentenced for drug offences and the ‘recycling’ of women through prison on short sentences that means no rehabilitation could possibly occur.

Wood also comments on how some aspects of crime policy, such as preventative elements related to housing, education, domestic abuse, youth justice etc. have been devolved to the Welsh Assembly, but control of policing, criminal law, the courts, probation and prisons remains with the new Ministry of Justice.

In criticizing the recent policy from the Home Office, she notes the admixture of free-market liberalism with punitivism and prohibition. We have seen in recent years the largest ever prison population, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) criminalizing young people, clamping down on civil liberties and the proposed ID cards. Alongside this we’ve seen drinking laws relaxed, the promotion of super casinos and the opening up of the probation service to privatization.

In trying to answer the question of why crime has become such a political issue she points out the contradiction between the declining crime rates and the ever increasing fear and perception of crime. She reviews the usual links between media portrayals of crime out of control, and points out that ‘anti-social behaviour’ was invented by New Labour, indeed much of their effort against crime has been directed at low level crime which only seems to have made the problem worse.

To do something about crime, Wood correctly argues that we have to understand why people commit crime. She briefly surveys things like poverty, substance abuse, lack of youth facilities and mental health problems, pointing out the shocking statistics relating to this including over half a million people in Wales living in poverty and the much greater prevalence of mental health problems in former coal mining areas.

Crime policy towards young people comes under severe criticism from Wood. She points out that because there is only one secure children’s home in Wales about 84% of young offenders from Wales are imprisoned in England. But it is ASBOs which come in for the most criticism (quite rightly!). As she explains ASBOs are not criminal offences, but their breaching can result in imprisonment, meaning that people are being sent to prison for offences that wouldn’t even warrant a fine or community service order! She cites figures from the Youth Justice Board showed that 700 children and young people had been imprisoned for ASBO breaches, and she also points out that figures show that about half of all ASBOs are breached.

So far so good. These criticisms of government policies are something socialists would agree with. But what does she propose? The main proposal is to make criminal justice issues fully devolved to the Welsh Assembly government, so that they can prioritise tackling the causes of crime. The bulk of the proposals lay in substituting the punitive approach of new labour for a rehabilitative approach, alongside a pro-active preventative approach with young people generally, and specific interventions for those who have committed criminal offences or anti-social behaviour. Of course, such an approach would be a big improvement on current government policies, but unfortunately it doesn’t tackle many of the real problems.

Poverty, substance abuse, mental health problems are by products of living in an alienating society based on greed rather than need. Wood’s proposals are attempting to deal with these damaging by products, rather than their root causes. No mention is made of trying to deal with the devastation caused to communities by multinationals that decide to leave for lower wage economies, nor the current financial squeeze which is being reinforced by below inflation public sector pay deals and an appallingly low minimum wage.

Further more, these solutions would not empower ordinary people to be able to do anything, rather create a whole layer of professionals who will control the lives of thousands. It is a recipe for a top-down system which would still fail to respond to the needs of ordinary people in Wales.

Instead, Socialists would start from the need for the democratic control of the whole criminal justice system so that priorities can be decided by local communities. We would also advocate the democratic control of the economy to provide well-paid jobs and employment for all. Of course, some of the suggestions that Wood makes would be incorporated into a socialist strategy to tackle crime, such as increased availability of facilities to help those with drug problems, but to be successful it would need to be linked to the key socialist policies stated above to have any real chance.

Cardiff school saved from the wreckers.

This piece comes from the Socialist party wales website. On another note i've finished most of my coursework now so I'll be able to do a couple of things I've been putting off for a while, inlcuding making some updates to the blog.
Campaigners from Lansdowne Primary School in Canton in Cardiff are celebrating this week after winning their fight to save their school.
Report by Ross Saunders
( Cardiff West Socialist Party, Unison Steward Fitzalan High School)

Eight months of hard, well-organised campaigning by parents, staff and community members has proved that fighting back can win results. The victory has given a huge boost to schools like Llanedeyrn, Cefn Onn and Llanrumney, which still lie under the axe.The campaign forced school closures to the top of the agenda in the recent Council elections. Socialist Alternative candidates standing under the banner of Save Our Schools gained respectable votes and Plaid Cymru were pressured into opposing the school closures. Plaid has now joined forces with the Lib Dems on the Council Executive. Cantonian High School will also remain open and anew school for over-crowded Welsh-language Primary Ysgol Treganna. will be built. But the school closures programme has not been withdrawn.
These developments have exposed the lies peddled by local Labour councillors, who claimed building a new Welsh-language school was impossible without closing an English-speaking school.
Plaid, which has been able to fake left while in opposition, now faces having to administer closures in the city, or come up against its own party members in the WAG coalition with Labour. Canton has won its battle for now, but campaigners have expressed their sympathy with the other schools still on the closures list. People in other parts of the city will ask how Plaid can close schools in their area while saving those in their own back yard.
Socialist Party members, who have supported Lansdowne and the other schools campaigns from the beginning, are calling for so-called "surplus places" to be redistributed amongst all the schools in Cardiff in order to lower class sizes and raise standards, and demands the funding arrangements be changed in order to allow this. Colossal pressure has been able to divert the main parties from attacks in some parts of the city, but until a new party that acts in the interests of ordinary people is created, campaigners will have to continue their fight against school closures and job cuts in education

France '68, Remembering the 40th Anniversary of the revolutionary uprising.

Okay I promise I'll post something on crime tomorrow, but for today I thought I'd post up some meeitng reports from Wales, taken from the Socialist Party Wales website

France came to Wales last week as successful meetings were held in Swansea, Cardiff and Bangor to discuss the events in France in 1968.

Dave Reid , Alec Thraves and Ian Dalton report:
In Swansea, South Wales Evening Post advertised our meeting but mistakenly gave out the wrong day of the meeting. The following night we had to go back and explain to some disappointed members of the public why they had missed an excellent meeting. Despite their frustration we sold a couple of papers and one is coming to the Swansea Socialist Party branch meeting next week. The previous night there was a lively debate amongst an enthusiastic audience who agreed we could expect more revolutionary movements of a similar kind in the future. The biggest lessons that came out of the meeting were the central role of the working class in changing society and the need for a determined socialist leadership.

In Cardiff six non members of the Socialist Party attended the meeting including three people who had seen publicity on the streets.
Clare Doyle, author of Month of Revolution: France 1968, outlined the events in 1968. She pointed out that while the media has mentioned the battles of the students with the police which opened the events in Paris there is little or no mention of the general strike by the working class, the biggest general strike in history.
A “strike chart” on the wall visually brought home the scale of the movement in 1968. Clare gave an inspiring account of the thousands of factory occupations which seized the factories from the bosses and led to similar action by the middle layers in society like journalists, doctors and actors. All four conditions for revolution outlined by Lenin were present in France with the exception of the existence of a party of revolution that understood the events and was able to lead the working class.
A wide-ranging discussion ranged from France to Britain to Saudi Arabia to Sweden to Czechoslovakia. Some questions were raised about whether the modern working class has the power to carry through the strike movement that the French workers fought in 1968 and whether British workers are as militant as French workers.
A PCS member pointed out that we can take a step forward towards that of France 1968 by building towards united action in the public sector against the government’s pay freeze. Civil servants are one section of the workforce today who would have regarded themselves as middle class in the 1960s who are now clearly part of the working class.
Andrew Price, a member of the UCU national executive, joined Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party, in May 1968. He explained that in the same week that he joined Militant the Labour Party had received an even worse result in the local elections than New Labour got in 2008, but what was different was that the working class base of the Labour Party in 1968 moved to the left and the ideas of Marxism received an increasing ear with 3 million votes for nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy at Labour Party conference that year. Today there is no party for the working class and we will have to build it. 10 copies of Clare’s book were sold and £166 fighting fund raised at the two meetings.

In Bangor Rob Williams(Swansea SP) spoke on the 10 million strong general strike that shook the capitalist system. He described how the movement developed with workers occupying factories causing French president de Gaulle to flee the country and how the so-called Communist Party betrayed the movement and saved the day for capitalism.
The discussion covered other mass strikes such as the 1984-5 Miner's Strike, the 1926 British General Strike and movements that the Militant (the fore-runner of the Socialist Party) played a leading role in such as the heroic 1984-7 Liverpool City Council battle. The difference in the world economy and situation between now and 1968 was also discussed. Books, pamphlets, and the 1968 special issue Socialism Today were sold.

Something's Missing?

I had to comment on this commentary by Rob Sewell of Socialist Appeal on the Uk local election results. It's not something I normally do, but it's quite misleading. The original article is here.

I wouldn't expect anything else of Socialist Appeal than to use the not too fantastic results of the left (particularly SWP/Left List) in the local elections to say there is no possibility of building anything outside of Labour. But you would thought they would tell the whole story.

The paragraph that offends me most is as follows

Another sect, the so-called Socialist Party, fielded about 15 candidates nationally in the local elections. They all sank without trace - except one. And this was the exception to the rule. This was Dave Nellist, the ex-Labour MP of Coventry SE, who retained his seat in St Michael’s ward with 1,643 votes. This was clearly a personal vote as the other two SP candidates managed to scrape a measly 142 votes (to come bottom of the poll of seven candidates) and 135 votes (to come bottom of the poll out of six). Other results included Alec Thraves in Castle ward, Swansea, who scored 172 votes, Pete Bradley in Nuneaton who polled 88, while in Stoke on Trent the SP candidate got 130 votes. In London, they fared no better, where they stood Chris Flood for the London Authority. He managed to come bottom of the poll (10th out of 10 candidates), with 1,587 votes (out of 146,841 votes caste) in Greenwich and Lewisham. This was even less than the votes cast for the fossilised sect of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which polled 1,588 votes in Lambeth and Southwark!

The results picked are selective - (this is also the case with some of the SWP/Left List candidates who polled fairly well in a few areas outside London where they have been campaigning for several years) But it misses out the four best results after Dave Nellist - which are

18% (377) Pete Glover in Sefton
936 Ian Slattery in Huddersfield (standing for Save Huddersfield NHS)
12% (295) Lyne Worthington in Bagueley, Manchester
12.3% (352) Mick Griffiths in Wakefield

now, these aren't victories but they are better than the results reported by Socialist Appeal, and show that we are building bases of support in several areas around the country.

but also there is the question of why we stand in elections. according to Socialist Appeal we should be standing to win hundreds of seats by the sounds of it (okay maybe I am exaggerating a bit). we know we are only small and the task of building a much bigger organisation remains.

for us however, standing in elections is part of the process of building our support - most of the time we don't expect to win (although it's nice if we do), it's more about increasing our share of the vote, building support for socialist ideas and building the party.

Devastating Election Blow for New Labour

Taken from Socialist Party Wales website

Report by Dave Reid

This year’s local election results in Wales have delivered a devastating blow to Labour. Together with the results in England they represent a comprehensive rejection by working class people of everything that new Labour and the Brown government stands for.
Labour has been thrashed in its old heartlands. It has lost Blaenau Gwent, Merthyr and Torfaen councils and suffered serious losses in Caerphilly, areas in which Labour used to regularly win crushing majorities in good times and bad. Labour also lost Newport so now controls only Rhondda Cynon Taff, Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend.

Mortal blow to Brown and New Labour

But this is not the old Labour Party. A growing layer of working class people has realised that this is not their party anymore and have abandoned Labour as decisively as Blair and Brown abandoned their interests. Others cannot bring themselves to vote for the crew who has just put income tax up for the lowest paid workers in the country. They may return to vote Labour to keep the Tories out in the future but not with great conviction.
Labour’s projected share of the vote across Britain stands at just 24% the lowest for over 40 years and puts Labour 3rd behind the Liberal Democrats. Brown’s premiership has been dealt a mortal blow. He will attempt to cling onto power or face being dumped before the General Election, an even more ignominious fate than James Callaghan, who was one of the few Prime Ministers not to win a General Election.

Support for whoever could beat Labour - No enthusiasm for Tories

David Cameron has tried to ride the crest of the wave of his party’s gains. But there is no enthusiasm or illusions in any of the other parties in Wales and certainly not the Tories. This was a vote against Labour, not a vote for any of the other parties. In fact this election represented a further rejection of the Tory policies that New Labour has promoted. The Tories re-gained some seats in their old Welsh strongholds of Monmouth and Vale of Glamorgan, but have not broken through in most of Wales. They only gained control of Vale of Glamorgan council.
Voters supported whoever could beat Labour and in most areas that was not the Tories. Most old Labour voters stayed at home. In the valleys it was People’s Voice and Independent candidates as well as Plaid Cymru who broke Labour control. In Cardiff the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Tories gained as Labour was pushed back to the 3rd party in the capital.
The Liberal Democrats benefited from the anti-Labour mood and held onto to their control of Cardiff and Swansea but there is no enthusiasm for their councils and they made few gains.
Plaid Cymru suffered serious losses as well as gains, losing control of Gwynedd, their only council. Significantly Plaid lost seats to Llais Gwynedd (Gwynedd’s Voice) which was formed primarily to stop school closures in the countyOverwhelmingly working people are sick of all the parties. All the opposition parties talk of change but they all implement similar policies when in power.Working people are craving a real change and the situation is crying out for genuine alternative to the stale diet of all the parties. People’s Voice’s and Llais Gwynedd gains show the potential for a new mass workers party.

A warning and an opportunity for socialists

The increased vote for the BNP is also a warning to the labour movement if it fails to provide an alternative to the pro-capitalist parties. However, despite a big press campaign against immigrants before the election, the BNP failed to make a major breakthrough in Wales. Only in Swansea did this racist party succeed in making gains in the number of votes.

The Socialist Party standing as Socialist Alternative achieved the best results of the left with creditable results in Cardiff and Swansea. However at this stage the support for our ideas is not reflected in votes. Working people realise that we need a bigger vehicle to deliver real change.
A serious discussion must begin in the Welsh trade union movement to look at the unions forming a new party through which the working class can fight to offer a real change form the policies of all the pro-capitalist parties.

200 March Against the BNP in North Wales

I've been rather busy recently, hence the lack of posts. However, I have written stuff during this period which will shortly appear on this website

At least 200 people joined a demonstration against the BNP organised by Wrexham Trades Council last Saturday. The numbers came as a pleasant surprise to many people (including the organisers who had only expected 50 at the rally after the demo).

The demo consisted of members of PCS, UNITE, UCU, NASUWT and other trade unions, as well as anti-fascist campaigners, mostly from Wrexham, but also in other small towns across North Wales and a coach came up from Cardiff.
The BNP are threatening to win district and county council seats in Wales in the upcoming local elections. They are standing across North Wales where they won over 5% of the vote in last years assembly elections, but also in Mid Wales and Swansea. Already they have had several community councillors elected after they stood unopposed.
The demo consisted of members of PCS, UNITE, UCU, NASUWT and other trade unions, as well as anti-fascist campaigners, mostly from Wrexham, but also in other small towns across North Wales and a coach came up from Cardiff. On the march we passed straight past the BNP stall in Wrexham, showing that they are not welcome on our streets.
After the post-demonstration rally, many protesters decided to counter-leaflet against the BNP stall. Unfortunately I only saw one speaker from the platform of the rally join in this action, which is disappointing as it will not just take one-off marches to stop the growth of racist and fascist ideas. The cuts and privatisations that all the main parties favour need to be fought as these allow the BNP to scapegoat immigrants as being responsible for this. The trade unions have a vital role to play in doing this, but at the moment many of their leaderships are tied to the Labour government which is carrying through these attacks. Ultimately we need a party that is prepared to stand up against these attacks, building the Campaign for a New Workers Party in North Wales is an urgent priority.
Socialist Party members sold 16 copies of The Socialist on coaches to the demo and at the demo itself, as well as one copy of Socialism Today and one copy of the newly published France 1968 book by Clare Doyle.

Gwynedd - Cuts, cuts and more cuts!

From the Socialist Party Wales website and also being distributed as a leaflet on stalls in Bangor. Although the leaflet focuses on Gwynedd, the gist of it applies to many other Welsh councils at the present time.

Plaid Cymru-led Gwynedd council is howling and raging over the recent low spending increase given to it by the Assembly government. This comes on the back of a low settlement from Westminster to the One Wales (Plaid Cymru and Labour coalition) Assembly government.

The council’s response has been to complain but do nothing to oppose the cuts, and instead has passed them straight on. The council are now making an extra £4-5m worth of cuts on top of already making £4m worth of so called ‘efficiency savings’. Closures and mergers of schools have been the big headline grabber in the area, but so has the ending of funding to the Gwynedd Museum and Art Gallery in Bangor. There are also expected losses of 300 jobs and a day centre for the elderly is set to close in September, as well increases in parking charges and a 4.8% rise in council tax.

Local Anger

The cuts have provoked resistance. At the moment it is quite scattered, although there was a 600 strong protest against school cuts outside the Council’s November meeting (see below). Protests and campaigns against some of the other cuts have happened or are being set up. However, some of these are arguing that the cuts should come from elsewhere in the budget.

The Socialist Answer

Socialists however, demand that there should be no cuts to services. The Socialist Party in Gwynedd is calling on the council to set a needs budget. Decide what our communities need, better schools not school closures, better cultural facilities (museums, theatres) etc., and then set a budget based on the needs of the community not the demands of Gordon Brown or Rhodri Morgan. If they can find billions of pounds to bale out Northern Rock then they can find billions to keep community schools open and decent accommodation for the elderly. But the council has to mobilise a mass campaign together with other local authorities in Wales and in England to force them to do it.
Such a campaign would follow the heroic example of the Liverpool Labour Council from 1983-7, who forced Thatcher to return millions of pounds she’d stolen from the city in funding cuts.

Report of the Socialist Party Wales Conference

There is another report of this at www.socialistpartywales.org.uk

Last Sunday saw the annual conference of the Socialist Party Wales in Swansea. I went to this as part of a three string delegation from Bangor, travelling down on the Saturday to stop overnight in Cardiff before going to the conference the next day. The long journey times had meant that several other people could not come down from Bangor. The Conference, however, provided us a chance to meet with Socialist Party members, and other party supporters from across Wales and learn from each others experiences.
The first session of the conference featured a discussion on Latin America that was introduced by the Socialist Party General Secretary, Peter Taaffe. The introduction focussed on many issues that have been in the pages of The Socialist and Socialism Today over the last few months, particularly on Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil where the CWI has sections. There were quite a few interesting things raised during the discussion, but most interesting for me was the development of the trade union movement in Venezuela, the creation of the UNT and the roles of various lefts including the most well-known figure, Orlando Chirono, who had (mistakenly in my opinion) campaigned against the recent referendum.
The second discussion was on the world economy, and to some extent what the prospect of recession would mean for workers in Wales. Again, there have been several articles in the publications of the Socialist Party on this matter. In the discussion comment was made on the recent attacks on welfare claimants and the experiences of Tower colliery which recently closed. In this session a short statement of Wales was discussed and agreed upon, with some comment from several delegates as to the consequences of the reduced funding councils are receiving from the Assembly government, which is leading to in particular closures of schools across Wales, but also of libraries, museums and other service cuts.
Finally there was a discussion on building the Socialist Party in Wales and the election of a new regional committee. In particular, myself and other comrades from Bangor were congratulated on our work in establishing a branch here, the first of a likely four new branches the party in Wales is in the process of establishing this year. Other work, will include trying to provide some more Welsh language material as well as improvements to our regional website www.socialistpartywales.org.uk, where hopefully there will be some footage of this vary conference.

Stop the Anglesey nuclear time-bomb

I wrote this article (in this weeks The Socialist) based on recent developement on Anglesey and the battle between local politicans over who can be pro-nuclear enough. Also people may have noticed i've said in blogs i was writing this article, anyway here it is. There is also another version at www.socialistpartywales.org.uk

The pro-nuclear alliance of Anglesey County Council and local Labour MP Albert Owen have launched a new propaganda offensive to win people to the idea of a new nuclear power station at Wylfa on Anglesey.

Iain Dalton
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 have 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).

Local campaign group Pawb are arguing for an alternative employment plan for the island. Much of this lies around the potential for harnassing 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.

Over a thousand people have now signed a petition organised by Pawb. Socialist Students in Bangor are helping to organise a public meeting.

There are lots of issues the mainstream politicians don't want to talk about. The fact that Wylfa has been shut down several times means that nuclear isn't a sure supply of energy as they argue. Cost-cutting could result in disastrous situations; the memory of Chernobyl still hangs across north Wales as farmers in the region are still affected by restrictions on animal movements as a result of fall-out from that disaster.

Furthermore, a new nuclear power station is seen as carbon neutral, but what about carbon emissions from mining fuel, transportation and construction of the plant itself? Also, the nuclear waste cannot be safely disposed of at present; this is a radiation time-bomb for future generations.

As the government announced the new plants, former Welsh Secretary, Peter Hain, offered his support for them, alongside Plaid Cymru leader Ieuan Wyn Jones. Both were prepared to grease the wheels for big business, whilst claiming, like the council, to be fighting for local jobs. Their policies are no solution to the endemic lack of jobs in north west Wales.

Pawb have launched a new website: www.stop-wylfa.org

Bangor Branch Launch

I'm going to be publishing daily (or near enough) for the next week. Have plenty of material from when i didn't publish stuff for a while (both things i've written and reports of what myself and sp here were up to).

Sunday 27th January saw the launch meeting of the Bangor Branch of the Socialist Party. Socialist Party Wales Secretary, Alec Thraves introduced a discussion on the important role a branch in Bangor can and will play in introducing people to the ideas of socialism. In Bangor, Socialist Party members already there have had a crucial intervention at Bangor University, setting up a campaigning Socialist Students society as an alternative to the inaction of the local student union leadership. The role of organisers in helping to develop the work of the branch was also discussed, particularly the importance of finance and paper organisers in helping us raise the funds necessary to help get our ideas across to workers and students in Bangor.

Iain Dalton, Bangor Branch Secretary

Utopia or Reality? Can we create the Perfect Criminal Justice System?

This was an essay I had to submit for my course on the criminal justice system, I post it here because it raises several things I discussed in my post Draft Prinicples of a Marxist Criminology and should be of interest to all readers ps. there's more after the references

Is there such a thing as a perfect criminal justice system and, moreover, what would such a criminal justice system look like? In this essay we will examine these questions. We shall first discuss what a criminal justice system is, before contemplating what the aim and purpose of a criminal justice system is. We will then discuss if and how these systems may be perfected, before discussing the implications of this on individual branches of the criminal justice system and concluding the essay.
The first question that we are presented with is that of definition, what is a criminal justice system? The Sage Dictionary of Criminology (2001:66) defines Criminal Justice as “The process through which the state responds to behaviour that it deems unacceptable. Criminal justice is delivered through a series of stages: charge, prosecution, trial; sentence; appeal; punishment. These processes and the agencies which carry them out are referred to collectively as the criminal justice system”. Cavadino & Dignan (2002:1) note that the criminal justice system consist of the “police, prosecution authorities and courts” in addition to the penal system “the system that exists to punish and otherwise deal with people that have (usually) been convicted of a criminal offence” (most importantly the prison and probation services).
The entry in the Sage Dictionary of Criminology later states “… crime control, or crime reduction, is obviously the overall aim of criminal justice…” (2001:67). But this answer does not yet solve our question; instead we must ask what would the aim and purpose be of a perfect criminal justice system? Given as we have seen crime control and crime reduction are the aims of a criminal justice system, then a perfect criminal justice system would reduce crime to non-existence. However, such an aim is quite contradictory; if such an aim was achieved there would be no need for a criminal justice system to exist any more as there would be no further criminal offending. Here we have our answer, the perfect criminal justice exists when it has served its purpose, when it is no longer necessary and thus no longer exists.
If we consider Lenin’s (1987) notion with regards to the state as a whole withering away when it is of no further use, then the idea of a criminal justice system ceasing to exist when crime is no longer occurring is very similar. In discussing democracy in the state Lenin (1987:339) says “… the more complete it is the more quickly it will become unnecessary…”, we could similarly say the more complete and effective a criminal justice system is in reducing crime (by lowering recidivism for example), the less need there is for it.
One may ask how relevant it is to be talking about the state in relation to the criminal justice system. As Taaffe et al. (1983:25-6) point out that “In the last analysis – as Marx, Engels and Lenin pointed out - the state consists of armed bodies of men and their material appendages ie. prisons etc.” Are not these the main constituents of the criminal justice system – the police and prisons – alongside the judiciary?
It would also be wrong to consider Lenin’s argument on the withering away of the state without noting that there is another criminological tendency which posits the lack of or severe reduction of a criminal justice system. Abolitionism to some would seem a not too dissimilar approach to the one just outlined above. Indeed, in an article outlining the relationship of abolitionism to crime control, Willem de Haan talks of “popular or socialist forms of penality” (de Haan, 1991:214), and the abolition “of the repressive capitalist system part by part or step by step” (de Haan, 1991:213).
However, abolitionism, according to de Haan, (1991:203) “is based on the moral conviction that social life should not and, in fact, cannot be regulated effectively by criminal law and that, therefore, the role of the criminal justice system should be drastically reduced while other ways of dealing with problematic situations, behaviours and events are being developed and put into practice.” Unlike the Marxism of Lenin, its starting point is not class struggle that necessitates the abolition of capitalist relations of production, but moral conviction instead. Whereas the eventual ‘withering away’ of the state and criminal justice system is only possible in a post-capitalist situation for Lenin, Abolitionists want the criminal justice system gone without any pre-conditions.
This difference then leads on to differences of a more practical nature. As de Haan (1991:207) goes on to state “…the criminal justice system is part of the crime problem rather than its solution… Therefore there is no point in trying to make the criminal justice system more effective or more just.” And later “Instead of the panacea which the criminal justice system pretends to provide for problems of crime control, abolitionism seeks to remedy social problems… Abolitionism assumes that social problems or conflicts are unavoidable as they are inherent to social life…” (de Haan, 1991:211) In contrast, as Taaffe et al. (1983:14) point out “It would be absurd for socialists in present day society to stand aside and declare that we cannot support the police in taking action to prevent crime and arrest criminals.” However, Marxists would agree that social problems need remedying too, and it is to this that we now turn.
As Jock Young (1981) discusses, aetiology, or the causes of crime is a pivotal issue in criminology and in how one deals with crime. This is influential, because as he exposes “If, for instance, we view crime as a voluntary act of the individual, we would tend towards a policy of punishing him or her, whereas, if she/he is seen as acting under the compulsion of individual or social forces, the treatment of the criminal might seem to be inappropriate.” (Young, 1981:252)
Indeed, Lenin (1987:340) suggests that with the removal of “the fundamental social cause of excesses”, which he holds to be “the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty”, “excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away”… with their withering away, the state (or in our case the criminal justice system) will also wither away”.
From this passage we can see that Lenin suggests two main causes of crime (or excesses); ‘want and poverty’ (deprivation/relative deprivation) as well as ‘exploitation of the masses’ (alienation). These factors are not new, indeed, Lenin being a Marxist drew these concepts from Marx, who exposed them several times in his works, most accessibly in Wage, Labour and Capital (Marx, 1996).
Marx’s theory of alienation can be summed up nicely in the sentences “… the exercise of labour power, labour is the worker’s own life activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as a part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.” (Marx, 1996:25) Sell (2006:28) adds to this by commenting “Instead of making life easier, the increase in automation has reduced ever more jobs to mind-numbing repetition and boredom”.
Marx’s explanation of relative deprivation is similarly summed up well by his words “A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilisation, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.” (Marx, 1996:39) He concludes, “Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.” (Marx, 1996:39)
But how does this relate to crime? Sell (2006:30) argues that “The result [of increases in alienation and relative deprivation] has been an increase in street crime and robbery, almost all of it carried out against people who are also living in poverty. There is an increase in drug addiction… The reasons for drug use are wide and varied. Nonetheless, the increase in drug addiction and dependency, both legal and illegal, is primarily the result of a more alienated society.”
She goes on to illustrate this, pointing out “…the experience of the ex-mining villages around the country… the closure of the pits have left previously strong communities suffering the ravages of unemployment, poverty and drug addiction.” (Sell, 2006:30)
Young (1991:154) correctly states that based on this “To reduce crime we must reduce relative deprivation by ensuring meaningful work is provided at fair wages, by providing decent housing in which people are proud to live in, by ensuring that leisure facilities are available on a universal basis…”
However, as Taylor (1981:79) recognises “A welfare state which works on the principle that woman is naturally dependent on man and also currently depends on the expulsion of large numbers of youths into worklessness is not meeting the real needs of women and young people to be self-generating members of the human species.” The problem being that attempting to solve the problem of relative deprivation via a redistributive welfare state doesn’t solve the problem of alienation. It, as Taylor (1981) later notes adds because this is carried out by a layer of professionals which he argues act in lieu of people, rather than under their control.
Engels (1971:32) similarly discusses how “Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose head is the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society.”
To overcome alienation, it is necessary to overcome the fact that most people have no control over a large portion of their life, whether in the workplace, or outside it. Taylor (1981:101) argues that a “thoroughgoing democratisation” is necessary for these interests to be met. What would this look like you may ask?
Engels (1971:33) commenting on the Paris Commune suggests that “In the first place it filled all posts – administrative, judicial and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers… In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up…”
As Johnstone (2000) points out there are critics who would suggest that such a manner of operation of society as a whole, and the criminal justice system in particular, could not operate. Johnstone (2000:165) goes on to explain “even if it were concluded that today there is widespread and increasing support for a less tolerant and more punitive penal policy, it would not follow that increased public participation in the making of penal policy would automatically result in a harsher penal system.”
He continues “With regard to penal policy, the suggestion that people should be excluded from its making because they do not have the necessary qualities – such as knowledge, active interest and restraint – is easily countered. Through participation in making penal policy, people will develop these qualities. To the extent that they lack such qualities, this is due precisely to the over-centralization and over-professionalization of governance in general and penal policy making in particular. As decisions about the use of the social power to punish are historically removed from ordinary people and placed in the hands of a small elite, people lose the attributes required to make those decisions well. The only way they can recover these qualities is by having these decisions returned to them.” (Johnstone, 2000:158)
And tying this back in with the ideas developed so far, Lenin (1987:339) comments “…the diffusion of democracy among such an overwhelming majority of the population [means] that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear”, by special machine Lenin means the state (or for our purposes the criminal justice system). Of course such a thing will not happen overnight, as Lenin (1987:334) notes “there can be no question of defining the exact moment of the future withering away – the more so since it must obviously be a rather lengthy process”. Greater and greater participation can only come with time being freed from other areas; in particular the working day must be gradually shortened to allow for “removing the antithesis between mental and physical labor” (Lenin, 1987:344). Additionally, other institutions outside the criminal justice system would also be used to help in this process, most notably the media and the education system would be inherently useful to help people become more informed about crime and the criminal justice system.
As mentioned above, informed journalism could play a role in this. Wacquant (2007:39) gives us an example of how this may look “A rational public debate on crime would differentiate between offences and rigorously measure their incidence and effects. It would eschew the short-term perspective and emotional cast of daily journalism to make a clear cut differentiation between blips and groundswells, incidental variations from year-to-year and long-term trends. It would not confuse the rising fear of crime, intolerance of crime, or concern over crime with an increase in law-breaking itself.”
However, as Feilzer & Young (2006) demonstrate, such journalism cannot be limited to just one columnist in one newspaper. It must become a standard for newspapers and other media to place crimes in their social context, and to be written in a manner that explains the processes behind the topic being reported on. A basic grasp of the workings of the criminal justice system taught to all school pupils would also assist in this manner.
Now that we have a brief outline of what is necessary to achieve such a state of the criminal justice system, it is perhaps worth looking at what the first steps towards this may be in each of it’s branches. Although the comments here are focussed on the Criminal Justice System in England and Wales, the general thrust should be applicable to a greater or lesser extent in other countries too.
Policing is perhaps the most visible part of the criminal justice system. For our purposes it is perhaps useful to look in particular at the disputes in the early 1980’s to do with the accountability of the police. This centred around several issues, from the 1980 Police Authorities (Powers) Bill proposed by Jack Straw MP, the inner city riots of 1980 and 1981 (particularly in Toxteth and Brixton) and conflicts over the role of police authorities, and later the deployment of the police during the 1984-5 miner’s strike (Scraton, 1985).
The link between all these issues was the attempt to subordinate the priorities of local policing to the wishes of the local populace. Kinsey et al. (1986) argue that police are dependent upon the local community for information to help them apprehend offenders and that the pursuance of policy contrary to the wishes of the community (such as operations like Swamp 81 which provoked the 1981 Brixton riots) merely serve to alienate the community further from the police, and thus reducing this flow of information. As they note “People have little incentive to participate in a process over which they have little control” (Kinsey et al., 1986:133) Instead they advocate increasing the powers of police authorities and giving them the responsibility to encourage debate over crime and conducting local crime surveys. This could however be extend to even more local democratic bodies for certain areas or long lasting cases or series of crimes.
Prisons have been said to have been in an almost perpetual state of crisis recently (Cavadino & Dignan, 2003), the most important of which is crisis of resources. This has manifested itself recently with a record prison populations leading to massive overcrowding across the 139 prisons in England and Wales (Dalton, 2007a).
Overcrowding has led to a poor standard of accommodation, which Cavadino and Dignan (2002:189) suggest is ‘a byword for squalor’ with lack of access to adequate toilet facilities, lack of time outside cells and cell sharing. Similary a record 91 self-inflicted deaths in prison was recorded in 1999 (Cullen and Minchin, 2000) and Morgan (2002) notes that about a quarter of all prisons are Victorian buildings, most of these older prisons are local prisons which suffer the most overcrowding. As Dalton (2007b) notes at present the strategy is to release some prisoners early and attempt to build the way out of the problem, creating 9,500 extra places by 2014, but estimates suggest that cells will run out then too.
Fundamentally, a change in policy is necessary here. Cavadino & Dignan (2002) suggest that the judiciary is the ‘crux of the [penal] crisis’ and suggest a list of reforms including empowering bodies to create enforceable guidelines for sentencing to make it more consistent, in addition to other measures to encourage the judiciary to be more lenient. However, why leave the same people running the system if they have been too punitive, and why stick to sentences given out by them if they too are too punitive. As Dalton (2007b) argues, the judiciary should be elected and democratically elected tribunals should review existing sentences.
Overcrowded prisons also don’t help reduce crime either. As government figures show six out of every ten released from prison end up back inside within two years, this cannot be improved by a situation which has seen prisoners being locked up for longer in their cells, rather than tackling some prisoner’s underlying problems such as illiteracy or innumeracy. As Dalton (2007b) points out, a reduction in the prison population would free up resources which could be used towards the rehabilitation of those it is still deemed necessary to detain.
In conclusion, the perfect criminal justice system is both possible and impossible in that on reaching its stated aim it will have fulfilled its purpose and fall into disuse. In the opinion of the author of these words most other approaches tend to keep crime down to manageable levels rather than rid us of it. This solves no-ones problems; people still get victimised, offenders get stigmatised for life and the public foots the millions and billions necessary to make the system work.
This essay has thus taken a distinctly Marxist position, drawing in particular on Lenin’s notion of the withering away of the state. We have discussed what this position would put forward as the reasons for crime and how this influences how the criminal justice system should operate to help alleviate these problems. We have then discussed how to implement these ideas within several branches of the criminal justice system. From this we have shown that perfecting the criminal justice system to the point where it is no longer needed, will take a long time and will generally consist of increasing democratisation. Wider changes in society will also be needed to supplement these processes. Crime breeds inequality, so it seems only apt that achieving real equality is the solution to this problem.

References

Cavadino, M. & Dignan, J. (2002) The Penal System, 3rd ed. London: SAGE
Cullen, C. & Minchin, M. (2000) The Prison Population in 1999, Home Office Research Findings No. 118, London: Home Office
de Haan, W. (1991) ‘Abolitionism and Crime Control: A Contradiction in Terms’ In: Stenson, K. & Cowell, D. eds. (1991) The Politics of Crime Control, London: SAGE
Dalton, I. (2007a) ‘Reid’s prison disaster’, The Socialist, 1st-7th February pg.5
Dalton, I. (2007b) ‘Overcrowded prisons, overworked staff’, The Socialist, 13th-19th September pg.4
Engels, F. (1971) ‘Introduction to the Civil War in France’ In: Marx, K. & Engels, F. On the Paris Commune, Moscow: Progress Publishers
Feilzer, M. & Young, R. (2006) ‘Crime Scene Oxford’: The impact of a factual newspaper column on readers of a local newspaper – Final Report to the Nuffield Foundation, Oxford: Centre for Criminology
Johnstone, G. (2000) ‘Penal Policy Making: Elitist, Populist or Participatory?’, Punishment & Society, 2(2): pp.161-180
Kinsey, R., Lea, J. & Young, J. (1986) Losing the Fight Against Crime, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Lea, J. & Young, J. (1996) ‘Relative Deprivation’ In: Muncie, J., McLaughlin, E. & Langan, M. eds. Criminological Perspectives: A Readers, London: SAGE
Lenin, V. I. (1987) ‘The State and Revolution’, In: Christman, H. M. eds. Essential Works of Lenin: “What is to be done?” and Other Writings, Mineola: Dover
Marx, K. (1996) ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ In: Marx, K. Wage Labour and Capital & Wages, Price and Profit, London: Bookmarks
McLaughlin, E. & Muncie, J. eds. (2001) The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, London: SAGE
Morgan, R. (2002) ‘Imprisonment’ In: Maguire, M., Morgan, R. & Reiner, R.. Eds. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP
Scraton, P. (1985) The State of the Police, London: Pluto Press
Sell, H. (2006) Socialism in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. London: Socialist Publications
Taaffe, P., Grant, E. & Walsh, L. (1983) The State… A Warning to the Labour Movement, London: Militant
Taylor, I. (1981) Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism, London: Macmillan
Wacquant, L. (2007) ‘How to Escape the Law and Order Trap’, Criminal Justice Matters, 70 pp.39-40
Young, J. (1981) ‘Thinking seriously about crime: some models of criminology’ In: Fitzgerald, M., McLennan, G. & Pawson, J. eds. Crime & Society: Readings in History and Theory, London: Routledge
Young, J. (1991) ‘Left Realism and the Priorities of Crime Control’ In: Stenson, K. & Cowell, D. eds. (1991) The Politics of Crime Control, London: SAGE

Upcoming Posts

As you have seen i've posted on some of the things touched on in this post before (ie left realist criminology, media and crime, and crime and alienation) expect over the next few weeks/months/whenever i get around to it:-

A review of the State of the Police with some commentary on the 'left idealist' branch of critical criminology
A post on relative deprivation as a 'cause' of crime
A post on the criminal justice system and the paris commune
A post on The State and Revolution and the criminal justice system
A review of The State: A warning to the Labour Movement
A post on political economy and crime
A review(s) of Cavadino & Dignan's arguements about the penal system