Bangor Socialist Student & Youth Conference

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

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

Report by Sarah Mayo

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

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


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

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

Youth Fight for Jobs Launch Conference

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

Harassing Young People

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has recently been heralding an initiative in Essex where officers harass ‘yobs’ by following young people around with video cameras. The Guardian recently published an article (30/05/08) written by one of their journalists who had spent a day with the ‘Operation Leopard’ police taskforce.
The journalist describes how the police roam the estate looking for a ‘hit list of individuals’, filming them and anyone they are with and occasionally visiting their homes. Apparently those filmed have the right not to be, but as with many ‘right’ that we don’t have when it suits the authorities, the journalist notes that this option wasn’t given to any of the 15 people filmed in his presence.
But one of the many problems of such ‘targeted’ police work is that it targets either stereotypically contrived sections of the population, or ‘known offenders’, the latter given only a tiny proportion of all crimes committed are ever arrested isn’t the ‘evidence-based’ approach its advocates make it out to be. But also, as a conversation the journalist has with a 19 year old target uncovers, just because someone has committed one or more crimes in the past, doesn’t mean they will do so in the future, indeed many people who have engaged in criminal or anti-social behaviour when they are young simply drop out of it later or ‘grow up’ as the 19 year old expresses it.
Many working class people rightly feel threatened by ‘street’ crime and anti-social behaviour, so it is perhaps understandable that many residents on the police’s survey supported the initiative believing the inconvenience of a dozen or so youths is worth it if crime is reduced. There are two problems with this though, firstly that saturation and intimidatory police tactics can often provoke a fierce backlash from the relatively powerless groups subjected to them. Secondly, there aren’t enough police officers to operate such schemes everywhere, and given that it doesn’t remove the underlying causes of such actions, as many residents themselves expressed, once the operation leaves the estate crime and anti-social behaviour will probably increase again.
Socialists do support the use of policing to tackle crime, but only under local democratic control and we would favour a more reactive use rather than proactively harassing people, who often are completely innocent. But this would be as an auxiliary to tackling the problems at the root of crime, unemployment and alienation which give many young people no future under this current capitalist system.

The Socialist Crime Fiesta

This weeks socialist features a wealth of article of interest to the budding left/socialist criminologist. We have articles on youth crime, the exeter attempted terrorist attack, civil liberties, a review of a crime tv programme and a report of barbaric violence in South Africa. To read these go to http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/main/The_Socialist

Beyond the Hoodie

I just read about this film today, it's a short film created in response to a film shot by Tory MP Ann Widecombe, where she basically steam-rolled over the views of most of the estates to impose a right-wing law and order view of inner city estates. It's a good response, but i somewhat doubt whether it'll get the same coverage as David Cameron's tough on crime statements made over the last few weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gbX_wCHlzo

Socialist Students Conference

Yesterday saw Socialist Students conference being held in London. I got up at a silly time in the morning to get there, crammed in the back of a car with four other comrades from Huddersfield. On the way down I mostly read End of the Hamptons by Corey Dolgon, a book I got for my birthday a while back, interspersed with general chatter and trying to find our way to the conference.
Anyway, when I got there we entered the fairly smart conference hall at Holloway Road Resource centre and was promtly aatempted to be greeted by Sparts, but i was running late so i ignored them and went inside. The main room for the conference was quite odd, looking a lot smaller than it actually was, there was about 125-150 people there i think (i know there was seating for about 110ish and quite a few people were standing (but i only counted the closing session and some people left early).
Anyway, the day began with an opening rally, with a collection of photos of various campaigns Socialist Students and ISR have been involved with (fortunately they didn't show the photo from the Machester 06 anti-war demo where my bandana is sticking up - it looks realy daft), followed by conference splitting into two to go to sessions on rights at work and fees.
The fees debate had Wes Streeting, NUS VP Education, Matt Dobson and Hannah Walter from Socialist Students and an anarchist Dan Glass from Sussex. Both Socialist Students spoke well, Matt speaking about the Campaign to Defeat fees, and Hannah speaking more specifically about anti-cuts campaigns in Durham (probably the most interesting of the four). Dan Glass seemed to be going on a lot about an idea of 'tent-universities' an awful lot and for me didn't really hold a perspective of how to link the campaigns against cuts and fees up. Wes Streeting tried to defend NUS's position (and didn't do particularly well) although he seemed to be slightly less bad than the rest of the labourites controlling NUS, he still couldn't defend the fact that he was a member of the labour party, saying that he wished Socialist Students members were still in there, forgetting that many of us (but nowhere near all) are members of Socialist Party, and many of our comrades got thrown out of that very same labour party for sticking up for working class people. That and he seemed to avoid the question of what to do next.
After this came lunch and a phone call to my partner who couldn't make the conference with me and then the discussion groups. I was chairing the Save the NHS session, and oh how badly did that go. The problems for me was that very few people turned up to that session only six excluding me and the three speakers, so when no-one wanted to speak in the discussion i felt i had to say something. It wasn't pretty, i completely screwed up what i was saying, fortunately Roger Davey, a UNISON member and one of the speakers saved me by coming in again. However, if I did that session again i'd probably aim it even more specifically at NHS students and young workers, who face the prospect of not having jobs or very low pay. I don't think i'd want to chair it (to be honest after doing NHS campaigning for a year and a half you begin to get a little sick of it).
Next came the motions, and I spoke on the motion about NUS, very well I thought and also came in on a few of the other motions. There were some very good discussions on issues relating to nuclear disarmament (and critics who say we never talk about revolution should have been there to here it) and on iraq.
Finally came the closing rally, which I have to say dragged a little particularly because there was a supposed 20 minute discussion, which wasn't really used except for a finance appeal, and a slide show presentation that wasn't as good as the first.
All in all though a good day, and we had a fair few debates in the car on the way back. Particularly about charities which i'll try and go into in a bit.