Tell them to pack their bags - Morning Star Comment

Tell them to pack their bags - Morning Star Comment.

Possibly the most startling thing to emerge from the latest confrontation between the directors of RBS and the government is the estimate made in Parliament by City Minister Lord Myners.

The minister told the assembled MPs that, unless something was done, over 5,000 senior British bankers would earn more than £1 million this year.

That's not to say that it will make them all new millionaires. Most of them are millionaires already.

In an exercise in avarice which can have few parallels in history, 5,000 people will trouser a million pounds each in just 12 months. That's £20,000 a week, give or take the odd few hundred quid.

And for what? Why, for taking the country's and the world's economies to the brink of disaster, ruining thousands of people and driving into unemployment hundreds of thousands of others.

For gambling on the stock markets with other people's money and losing. And for plundering the taxpayer for billions to bail them out when the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

The directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland are now threatening to resign if the Treasury blocks the 84 per cent publicly owned bank from upping bonuses to 50 per cent above last year's total, aiming to pay out £1.5 billion to its top investment bankers.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damn arrogant. But you've got to give the board brownie points for sheer brass neck. The facts are astonishing. According to the BBC pundit Robert Peston, an RBS currency trader in New York took home $20 million last year and a commodity trader was paid $40 million.

The directors claim that they really have to give these absurd bonuses in order to retain top-level staff in the face of huge competition for their services.

Well, if their services are what drove the banking system into meltdown, it should surely be obvious to even the meanest intellect that we, as taxpayers and the owners of the bank, would be a sight better off without them and their dubious services.

Lord Myners put that fairly well, but his further comments reveal exactly what the real problem is.

"I think," he continued, "the real responsibility here must lie with the shareholders. Accordingly I have written to the National Association of Pension Funds, the CBI and the TUC urging them to use their influence to persuade trustees to ask their fund managers: 'What are you doing to stop these quite unreasonable and unjustified levels of remuneration?'"

All well and good, but it shouldn't be necessary, in the case of RBS at least. The bank is now 84 per cent owned by the taxpayer, so we are the shareholders. It should need no pressure, just a simple instruction.

Top bankers earn salaries that the rest of us can only dream of. Let them live on them and stop this pernicious bonus culture dead in its tracks. If they don't like it, they can leave and join the ranks of the "resting."

They can be replaced easily enough, despite their overblown estimates of their own importance.

And they can be replaced by a new generation of bankers working for a publicly owned bank, placing investment capital where it can revive manufacturing, develop a new generation of green enterprises and give employment to some of the millions of unemployed in the process, rather than placing capital merely to generate speculative profits.

All it takes is the will in government. Unfortunately, it is that will which is evidently lacking. Given Business Secretary Lord Mandelson's comment that he "understood" the point of view of the RBS directors and his admission that "the government does not run RBS, it is run by its management and its board," perhaps the not-so-noble lord ought to do what he has done all his political life and crawl to wherever the movers, shakers and money men are.

He's welcome to join them on the dole queue.

SEE: Banks bailout to cost state £131bn

Link: Junius Blog
Link: Morning Star Comments

Town halls face annual £11bn spending shortfall by Hélène Mulholland

Old friends think alike!

Local Government Association says councils will have to find cuts amounting to 10% of spending by Hélène Mulholland - The Guardian.

Town halls face an annual £11bn spending shortfall as the next government seeks to bring down the deficit in the nation's finances, the umbrella body for councils has warned.

Stephen Jones, director of finance for the Local Government Association, said the "ballpark figure" for anticipated cuts in the annual budget from 2011 is equivalent to around 10% of spending for local authorities, which deliver a range of services including social care, policing and schools.

Councils are on target to deliver £5.5bn of efficiency savings by the time the current spending review comes to an end in 2011.

With both the Conservatives and Labour promising to protect spending on health and international development in the next spending round for 2011-14, Jones said councils were vulnerable to cuts.

Local government currently spends around £105bn on local services, but this needs to rise to just under £110bn by 2013-14 to allow for additional pressures on services due to demographic changes, such as a rise in the elderly population.

The anticipated shortfall is almost equivalent to the entire spend on policing, said Jones, and prompts a serious debate about services provided in the future.

He told the Guardian: "None of this is written in stone because we have not had the spending review and we do not know what it is going to show up. What this modelling is trying to do is to give people a first shot of what the scale of issues council might have to deal with will be."

Editors Note: 10% cuts by either New Labour or the Tories (and supported by the Lib Dems) would be devestating. No one who is under 65 has ever seen a 10% cut in local government budgets. Having worked in local government for 32 years I can assure you that even a cut of 2% to 5% (and it could be more) would be a disaster. A 10% cut would signal the end of many local services as we know them and result in the wholesale privatisation of whats left of local government and services. Be afraid, be very afraid whoever wins the election - and get ready for the fight back!

Link: The Guardian

An assessment of the Respect conference by Alan Thornett

An assessment of the Respect conference by Alan Thornett from Socialist Resistance web site.

The Respect conference could have been a very positive event. It was attended by over 200 members and was located in Salma Yaqoob’s constituency of Sparkbrook and Small Heath in Birmingham where she won 27% of the vote in the last general election and where she stands a very good chance of winning in the next general election.

Unfortunately rather than providing an upbeat launch for the Respect election campaign it was overshadowed by an intolerant attack on a minority current and a challenge to the long established policy of Respect to work towards a broader coalition of the left to tackle the crisis of working class representation. The result was a potential setback for Respect just at a time when it was starting to recruit more members and consolidate its functioning after the split with the SWP.

This attack on broader coalitions is completely out of kilter with the needs of the political situation. We are facing the most important and dangerous general election for a generation, and we cannot approach it just through the prism of getting Respect candidates elected — important as that is. The left, and Respect as a part of it, has a responsibility to provide an alternative to the widest possible spectrum of the electorate as is possible — difficult as this may have repeatedly proved to be in the recent past.

The Tories are poised to launch an even bigger attack on the working class than Labour if they are elected and the far right is waiting in the wings in the form of the BNP and the racist UKIP to capitalise on the unprecedented unpopularity of the main parties through the expenses debacle. The left has a responsibility to maximise its intervention into the election not just to provide a desperately needed alternative to New Labour but as a cutting edge against the far right — which no one else is going to provide. This was absolutely clear from Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time where the only response from the main parties to the BNP was that they were perfectly capable of cracking down on immigration themselves.

The conference actually started very well, and on precisely this subject, with a substantial session on “one society many cultures’ introduced very strongly by Salma Yaqoob. She presented racism, Islamophobia and the rise of the far right firmly in the context of state racism and the economic and social policies of Brown’s Labour Government. This triggered a very good debate on the far right and how to confront it and on state bans against the BNP and where the left should stand on them.

It was a real discussion over legitimate differences and exactly the kind of debate which should take place in a broad organisation like Respect. Socialist Resistance speakers argued against state bans on the basis that they are generally used against the left whilst Socialist Action, the only other organized current inside Respect, appeared to be the main proponent of the opposing point of view.

This positive atmosphere changed rather dramatically, however, with the arrival of George Galloway — who first introduced and replied to a question and answer session, and later replied to the session on electoral strategy. His response to an emergency motion by Nick Wrack and others, proposing a positive response to the new No2Eu type initiative, turned the conference inwards. It was also contrary to the National Council resolution on the agenda which called for a positive approach to such developments.

Even if the movers of the emergency motion overestimated the possibilities of the new No2Eu, at the present stage at least, and underestimated its potential problems and were not prepared to accept that the issue was already covered by the NC resolution the reaction to them was completely misplaced and contrary to the ethos we should be building inside Respect.

Respect is part of the answer

It got worse, however, since George Galloway went on to use his interventions to launch a sustained attack on any idea of supporting the new coalition, or similar initiatives, in any way, and he included some very unpleasant references to the far left and the Communist Party. The perspective he projected was that Respect can provide an alternative single handed and this starts with success in its three target seats in the general election.

But Respect has never seen itself as the answer to the crisis of working class representation in this way, certainly not since the split with the SWP. Both the founding conference after the split and last year’s conference both stressed that Respect was, hopefully, a part of the answer along with others.

George Galloway was strong on electoral arrangements with the Greens following Respects support for Peter Cranie in the North West and the Greens standing aside for Salma in Sparkbrook. This is very welcome and necessary as has been shown in the North West Euro elections and recently in Sparkbrook. But it cannot be a substitute for a united left of Labour electoral initiative since the Greens will not join such an initiative in the foreseeable future, however positive collaboration with them becomes.

He claimed that the division inside Respect is between those like himself who want to reach out to our right and others who want to reach out to our left. But that’s not correct. Everyone in Respect wants to reach out to our right, but this needs to be done from a basis of maximum left unity. If you cannot unite the left itself how can you unite with those to your right? A left alternative without the left is a contradiction in terms.

We need to unite the broadest number of workers, campaigning activists, members of ethnic and religious minorities (some of the most oppressed section of the working class), socialist organisations, trade unionists, and all who want to fight for a left, anti-racist, alternative to new Labour around a broad campaigning platform.

This should include — as Respect policy already does — opposition to the war, the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and to redundancies and cuts in pay and public services to pay for the crisis. It should be in favour of the nationalisation of banks and bankrupt companies under proper democratic control to protect jobs and of large–scale government investment into the national infrastructure based on, in particular, renewable energy and measures to tack climate change. There is a wide spectrum of individual activists or of those currently organised to our ‘right’ who would agree with such an action platform, particularly at a time of crisis.

Top down control

This is certainly the way it has been done in other parts of Europe where successful left alternatives of different varieties have been built — first unite the left and then reach out from there on the basis of concrete policies. This was the case with the Left Bloc in Portugal, Die Linke in Germany, the Red Green Alliance in Denmark and the Scottish Socialist Party— before it split. They were all successful because they drew together all, or most, of the existing left and then reached out to others from there.

All these examples have another lesson within them as well — that of internal democracy. We have seen an epidemic of top-down control on the British left in recent years which unfortunately had a reflection in the kind of intolerance shown at the conference. Socialist Resistance supported George Galloway’s letter to the Respect NC two and half years ago — the reaction to which by the SWP precipitated the split — precisely because it was an appeal for democracy and pluralism in the structures of Respect. Let’s continue on that path — since it is excluded that a strong and viable left alternative can be constructed without a strong and viable democracy.

Responding to a question as to who he would advocate voting for in the general election in constituencies where Respect was not standing he said Labour — the only exceptions he could see to that was where a green or left of Labour candidate had a chance of winning, as was the case with Caroline Lucas in Brighton. But as I pointed out in my intervention, this is far too pessimistic an approach and would reduce the left of Labour votes to single figures — a point George Galloway acknowledged.

But we have to be clear about it. We should call for a vote for Labour against the Tories and the far right where there is no left alternative. But where there are credible left or green left candidates we should support them irrespective of whether they have a chance of winning. We have to give as many people as possible an alternative to the three main parties, and we have to establish a tradition voting to the left of Labour in order for an alternative to evolve.

Nor it is clear yet as to what left candidacies will be in place by the time of the general election. There are a number of local initiatives developing which are likely to be supportable and with which Respect should work closely. It should work with the greens on avoiding clashes and mutual support for key candidates. An open and positive attitude at this stage is therefore very important both at the national and local level.

The task for Respect, and its newly elected NC, following the conference, is the implementation resolutions adopted by conference. These were very good and wide ranging — from electoral reform to free public transport — and provide an excellent basis for the election campaign as well as guidance as to how Respect relates to any new left alliances which might emerge whether it is a successor to no2eu or anything else at local or national level.

At the same time Respect needs to prepare to defend the working class against attacks launched by either Labour or the Tories either before or after the election.

Link: The Junius Blog on Respect/ Left Unity and much else
Link: Respect Conference report on Mac Uaid Blog

Resolution on Left Unity at Respect Conference

Resolution on Left Unity at Respect Conference (reposted from the Junius Blog)

Below is the text of an emergency resolution on the new left coalition launched last weekend submitted to the Respect national conference (it was defeated and opposed by the leadership).

The Conference Arrangements Commitee ruled it out of order as not constituting an emergency. This was contested and a vote taken. The decision of the conference was to uphold the ruling of the CAC and the resolution was not disscussed.

Below also is the text of a letter distributed to conference delegates in support of the motion.

Emergency Resolution on Left Unity

Conference notes the formation of a new left-wing coalition to stand candidates at the general election, which was announced at the RMT union’s conference on the crisis of working-class representation on Saturday 7 November 2009.

Conference notes that at this stage the coalition involves the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism and the Communist Party of Britain and has the backing, in a personal capacity, of RMT general secretary Bob Crow and Prison Officers Association general secretary Brian Caton, and has called on everyone who wants a socialist, working-class and trade union alternative presented at the general election to get involved in the coalition.

Conference welcomes the formation of the coalition. It ensures that there will be more left candidates in the general election and contributes to the much needed challenge from the left to the right-wing policies of privatisation, cuts and unemployment supported by New Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

Conference instructs the incoming National Committee and National Officers to write to the coalition organisers to seek joint work to promote support for left-wing candidates at the general election.

Conference encourages Respect members and supporters to support coalition candidates at the general election and to work together with coalition supporters where possible to build united action around left-wing policies.

Letter addressed to conference delegates

Dear Comrades, Sisters and Brothers

Many of you may have heard about the new coalition that was announced last week by former MP Dave Nellist at the RMT conference on working class representation.

The coalition has the backing of Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT, Brian Caton of the Prison Officers Association, national officers of the PCS civil servants’ union, and members of the national executives of the CWU, Unison, FBU and USDAW trade unions (all in a personal capacity).

It also has the backing of the Socialist Party, Communist Party of Britain and the Alliance for Green Socialism.

The coalition intends to stand against current and former cabinet ministers who have pushed through anti-working class policies. It has appealed for all those who want a working class, socialist and trade union alternative to be put forward in the election to get involved.

Labour has followed the agenda of big business for twelve years. It has pushed through reforms which have weakened the working class in this country. The few progressive policies it has implemented have nearly all failed to meet their targets.

Confronted by the recession it has chosen to maintain its neo-liberal course. If it wins the election it plans massive public spending cuts.

If a Tory government is elected things may be even worse. But if the Tories win the blame will lie entirely with Brown and his party. They had the perfect opportunity to turn away from Blair’s rotten policies. They did not take it.

From 1997 to 2005 Labour lost 3 million votes. It is set to lose more. The fact is that millions of working class people can no longer bring themselves to vote for Labour. They need a socialist alternative to vote for. We need to offer it to them.

Successful left wing campaigns across the country can only strengthen us in facing the struggles that are bound to come after the election.

We want to see left wing MPs elected, but Respect will only be standing in a handful of seats out of 650.

We ask Respect members to support candidates of the new coalition wherever they stand and to become involved in their campaigns.

A real alternative is desperately needed. The left standing together will be stronger.

You may also find this excellent article interesting: Why we need a new workers’ party

Link: Junius Blog

Respect moves to the Right!

Respect moves to the Right!

The 2009 Respect National Conference was held yesterday in Birmingham . we will post some reports and comments here over the next week or two.

This was a quick reply by the Editor to a comment [comment 33 in the blog thred] from Derek Wall (Green party) on the Socialist Unity Blog (the subject matter was : ANTI RACISTS CLASH WITH SDL FASCISTS IN GLASGOW

Post 33 “on another matter, son of NO2EU motion defeated at Respect conference today”

Derek it was worse than that for many of us on the left as Respect has clearly moved to the right in a big way led by George, Salma and friends - but you will be happy to know that an electorial agreements with the Greens (not on policy but a trade off for votes) was seen as the the way forward rather than any alliance with others on the left or the trade union movement (Geoege flatly refused to have anything to do with this).

Key speakers on the whole opposed any attempt to stop the BNP/SDL/EDL by mobilsation and confrontation should this be required - it was not ruled out but they saw an appeal to the “police” as just as important if not more important.

I wont go on too much as this is not the right thred but it would be nice to have one on the Respect Conference (please).

It looks to me like the SWP were right, and have been right all along that Respect was going to, and has moved, clearly to the right - community politics and opportunist alliances are in, while Soialism is out for good! (I am sure I will get a reply to this very quickly from the “conference majority” but be it known that at least a third of the Respect conference supported a more socialist /trade union orientated perpective).

Those of us on the left in Respect have a great deal to think about in the next few months - can we continue in Respect? It felt at times that George/ Salma and others were only too happy to see socialists like myself leave Respect - but just what will they be left with?

Link: Socialist Unity Blog
Link: Junius Blog
Link: Respect

A left challenge in the General Election

A left challenge in the General Election - from The Junius Blog.

It is hardly a secret that for the last few months talks have been going on regarding a united left wing challenge in the forthcoming general election. Involved have been the backers of the No2EU slate put up to fight the Euro elections, namely Bob Crow and the RMT, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Britain.

On the other hand not much has been said about the talks publicly… until now.

An statement by the Socialist Party’s Executive Committee has now posted on their website on precisly this subject.

Clearly the project is not yet the finished article, but it is to be welcomed.

Many have lamented the failure of the left to create an elctorally viable force during the last decade.

And the lack of a left alternative is now more obvious than ever. As the Labour Party’s base amongst ordinary working class people disintegrates the gainers have been a revivied Tory Party and even more worryingly the BNP.

This move to the right cannot be stopped by Labour, it is what started it. Labour politicians seem to be ever more determined to out Tory the Tories on everything from immigration to drugs.

In the economic sphere their rediscovery of “Social Democracy” is an illusion conjured up by those desperate that a Tory governement is just around the corner. It doesn’t stand up to any serious analysis.

The Labour Party is no longer a form of progressive anything in government. It has become merely “the human face of neo-liberalism”. As a party based in the working class, it is a dying force.

Here at the Junius Blog we maintain that what is needed is a new party of the working class based on the politics of socialism. This is the only way that not only can the increasingly reactionary path being taken by all the main parties can be opposed. It is also the key way that all those who still believe in class politcs can be brought together to support the coming struggles in defence of public services and workers’ living standards.

Electoral politics won’t be the way to stop the coming assault by the ruling class, only struggle can do that, but millions of people do still believe in the “democratic process”. Either we can stand in the election and use it as way to bring together all those who want a fairer society, or we can abandon them to the “lesser evil” of voting Labour.

There have been many false starts in the left’s attempts at esatblishing a credible electoral force over the last few years. This was entirely predictable given the the way that thirty years of neo-liberalsim have rolled the left back. It was also going to be a rocky ride breaking people away from the party that has had an almost totoal monoply on working class representaion for nearly a hundred years.

But that is no reason to give up. The new proposed alliance might not live up to expectations, or it mght be a great success. Which it is depends on whether we throw ourselves into building it or just sit and wait for something more to our particular liking magically appears.

To read the statement on the Socialist Party’s website, click here

Editors comments: Could not agree more with the article.

Respect was once at the forfront of the developments to create a left alternative to New Labour. For some time now it has stood on the edge looking in rather than being at the centre of these new developments and this needs to change - its one reason I am not standing this year for the National Council of Respect (I clearly represent a minority view on the current Respect National Council). I hope however to play a part within Respect to take more seriously inititaives like the RMT conference and anything that may arise from it.

Saturday's RMT conference report: Mobilisation a key priority at working-class forum - Morning Star

Link: The Junius Blog

George Galloway MP - Afghanistan - Bring the troops home protest 24 Oct 2009

Video by adycousins on YouTube
Link: You Tube link

The postal strike is our strike by John Pilger

The postal strike is our strike by John Pilger

New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a public institution. Postal workers deserve our solidarity

The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.

And now the Brown government is to mount a "fire sale" of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret Thatcher's transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way.

The common thread is adherence to the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and of the City of London, now rescued with hundreds of billions in public money and still unregulated with a single stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the Prime Minister, is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000. The Financial Times now offers a service called How to Spend It.

Best of Britain

None of this is accountable to the public, whose view was expressed at the last election in 2005: New Labour won with the support of barely a fifth of the British adult population. For every five people who voted Labour, eight did not vote at all. This was not apathy, as the media pretend, but a strike by the public - like the postal workers are today on strike. The issues are broadly the same: the bullying and hypocrisy of contagious, undemocratic power.

Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. Not long ago, you posted a letter anywhere in the country and it reached its destination the following morning. There were two deliveries a day, and collections on Sundays. The best of Britain, which is ordinary life premised on a sense of community, could be found at a local post office, from the Highlands to the Pennines to the inner cities, where pensions, income support, child benefit and incapacity benefit were drawn, and the elderly, the awkward, the inarticulate and the harried were treated humanely.

At my local post office in south London, if an elderly person failed to turn up on pension day, he or she would get a visit from the postmistress, Smita Patel, often with groceries. She did this for almost 20 years until the government closed down this "lifeline of human contact", as the local Labour MP called it, along with more than 150 other local London branches. The Post Office executives who faced the anger of our community at a local church - unknown to us, the decision had already been taken - were not even aware that the Patels made a profit. What mattered was ideology; the branch had to go. Mention of public service brought puzzlement to their faces.

The postal workers, having this year doubled annual profits to £321m, have had to listen to specious lectures from Peter Mandelson, a twice-disgraced figure risen from the murk of New Labour, about "urgent modernisation". The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. In dealing with new technology, postal workers have sought only consultation about their working lives and the right not to be abused - like the postal worker who was spat upon by her manager, then sacked while he was promoted; and the postman with 17 years' service and not a single complaint to his name who was sacked on the spot for failing to wear his cycle helmet. Watch the near frenzy with which your postie now delivers. A middle-aged man has to run much of his route in order to keep to a preordained and unrealistic time. If he fails, he is disciplined and kept in his place by the fear that thousands of jobs are at the whim of managers.

Subversive forces

Communication Workers Union negotiators describe intransigent executives with a hidden agenda - just as the National Coal Board masked Thatcher's strictly political goal of destroying the miners' union. The collaborative journalists' role is unchanged, too. Mark Lawson, who pontificates about middlebrow cultural matters for the BBC and the Guardian and receives many times the remuneration of a postal worker, dispensed a Sun-style diatribe on 10 October. Waffling about the triumph of email and how the postal service was a "bystander" to the internet when, in fact, it has proven itself a commercial beneficiary, Lawson wrote: "The outcome [of the strike] will decide whether Billy Hayes of the CWU will, like [Arthur] Scargill, be remembered as someone who presided over the destruction of the industry he was meant to represent."

The record is clear that Scargill and the miners were fighting against the wholesale destruction of an industry that was long planned for ideological reasons. The miners' enemies included the most subversive, brutal and sinister forces of the British state, aided by journalists - as Lawson's Guardian colleague Seumas Milne documents in his landmark work, The Enemy Within. Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent.

Link: New Stateman
Link: CWU
Link: The key issues behind the battle in the post - Socialist Worker
Link: Respect - Unite behind the Postal Workers

Lest we forget - the Tory years.

Lest we forget - the Tory years and not so long ago. Never again!!!!!
Adolf Hitler & Margaret Thatcher On Spitting Image via YouTube
Link: Maggie "Scum-Bag" Thatcher - YouTube
Link: YouTube link

Cameron: The man who would return us to 1979 by George Galloway

Cameron: The man who would return us to 1979 by George Galloway.

But the economic crisis unleashed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year has not only exposed the dangerous underpinning of free-market capitalism, it has also brought the return of the big ideological questions on how our society and affairs should be organised.

That was the backdrop for David Cameron's address to the Tories in Manchester this week.

He's done a good job in knocking the most unpleasant edges off what Theresa May once called the nasty party - though some rather ugly facets remain. The association with the anti-semitic dregs of eastern Europe is one of them and it's fitting that that has come under some scrutiny.

The liberal media's outrage about it, however, is somewhat undermined.

So many of those columnists share the basic thrust of the Polish and Latvian right-wing populists' propaganda, which is to trivialise the barbarity of nazism and its collaborators by claiming that they were comparable to or less than the record of the Soviet Union and Red Army.

The Labour front bench and its supporters are similarly hobbled when it comes to challenging effectively the thrust of what Cameron threatens to inflict on the country.

The centrepiece of his speech was a Reaganist-Thatcherite assault on the idea of collective solutions to the misery inflicted by the untrammelled market. His leitmotif could have come straight from 1979 - an end to big government and freedom for big business.

Some of you will have experienced first hand what that meant at the time. A generation thrown on the scrap heap.

Every one of you is living with the legacy.

Think of some of the most appalling instances of the breakdown of local communities and then recall the places from where we read reports of damaged children, drug epidemics and violence - Doncaster, the poorest parts of London, south Wales. All of them places that were devastated a generation ago.

The problem is not too much government but too little.

And what there is is all too often directed at the wrong things.

Is the problem for vulnerable children in Haringey that the social services are too vast, overstaffed and too engaged in their lives?

Or is that they are barely holding together even before the public spending axe falls?

Make no mistake about this - the scale and savagery of the austerity measures Cameron and George Osborne are contemplating threaten to make our country a far more bitter and dangerous place to live.

They've yet to come clean with what is to be axed. Osborne announced £7 billion in cuts. The amount they are after is more than £100bn, with the axe swinging the moment Cameron sets foot in Downing Street.

Of course those who would do the cutting are from the most privileged layer in society. Cameron may have sought to rebrand his party, but his shadow cabinet is made up of old Etonians and millionaires.

It's a point made by some on the Labour side. But it is somewhat vitiated by the friendships and associations they have chosen over the last 15 years - assorted Russian billionaires and a former leader who has made £15m since leaving office.

Labour is similarly hobbled when it comes to refuting the Tories' claims about big government and the public sector.

There are three reasons. First, so many of Labour's measures have amounted to authoritarian interference in people's lives under the guise of rebuilding communities or protecting security.

The ever-widening scope and application of so-called anti-terror laws is the most extreme example.

Second, extra money on public services has gone on an army of consultants and privateers. So it doesn't feel like progress in east London when the rebuild of the Royal London Hospital under PFI will cost more than it would have done in the public sector and leave us with fewer beds as a result.

Third, they accept the false economics which, having brought the world economy to the brink, now insists on switching off the life support machine of an enfeebled patient.

It's true that Britain's deficit is set to hit about 13 per cent of national output this year and that the total debt burden is rising.

But so it should.

If the private sector is unwilling to invest and spend, then the public sector must - or risk a vicious circle leading to depression.

The surest way to bring debt down is to generate economic growth.

But Labour is not making that case. Indeed, Gordon Brown abandoned the idea of fighting the election on Labour investment versus Tory cuts. So the entire mainstream consensus is that spending and government must be slashed.

I'm sceptical of claims that the public are clamouring for that. In any case, there's a big difference between being asked if there should be spending cuts in general and then being told that it means your children's school, your hospital, your pension, your benefits or your housing estate.

Many, many people are going to respond in horror and outrage when they discover what the reality of these cuts will mean. But by then it will be too late.

Link: Morning Star
Link: Respect - find out more.

Conservative Conference: We have been warned: the nasty party is still with us - Seumas Milne

David Cameron quaffs £140-a-bottle bubbly with his rich chums just hours before the Tories announced a pay freeze for millions of ordinary workers (and ups the o.a.pension age to 66!) - Daily Mirror.

Conservative Conference: We have been warned: the nasty party is still with us - Seumas Milne

Strip away the spin. Cameron's cuts and his friends in Europe give the lie to compassionate Conservatism.

There is nothing like the smell of regime change to turn the head of the British media. Just as in the runup to the 1997 election, when Tony Blair was given the easiest of rides, so David Cameron's Conservatives can now hardly put a foot wrong for press and broadcasters alike. Every set-piece speech is a dazzling performance, every policy initiative a bold and tough choice. Wherever the Tory government in waiting declares the territory to be staked out, the media caravan follows.

At the party's conference in Manchester, it has been the turn of George Osborne to be elevated to the ranks of the political greats. The shadow chancellor had "come of age", the Sun declared, as the BBC's Newsnight compared his oratory to Winston Churchill's. His declarations that the burden of overcoming the crisis will be fairly shared have been accepted at face value. And the Tory claim that the budget deficit is the "defining issue" facing the country, as Cameron insisted today, has become the starting point of political reporting.

But the reality doesn't begin to measure up to the billing. Osborne certainly presented his case for cuts on Tuesday as if he were demanding sacrifices across the nation. The Tory high command is acutely aware that most voters regard the idea that they should pay the cost of an economic crash visited on them by bankers as anathema, and some recent polling shows opposition to spending cuts to pay off public debt running at two to one.

So Osborne's endless repetition of his "we're all in this together" mantra made perfect political sense. Excluding those earning less than £18,000 a year from a public sector pay freeze and the poorest households from the abolition of child trust funds was designed to demonstrate that "compassionate Conservatives" look after the vulnerable. Meanwhile capping mandarins' pensions and declaring no public employee will be able to earn more than the prime minister without the chancellor's approval is intended to give the appearance of toughness for the top end.

But the idea that Osborne's cuts could by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as a fair shares package is clearly nonsense. The initial pain is to be borne by a real terms pay cut for 80% of public sector workers, including those earning nearly £9,000 less than the average wage; by low-paid manual workers who will have to work an extra year for their pension while their life expectancy is up to seven years less than the well-off; and by the half a million people the Tories plan to move off incapacity benefit who stand to lose £25 a week.

As for those at the other end of the income scale, Osborne offered only the discomfort of having to endure Labour's 50% top tax rate at least until the pay freeze is lifted. And for the bankers themselves, there was the less than terrifying warning that "we reserve the right to take further action" if public funds continued to be "unreasonably diverted into bigger pay and bonuses".

Add to that the refusal to ditch plans to abolish inheritance tax below £1m – half the benefit of which would go to the 3,000 richest estates in the country – and the truth of who is to shoulder Osborne's burden couldn't be clearer. And his £7bn worth of cuts of course represent only a fraction of those the Tories intend to make, and Osborne this week repeated plans for tax cuts, on pension funds for instance, which imply still deeper reductions in spending.

The most dishonest of all the "honest choices" Cameron and Osborne claim to be making, however, is that the crisis facing Britain is one of public debt, rather than of recession, growing unemployment, bankruptcies, lack of demand and a continuing squeeze on credit. As the Financial Times' economic commentator, Samuel Brittan – no kind of radical in anyone's book – argued last week, the country is facing a "largely imaginary budget crisis". If there is a normal recovery, the deficit will shrink; if not, it shouldn't.

In fact, industrial output and lending are both still falling. The kind of cuts Cameron and Osborne are talking about, including a pay freeze, could only deepen the downturn and delay recovery, while the Tories are even less prepared than the government to use publicly controlled banks to drive up investment and boost growth. In fact, contrary to Osborne's claims this week, the Conservatives opposed several of the crucial measures taken over the last year to halt the crash – including bank nationalisations, fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing.

Whether Labour is in a position to challenge that dishonesty or the sincerity of the Tory embrace of compassionate Conservativism is another matter. But the reality behind the public view, that Cameron's makeover of the Tories is only skin deep, was on unmistakeble display over Europe this week. First Cameron signalled that, if denied the chance of a referendum on Europe's Lisbon treaty, a Conservative government would seek to negotiate a British opt-out from social and employment rights: one bit of the Brussels edifice that is actually popular in Britain.

But the Tory response to the exposure of their new rightwing European allies to the light of day has also been deeply instructive. It has been known for some time that Cameron's new Conservatives and Reformists group included a motley array of east European antisemites, homophobes and climate-change deniers. But faced with the evidence that its ultra-nationalist Latvian member party supports annual parades of veterans of Hitler's Waffen-SS, the reaction of Tory leaders has been bizarrely to accuse foreign secretary David Miliband of falling for "Soviet smears", deny the facts or, even more extraordinarily, defend the SS veterans as people who were fighting for their country.

Another tack has been to counter that a number of Latvian parties back the parades. In fact, the Conservatives' Latvian ally, the For Fatherland and Freedom party – whose leader Roberts Zile has been a Tory guest in Manchester this week – is at the extreme end of an ugly spectrum: in September 2007, for example, it tried and failed to have a law adopted in Latvia's parliament giving full military pensions to the SS veterans, some of whose volunteers took part in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. It's a reminder not only that the "nasty party" never went away – but that the Conservatives remain the party of Neville Chamberlain, as well as of Churchill.

Link: The Guardian

The Tories - Keep the old axe flying

Keep the old axe flying - Morning Star Comment.

It's almost a relief to see the tail lights of Labour's conference vanishing in the distance and the Tories' vehicle approaching like a bright blue boy racer.

Mind you, that vehicle seems to be a 1982-style Mark V Cortina rather than a more up-to-date model, from what's coming out of the Tory conference.

It seems that it's goodbye to caring sharing Dave now that there's a hint of approaching government, and it's back to the old red-in-tooth-and-claw Tory policies that Margaret Thatcher taught us to hate.

Off ducks the purported friend of the poor and the disadvantaged and up pops the real Tory David Cameron from behind the flimsy mask of social responsibility that has suited him so poorly.

For the Tories have abandoned virtually everything they were wearing like a carnival costume and have turned up in mufti for their last conference before the general election. And what a set of clothes that is.

There's a £25-a-week aid cut for up to half a million claimants on incapacity benefit who will, the Tories expect, be found fit to work after all 2.6 million claimants are tested and will thus be transferred to the lower Jobseekers' Allowance.

There's a windfall for private firms which are going to be paid public money to get people into non-existent jobs out of the £600 million that Mr Cameron expects to squeeze out of the disabled.

There's a 10 per cent reduction in the cost of student loans, but only for students who go into posh, high-paid City jobs or have rich parents - in other words, for those who can repay their loans early.

These early repayments, according to the Tories, would enable them to fund 10,000 extra student places next year, although the mathematics of that proposition seem fragile, to say the least.

Although not, apparently, for the National Union of Students, whose president Wes Streeting commented that this is "an acceptable short-term fix."

For you, perhaps, Mr Streeting, but not for the taxpayer who will have to fund those 10 per cent rebates. There's nothing comes for nothing, Mr Streeting, as you will learn one day - especially from the Tories.

But, back to the Tory electoral jalopy. Another wizard wheeze from the Old Etonians concerns the NHS which, if you remember, is one of only two budgets the Tory opposition guaranteed would be spared the axe if it took power.

Well, it appears that the Tory definition of "being spared the axe" involves cuts of £4 billion in administration costs over four years.

Oh, and around another £1 billion from primary care trust budgets, of course. Apparently, since this is not coming out of "front-line" funding, it doesn't count as a cut, according to the Tories.

At least they seem to be learning something from new Labour, which has the same peculiar conception of accounting. But neither they nor new Labour seem prepared to say who is going to do the administration if the admin budgets are slashed to threads.

The odd idea of front-line services running efficiently without back-office support seems to have come into general currency without anyone ever saying that it is nonsense.

Large enterprises need large administrative support and cutting that support simply means slashing jobs and putting more people on the dole right at the time that the economy needs to stimulate demand, not plunge ever more people onto benefit.

All in all, then, it's welcome back to Maggie's Tories. We know that you really never went away, but it's good to see you come out of the closet again after hiding your Tebbits and Thatchers away for so long.

Keep up the axe-waving and perhaps we will find the electorate seeing you for what you are.

Shout it loud, you're mean and proud - and you lie like the Tories of old.

Link: Out-Torying the Tories - Morning Star
Link: Morning Star Comment

Crikey! Its the Tories

David Cameron as Robbing Hood: robbing the poor and retired to help the rich!
Posted by Tetrasoft on YouTube.
Link: YouTube

BY-ELECTION. RESPECT HOLD BIRMINGHAM SPARKBROOK

BY-ELECTION. RESPECT HOLD BIRMINGHAM SPARKBROOK (report from Socialist Unity)

Respect, 2492
Labour, 2221
Tory, 797
Lib Dem, 505
Green, 188
Ind, 54

Congratulations to Respect’s new councillor, Shokat Ali and all in Birmingham Respect.

Update: See also - George Galloway celebrates by-election victory

Link: Socialist Unity web site

For Britons, The Party Game Is Over by John Pilger

For Britons, The Party Game Is Over by John Pilger from Information Clearing House.

On the day Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his “major policy speech” on Afghanistan, repeating his surreal claim that if the British army did not fight Pashtun tribesmen over there, they would be over here, the stench of burnt flesh hung over the banks of the Kunduz River. Nato fighter planes had blown the poorest of the poor to bits. They were Afghan villagers who had rushed to siphon off fuel from two stalled tankers. Many were children with water buckets and cooking pots. “At least” 90 were killed, although Nato prefers not to count its civilian enemy. “It was a scene from hell,” said Mohammed Daud, a witness. “Hands, legs and body parts were scattered everywhere.” No parade for them along a Wiltshire high street.

I saw something similar in south-east Asia. An incendiary bomb had razed most of a thatched village, and bits of charred people were hanging on upended fishing nets. Those intact lay splayed and black, like large spiders. I have never believed you need witness such a hell to comprehend the crime. A standard-issue conscience is enough for all but the morally corrupt and powerful.

Fresh from another dysfunctional photo opportunity with troops in Afghanistan – a contrivance far from the impoverished suffering of that country – Brown “authorised” the Rambo-style rescue of Stephen Farrell, a journalist of British and Irish nationality, at the site of the Nato attack. It was a stunt that went wrong. A British soldier was killed and Farrell’s guide, Sultan Munadi, an Afghan journalist, was abandoned and killed. Munadi’s family now fully appreciates the different worth of British and Afghan lives.

During the 1914-18 slaughter, Prime Minister Lloyd George confided: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.” Have we not yet advanced over a century’s corpses to a point where the likes of Brown are denied their mendacious subterfuge? The Afghan war is a fraud. It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.

The establishment of a permanent US/Nato presence in a resource-rich, strategic region is the principal reason for the war. The British are there because that is what Washington wants. Preventing the Taliban from storming our streets is reminiscent of President Lyndon B Johnson’s plaint: “We have to stop the communists over there [Vietnam] or we’ll soon be fighting them in California.”

There is one difference. By refusing to bring the troops home, Brown is likely to provoke an atrocity by young British Muslims who view the war as a western crusade; the recent Old Bailey trail made that clear. He has been told as much by British intelligence and security services. Brown’s own security adviser has said as much publicly. As with Tony Blair and the bombs of 7 July 2005, he will bear ultimate responsibility for bringing violence and grief to his own people.

More than MPs’ fake expenses, it is this corrupting and trivialising of life and death that mark a fitting end to the “modernised” Labour Party, the party of criminal war. Do the delegates preparing for the party’s annual rituals in Brighton comprehend this? It says enough that most Labour MPs never demanded a vote on Blair’s bloodshed in Iraq and gave him a standing ovation when he departed. One timid motion proposed by the “grass roots” at Brighton might be allowed. This concludes that “a majority of the public believe that the war [in Afghanistan] is unwinnable”. There is no suggestion that it is wrong, immoral and based on lies similar to those that led to the extinction of a million Iraqis, “an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”, according to one scholarly estimate.

This is largely why the game of parliamentary politics is over for so many Britons, especially the young. In 2005, a bent system allowed Blair to win with fewer popular votes than the Tories in their electoral catastrophe of 1997. New Labour’s greatest achievement is the lowest turnouts since universal voting began. Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed their practices as an inspiration “for the whole economy”. At the recent meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing, and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in Britain is now the widest since 1968.

New Labour’s causes and effect extend from the one in five young people denied employment, education and hope to the £12m that Blair coins in a year, “advising” the rich and lecturing to them at £157,000 a time.For the more extreme among Blair's and Brown's mentors and courtiers, such as the twice disgraced Peter Mandelson, this represents the most sought after achievement of all: the positioning of Labour to the right of the Tories, though it is probably correct to say the two main parties have converged, now competing feverishly with each other to threaten cuts in public services in order to pay for the bailing out of the banks and for the druglords of Kabul. There is no mention of cutting the billions to be spent on replacing Trident nuclear submarines designed for the defunct cold war.

The game is over. Corporatism and a reinvigorated militarism have finally appropriated parliamentary democracy, a historic shift. For those Afghan villagers blown to pieces in our name, one craven motion at Labour’s conference is too late. At the very least, the party’s “grass roots” might ask themselves why.

www.johnpilger.com

Link: ICH

No excuse for Afghan war - Morning Star comment

No excuse for Afghan war - Morning Star comment.

Does even Gordon Brown believe the words coming out of his own mouth any more? If so he must be the only one in Britain.

The Prime Minister's latest attempt to justify the Afghanistan fiasco smacks of an over-the-hill prizefighter still staggering around the ring flailing his fists, too brain-battered to realise he's lost.

So detached is Brown from reality that yesterday's defence of the Afghan occupation consisted entirely of arguments which have already been knocked down and which surely no-one, except perhaps Brown, believes.

Every time Brown claims we're in Afghanistan to prevent terror attacks on Britain, a little bit more of his credibility trickles away down the drain.

It wasn't our original reason for invading. That was in theory to catch Osama bin Laden - remember him? - and in practice because the US told us to.

But bin Laden is proving as elusive as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And so, just as with Iraq, we get a constantly shifting stream of alternative excuses to continue the occupation, none of them convincing.

"Each time I have to ask myself if we are doing the right thing by being in Afghanistan," says Brown.

"And my answer has always been Yes. For when the security of our country is at stake, we cannot walk away."

Well, next time he asks himself that question, he can consider this. Is he aware why the July 7 bombers carried out the deadliest attack on London since World War II?

It was because of Britain's wars in the Middle East. Because of the "bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people," according to bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan. And, said Shehzad Tanweer, July 7 was "only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq."

Preventing terrorism? Our occupation of Afghanistan is causing it. That is the simple truth that Brown either cannot understand or cannot admit.

And his claim that our presence is helping to stabilise Pakistan is equally wrong-headed.

The truth is that military action in the Pakistani border region - particularly the notorious US drone attacks which have slaughtered hundreds of civilians, including children - is stirring up an angry backlash against the West, offering future July 7 bombers another motive to take revenge on Britain.

There's not much sign that anyone in Brown's government understands this - not even Eric Joyce, despite his resignation over Brown's handling of Afghanistan.

Joyce, like Brown, believes British occupation forces are helping to prevent terrorism. He just thinks that's "not enough of an explanation" for voters back at home.

Where Joyce is spot on, though, is in highlighting the government's shameful treatment of its soldiers.

Brown's talk of the importance of Afghanistan doesn't sit well with the reality for the troops - which is that the death toll from this pointless occupation is being inflated still further by underfunding and underequipping.

And if that weren't enough, the Ministry of Defence is fighting a massively unpopular court case for the right to slash compensation payments to wounded soldiers.

This is a staggeringly stupid and callous act which is winning the government no friends anywhere - not among the troops, not among the few voters who still think the war's a good idea and not among the growing ranks of those who want Britain out of Afghanistan.

At least now we know why the MoD is fighting the case - because it will have to pay out around £150 million more if it loses.

But that's hardly a convincing argument at a time when Brown's throwing far larger sums at the City. Not when it's such a small price to pay for some of the lives ruined by this criminal war.

And not when there's no sign of an end to the stream of young men and women returning maimed, disabled or in body bags from Labour's great imperial folly.

Link: Morning Star

Has Brown lost all hope? - Morning Star Comment

Has Brown lost all hope? - Morning Star Comment.

Has Gordon Brown already given up all hope of Labour winning the next general and opted to work for a City boardroom slot by pressing on with his pro-big business policies?

Does he think that the Tory opinion poll lead will evaporate as the electorate realise the extent of the public-sector cuts planned by David Cameron, handing victory to Labour?

Or, most far-fetched of all, does the Prime Minister actually believe that voters will warm to his programme of passing on the costs of recession to the poor and using public funds to restore the banks' profitability before handing them back to the speculators who created the financial crisis?

It is difficult to see which of the possibilities indicates the greatest level of cynicism or self-delusion.

But what they all have in common is an ongoing determination to ignore the interests of working people and the poor and to dance to the rich men's tune.

It beggars belief that a government that has made £1.3 trillion available to bail out the banks should then seek to pare up to £780 a year from housing benefit for some of the poorest families.

For a start, this penny-pinching plan will not save anything like the £160 million annually that its advocates suggest, since private landlords will soak up the excess by raising rents.

But it is also a scandalous measure in itself, attacking those least able to afford a cut in income.

People have not forgotten government abolition of the 10p income tax rate, which forced those at the bottom of the heap to fund tax cuts for those a little higher up it.

It has spent the last couple of years trying to make up lost ground through compensatory measures, but, no matter what steps have been taken, the initial resentment smoulders on.

And it is not just the poorest of all who are in uproar over government economic priorities.

Network Rail enthused many people earlier this week with its proposal for a new £34 billion high-speed rail link between London, Birmingham, north-west England, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The plan combined vital investment in the economic infrastructure, employment potential and a boost for the environment by offering the opportunity for passengers to switch from air to rail.

Yet, this same state-owned, not-for-profit company has been instructed by the Office of Rail Regulation to make savings of 21 per cent or £4bn over the next five years.

This is an example of the hare-brained schemes dreamed up by rail privatisers, where the regulator issues arbitrary orders to slash spending rather than prioritising the security of staff and passengers.

Even the dogs in the street can see that privatisation has turned out to be a disaster for all but a tiny well-heeled minority who can live off dividends generated by formerly public assets that were sold off to the private sector.

And the government plans the same shambles for the prison system, having established the charade of market-testing public facilities with a view to privatising them.

Prison officers have already balloted to defend public ownership, the public purse and public safety. RMT rail workers will fight to resist compulsory redundancies.

But the whole of the labour movement has to unite actively to defeat these anti-worker, neoliberal policies, whether spawned by new Labour or the Tories.

Link: Morning Star
Link: Respect Party

Not Green but Red!

Not Green but Red!

No2EU - what next? - from A Very Public Sociologist Blog

The bones of No2EU have been picked over by practically everyone on the far left (except for the Socialist Workers' Party, who've maintained a conspicuous silence about it). But what's going to happen next? Will the coalition be scattered to the four winds, leaving each of its components to sort out their own arrangements for the general election? Or, as was hoped, No2EU would result in a commitment to working together to produce something that can be a pole of attraction for all the left?

Thankfully, the news Dave Nellist brought from Monday's national steering committee meeting to the West Midlands gathering of No2EU on Tuesday night was very positive.

At the steering committee all the components of the coalition endorsed further action. The Communist Party said they were preparing to stand candidates as part of their Unity for Peace and Socialism alliance with members of other 'official' CPs domiciled in Britain but wanted to work with its No2EU partners and others.

In the immediate term the steering committee appointed a working group that will report back in September. Its remit is to come up with an alternative name and a basic programmatic document that can be added to later. In addition, another union besides the RMT will be present at the September meeting and committee members will be talking to the leaderships of a further four unions about their participation.

Dave finished his report by noting that our electoral challenge needs to be properly organised - we cannot afford to adopt a cavalier approach to these things. What is certain is millions of voters will be afloat thanks to the collapse of Labour's electoral support. If we are to claim some of that and start building a mass alternative we have to get out into communities with our socialist message now.

Unsurprisingly there was a good deal of discussion. Yours truly welcomed Dave's report after fearing the worst (I had heard mutterings the RMT were only going to be prepared to endorse certain candidates from the sidelines) and asked if the SWP had been approached or were in contact with No2EU. Pete McLaren of the rump Socialist Alliance felt enthused about the developments. He also called for the SWP to be involved because they are significant and said we should debate out the programme on the basis of a mutually acceptable platform. It's guiding method should be on the 80 per cent the far left agrees on and not let the 20 per cent or so we disagree about be a barrier to working together.

Dave Church of Walsall Democratic Labour Party argued we were in danger of going around in a circle if we just chase after elections. We need to be more consistent and seek roots in our communities. He also added that we need to be modest. We all know we'll be fighting to keep deposits rather than seats, but we need also be clear that regardless whether Labour or the Tories win the next election, the working class will lose.

Dave Griffiths of Coventry Socialist Party argued we need to be patient when we're working together. An open debate about the nature of the coalition and its programme is necessary and all left groups should be drawn into the process. But at this stage its de facto federal character should be preserved, so no one component can dominate. Dave was also cautious about the SWP - in light of what happened in the SA and Respect, he hoped to see some more signs of cooperative intent from them first.

Replying to Dave, Clive from Coventry SWP said the presence of himself and another member showed their serious intent. Because Labour is dying on its feet, there is a degree of urgency to all our unity proceedings. He thought there was a wind of change blowing through the trade union movement and what we need to do is give it an electoral expression that in turn can feed into workplace struggles. Alastair from Birmingham SWP said his party found the No2EU name problematic but that our enemies are a greater danger than we are to each other.

Summing up Dave Nellist said the SWP and No2EU had not spoken directly, but bilateral talks between them and the SWP had started. On the question of programme, the CPB signaled that the People's Charter would be pushed by them as the core programme for the coalition (a programme few but only the most chemical pure "revolutionaries" would have problem with as the basis of a left alliance). Dave also said he would like to see the coalition sit down with localised defenders of public services who already have some representation - people like Wigan's Community Action Party and the Socialist Peoples Party in Barrow. But they're only going to come on board any sort of left formation if they feel they have a say in its development. For example, back in the (mark one) Socialist Alliance the SP took a maximum of 40% of its leading positions, despite having the numbers to run it as a straight front group. If we try to hector and dominate localised campaigns when they become part of the coalition, they'll be out the door in five minutes. Therefore we need to exercise self-denying ordinance.

In sum, it's certainly looking positive. There will be something concrete on the table by the end of the Summer, which will be open to debate and modification. There is a commitment to having a more open coalition. The RMT are still on board and at least one other union is interested.

No2EU may not have set the world of electoral politics alight. But as has been constantly pointed out on this blog from the beginning, regardless of its faults it was part of a process that was going to go beyond the European elections. What this meeting did was to offer a glimpse of the far left realignment to come. There have been better times to be a socialist, but the one we live in is going to get more interesting.

Link: A Very Public Sociologist Blog
Link: Southwark Respect statement on the European election results and left unity

Afghanistan - what are we fighting for?

Afghanistan - what are we fighting for?

Watch the video and ask yourself - just what are we fighting for in Afghanisatan?

This is an excerpt from an excellent series by John Pilger which is now available in five parts from our old friend AzowRagbak. To watch the entire series, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/AzowRagbak

For those who believe that Green politics is the way forward I suggest you read this:
Joschka Fischer, former leader of the German Green Party, and Foreign Minister, had signed up for a “six digit salary” as an adviser on the Nabucco Consortium which is to build a pipeline form the Caspian Sea region to the EU via Turkey see HERE. The then foreign minister Joschka Fischer, in 1999 supported the war in Yugoslavia, against the wishes of many rank and file party members. Later, they supported sending German troops to the Afghan war, also against the wishes of many rank and file party members. Though armed forces are extremely destructive in environmental terms, especially so during wars.

Link: Nabucco pipeline - Wiki

Link: The War on Terror or the Trans-Afghan Pipeline: YOU Decide Which is Real! - YouTube

Are the Greens an alternative? - Alastair Stevens

Are the Greens an alternative? - Alastair Stevens via the Junius Blog

The success of the Greens in the Euro elections poses some important questions for the left on how to deal with them. Here is a contribution to this discussion from Alastair Stevens.

The failure of the left in England and Wales to create a viable electoral force, and the relative success of the Greens has given the question of the left’s relations with the Green Party a new importance.

The disintegration of the Labour government, the undermining of the whole British party system and the consequent growth of the BNP has also given it a sudden urgency.

The Green Party in action

The Green Party in Britain is often described as the most left wing in Europe. The policies of the party have tended to put them on the left in British politics, but then the yawning void on the left since the advent of New Labour has meant that even the Lib Dems have tried to fish for votes there.

The Greens have also been able to comfortably occupy this space due to their relative distance from power. Other European Green parties have been thrust fairly quickly into power. The electoral system here has meant that they have been mostly excluded from office and the pressures to move right that come with that.

However when they have had electoral success their record has been patchy. The closer they have got to power the less principled they have seemed.

The Green Party has gone into coalition with the Tories in Leeds. In Lewisham they have a base, it is one of their strongest areas in the capital. Yet their councillors there voted for the occupied Lewisham Bridge School to be turned into an academy.

On the London Assembly the Greens played second fiddle to Ken Livingstone’s neo-liberal administration giving it left cover. In reality they did nothing much really against the agenda of turning the city the playground of the rich. Its representatives have been almost invisible, Darren Johnson only popping up in the media to for example join in the attacks on Al-Qaradawi.

As they have become closer to power they have rapidly lost many of their democratic structures. The party that prided itself for its open democratic working has transformed itself quite quickly into a centralised political machine that has tended to revolve around big personalities. This has been seen in the way it moved to having a single leader and in its method of election which over rode the old internal workings of the party.

Darren Johnson, is a case in point. He has accumulated places on bodies at a rate that even Lord Mandelson would be impressed at: “as an Assembly member, Johnson is or has been a member of numerous committees, including the Health and Public Services Committee, the Environment Committee (of which he is the Deputy Chair after chairing for the previous five years), the Transport Committee, the Planning and Spatial Development Committee, the Commission on London Governance, the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA), the Elections Review Committee and the 7th July Review (London Resilience) Committee. He has also chaired an inquiry on nuclear waste trains for the GLA. He is or has been a member of Lewisham Council’s Council Urgency Committee, Elections Committee, Licensing (Supplementary) Committee, Licensing Committee, Overview and Scrutiny Committee and Marsha Phoenix Memorial Trust. He has represented Lewisham Council on the Local Government Association General Assembly.”

So much for a party that prided itself on its grass roots nature.

His fellow GLA member is Jenny Jones, who is also a councillor in Southwark, a role she has been virtually invisible in.

The Green Parties in Europe

The future for the Green Party may be seen in the behavior of its European partners. They have now been in government in all the major European countries and their record has been patchy tending towards downright awful.

In Germany, whose Green Party is still the most important in the movement, they have been in government in coalition at a national level with the SPD (the German equivalent of Labour) twice. They have been in regional governments since the mid eighties.

Hardly had they got into power in 1999 than they were supporting the war in Kosovo. The front man for this was the new Foreign Minister, and former anarchist street fighter, the Greens’ leader Joschka Fischer. This wasn’t the end of their war-mongering, though, as they also supported the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan.

They supported Agenda 2010 and most of the other neo-liberal attacks from the SPD government on the German working class. In April 2008 in local government they joined coalitions with the main right wing party, the CDU, in Hamburg and Cologne.

Elsewhere the record has not been much different.

In Italy much of the ire about the disastrous debacle the left suffered in the last elections has been directed at the performance in government of Rifondazione Comunista. The “Rainbow” alliance of which it was part along with the other smaller communist party the PCd’I was wiped out and won no seats at all.

Yet the Greens took an identical line in government to Rifondazione, voting for the continued occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of the neo-liberal reform pushed by Prodi’s government.

The Greens in France entered a similar coalition with Jospin, and followed the same neo-liberal path.

Closer to home in Ireland the Greens entered a coalition government with Fianna Fail, one of the two main parties of Irish capitalism. In the process they managed to put a road through the historically important Hill of Tara.

The Green Party in Ireland is still in government there despite the absolutely vicious round of cuts now being made. This year’s Irish budget has meant an income cut of up to 8% for workers, a 2% cut in welfare payments, and reduced housing benefits for newly unemployed workers aged under 20.

The nature of the Green Party

The Green Party is a middle class party. This is also true of Green parties throughout Europe.

Its origins lie in the early environmental movement of the 1970s. In Britain this actually also means people like Teddy Goldsmith founder of the Ecologist magazine, and the holder like many Greens of some quite reactionary Malthusian ideas.

The growth of the Green Parties came in the eighties as many who had been on the left moved away socialist politics and any class based understanding of society. In fact the growth of these parties marked a decisive rejection of the concept of class. Even today in the British Green Party’s materials you will not find the word class. True to the radical (and often utopian) liberalism that is the philosophical basis of these parties they condemn “wealth inequality”, and various other elliptical constructions, but they don’t call it class.

The middle class nature of the party is obvious to any who come across the party. Recent a recent poll by Yougov shows this up quite explicitly.

By social grade Green voters were shown to have the highest percentage in the ABC1 category, 64%, closest to the Lib Dems’ 61% and Tories’ 60% (Labour voters 53% and BNP 39%.

Green voters had the second highest median income after the Tories, 32k and 33k respectively, ahead of the Lib Dems 29k. Labour and BNP voters had the lowest on 27k.

Green voters were the most likely to have a professional or higher technical job (doctor, account, teacher, lecturer, social worker) on 32% (Lib Dems 26%, Lab 20%, Con 20, BNP 11).

Green voters were the least likely to be a manual worker (skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled) at 12% (the next least likely being the Lib Dems and Tories, 14% each, then Lab 21%, UKIP 23%, BNP voters proving the most likely on 36%).

It would be possible to go but the picture emerging is one that we know well. The middle class focus of the party is reflected in the party’s policies.

These at root look very similar to most radical petit-bourgeois movements which have appeared over the last two hundred years from the sans culottes of the French revolution onwards. This class, caught between the working class on the one hand and the ruling capitalist class on the other tend to fear both. They fear the domination of the bosses and fear being dragged down into the working class. They are usually against both “big business” and “big labour”.

There is an obsession with making everything smaller and more local. The problem with the big banks were, that they were too big for instance.

Something the Greens were proud of during the London elections last year were was the endorsement by the Federation of Small businesses as the party with policies most friendly to small business. This is something that left wing fans of the Greens, tend not to mention, nor for they tend to point out the Green Party’s Greens Mean Business website.

The lamentable statement by Jenny Jones in the London Assembly is indicative of this attitude (see here for the text of her speech).

Faced with the across the board criticism of the RMT’s tube strike, rather than take the opportunity to forthrightly defend the country’s most militant union, and one that has improved immensely the pay and conditions of tube workers, she merely said that she said that she had “a slight sympathy for trade unions”.

She went on to add that she would have voted for the Tories motion condemning the strike if it had been worded slightly differently.

That is not to say that the Greens are the same as the Tories. They support improvements in workers rights. They adopt progressive positions on many economic issues. They are against poverty and exploitation.

The single greatest thing that would improve the lot of working people would be to repeal the anti-union laws so that workers and the unions can fight for themselves for these improvements. Yet this is a commitment you will not find them making.

A defence of workers’ and trade union rights is not central to their politics. They are rather mixed up with the rights of the self-employed and small business in a manner that appears to put both on the same level. In their voluminous programmatic document, the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society, trade unions appear after self- employed workers.

Though there are proposals to tinker with the law and improve the legal position of trade unions, with such changes as “a limited scope to ‘secondary’ industrial action”, and a range of proposals for ‘industrial democracy’ – albeit mixed in with ideas of ‘partnership’ reminiscent of the rhetoric of New Labour, there is no clear call for a wholesale abolition of the Tory anti-union laws. Though this is formally Green Party policy, it does not seem to find its place in their main public policy manifesto.

The appeal of the Greens is in the main limited to its target audience, the educated middle classes. That is their base, and that is the core of the party. Its appeal to the working class is limited. To the poor it has virtually none. This has been shown quite clearly in the recent elections. In the North West for instance, where much of the left did unite behind the Greens they were unable to undercut the BNP’s vote.

The Left and Greens

Dealing with the Greens is difficult. They often position themselves as a party of the left. They can also be as fanatically sectarian as many on the left.

They have a policy of always standing. They stood against George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob in 2004. They refused to deal with Respect when it was formed. They always stand against the Socialist Party’s councillors in Lewisham. Deals with them that work are almost unheard of.

They have carved out an electoral niche for themselves in some of the new bodies that have been created under Labour such s the GLA. It is one they are willing to defend against all comers. This was shown most obviously by the reaction to No2EU.

This important initiative by the RMT and others was greeted in a most hostile fashion. Even the Green Left “condemned” it (the words of a their leading members who also went on to describe it as a “Stalinist inspired political disaster”, showing the Greens can be adept as anyone in the dark art of political invective).

The reaction of another leading member of the Green left was little different calling for the RMT to stand down in case it loses Jean Lambert her seat.

The fact that the Greens have managed to capture the bottom seats in a number of elected bodies under proportional representation voting systems seems to be giving rise to an assumed right of veto by the Greens over any force standing to the left of them. The argument that standing will lose Green X the seat will be the argument at every election.

A section of the left, most notably in Germany and Scandinavia joined the Greens in the 1980s as part of a retreat from class politics. The result was the propelling into power of the Green Party in Germany and elsewhere and rapid accommodation to the system and its priorities.

There is a threat of that happening here. You can already hear those siren voices inside Respect and on the left. The attraction is understandable, both if you take into the consideration the retreat of class politics and the relative success of the Greens compared to the rest of the left.

When fascists are winning seats in the European Parliament and the GLA the temptation to try short cuts and stop them can be overwhelming.

But to really face this challenge what we need is a party that can address the working class with class politics. The nature of the British electoral system, even when using some type of PR (the d’Hondt method used still tends to discriminate against smaller parties) and the political culture of this country means the electoral space on the left of the Labour Party can appear limited.

Yet the Green Party is not that party, and nor can it be. Its hostility to initiatives towards such a party has also shown that cohabitation and cooperation with the Greens is difficult to say the least.

Lessons of history

There is like a hundred years ago a large amount of churn going on in politics throughout Europe, and for once Britain is not an exception (even if it has started later and is happening more slowly). The two party system, with the two parties being that of the bourgeoisie and the trade unions is weakening considerably.

One hundred years ago in both Britain and America the end of a long period of economic growth and stability resulted in numerous challenges to the status quo. There was a fluorescence of movements from female suffrage to anti-colonialism and demands for social and economic reform. In the US it was the era of “progressivism”.

In Britain one of the most important changes that occurred was the creation of the Labour Party by the trade unions and the solidifying of a form of class consciousness (albeit reformist) that would be the bedrock of the workers’ movement for the next 80 years.

The “social democratic” party created was one of the most conservative in Europe, a symptom not of the innate conservatism of British society (in these years Britain and Ireland were amongst the most turbulent of European countries), but of the failure of the left to break more completely with the ideas of well-meaning liberal reform. The fact that so much of the ideology of the new party was formulated by those with elitist attitudes (such as the Webbs with their utterly disdainful view of the abilities of the working class) is indicative of this.

In the US the situation was different. The trade unions failed to form their own party, and the momentarily successful Socialist Party drifted apart and disappeared into a politically abstentionist syndicalism on the left whilst the “right” of the party were outflanked and absorbed by the middle class progressives from whom they had failed to differentiate themselves in any meaningful way.

Rather than moving to class politics, the putative forces of change were swept into broad ‘progressive’ alliances, which fed back into the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the American capitalist parties, the Republicans and Democrats.

Unity and independence

The project of the Green Party is a different one from ours. We believe that the working class needs a party that is based on class politics.

The Green Party is a middle class party of social reform that espouses a liberal cross class philosophy. It seeks to convince our rulers that it is in their own interest to change.

That is why we will not be joining the Greens, no matter how much more successful at the ballot box they may seem.

Nor should we should we be forming an unequal “alliance” with them, for in the future the left will probably have to fight against things they do, just as has happened in Europe.

But when it come to fighting for the things that working class people need, if the Greens fight we will unite to fight with them for a better world.

Link: Junius Blog - recommended!

Tackling the 'cancer' of BNP fascism - Salma Yaqoob

Tackling the 'cancer' of BNP fascism - Salma Yaqoob.

The election of two BNP MEPs has removed the cover on a political sewer that should have been sealed for all time. Nick Griffin, a man with a history of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial, now calls for "chemotherapy" against the Islamic "cancer" in Europe. The echoes of the past are deliberate. The choice of words is chilling.

Griffin's election has given the BNP unprecedented access to the media, and he is using it to promote the most vicious racism. His genocidal rantings towards Muslims followed his call for the sinking of ships carrying migrants from Africa to Europe - in other words the premeditated murder of men, women and children on a desperate voyage to escape poverty and oppression.

We should remind ourselves that almost 1 million people voted for the BNP in the European Elections. If there is a cancer in Europe, then it is the cancer of racism. Yet the response from the political establishment to Griffin's remarks has, so far, been less than overwhelming.

Defensiveness and political compromise has marked the response of mainstream parties to the rise of the BNP. It should be clear enough by now. This is not a temporary blip before we return to business as usual. Ignoring the BNP or playing down their successes will not make them go away. It is time for the anti-fascist movement to go on the offensive.

Griffin's Nazi-style outbursts cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant excess by a marginal figure. He knows what he is doing. He wants to make legitimate what was once illegitimate. He aims to shift the centre of gravity of political debate sharply to the right. He knows that his more extreme rhetoric is in tune with his party's membership, and large swathes of his voters. But he also knows that every time mainstream politicians bend to his agenda in an attempt to occupy ground he is staking out, that the racist argument is strengthened.

It is a pattern we have seen all too frequently in recent years. Faced with a rise in racism, politicians seek to ride both horses at once: deploring racism while conceding ever more political ground to the far right.

Isn't this exactly what Gordon Brown was doing when he called for "local homes for local people"? Concerns about housing are undoubtedly genuine. There are too few affordable homes. But that is because successive governments have relied on the market to provide what it patently cannot do. What should be done is to tackle this policy failure, which would provide affordable homes for all those in need. Furthermore, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has revealed that 9 out of 10 social housing residents were born in Britain, giving a lie to the BNP myths bout "local people" losing out to immigrants and asylum seekers. Instead of focusing on these realities, voters are told that their prejudices are justified and that the government will do what the BNP cannot. It is a tactic that is both cynical and ineffective.

Let us be clear. The response to Griffins call to "sink the boats" cannot be one of pledging to do everything possible to keep out immigrants short of launching missiles at defenceless people. His call for "chemotherapy" against Muslims must be met with robust challenge, and not by conceding that fears of Islam in Europe are justified. The alternative is to accept that ever more extreme and dangerous fascist rhetoric will define the nature of political debate in our society.

Those who promote fear and hatred of African immigrants knocking at our door, or of the Muslims already within the gates of Europe, have to be openly and directly confronted. Their arguments have to be dealt with head on.

It is not legitimate to blame migrants or refugees for the recession. They were not the ones who became rich beyond anyone's dreams while gambling away our economy. It is not legitimate to blame immigrants for rising unemployment. They did not close our factories and devastate our manufacturing base. It is not legitimate to blame ‘outsiders' for the housing crisis. They are not the ones who passed legislation that strangled the ability of local councils to build new housing on the scale we need.

And it is not legitimate to scapegoat Muslims, who represent just 3% of the population, for any supposed threat to British identity. The recent Gallup poll on Muslim integration revealed that while only half the UK population very strongly identifies with being British, 77% of Muslims did so. And only 17% of British Muslims wanted to live in an area consisting mostly of people of the same religious and ethnic background as themselves, compared to 33% of the population as a whole.

This is the positive side of our multicultural society. Being ‘different' is not a sign of alienation from society as a whole. Yet while Muslims increasingly identify with Britain and value its mix of people and faiths, more and more people conclude that Muslims are a breed apart. There is a gulf between the reality of our lives and the perception that is created by a constant stream of horror stories.

Today, it is anti-Muslim racism that is at the cutting edge of the fascist strategy. It is effective because it feeds on the suspicion and prejudice that is the theme of so much mainstream discussion of our lives as British Muslims.

Its consequences are real. Already, there are signs that attacks on mosques and individual Muslims may be rising. The police are warning of the danger of far-right terrorism. And, earlier this month we saw an openly racist provocation in Birmingham city centre, under the guise of a protest against "Islamic extremism" - a label that the organiser made clear applied to all Muslims.

We, as British Muslims, have a direct and immediate interest in defeating this fascist threat. The anti-fascist movement must reach out to Muslim communities who are at the sharp end of BNP attacks. But the rise in racism is not only a threat to Muslims. The BNP may be playing down their anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism in order to drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest of society. But to the BNP we are all "racial foreigners" - our very existence as British people denied.

We have to not only unite all those targeted by the BNP, with every possible ally who rejects racism and fascism. We have to also positively assert our multicultural and pluralist society. It is a message of hope that is in tune in an increasingly interconnected world. It is a source of strength and vibrancy. We are one society and many cultures. And we will only remain so if we are prepared to stand up and be counted.

Salma Yaqoob is the Leader of the Respect Party and a councillor for Sparkbrook in Birmingham

Link: Unite Against Fascism
Link: Respect
Link: Stop Britain’s Nazis: come to Unite Against Fascism’s national conference on Sat 18 July:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Wearing the burqa is neither Islamic nor socially acceptable

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Wearing the burqa is neither Islamic nor socially acceptable -The Independent.

To deny face-to-face interaction is to deny our shared humanity.

I am a Shia Muslim and I abhor the burqa. I am offended by the unchallenged presumption that women covering their heads and bodies and now faces are more pious and true than am I.

Islam in all its diverse forms entitles believers to a personal relationship with Allah – it cuts out middlemen, one reason its appeal extended to so many across the world. You can seek advice from learned scholars and imams, but they cannot come between your faith and the light of God. Today control freaks who claim they have a special line to the Almighty have turned our world dark. Neo-conservative Islamic codes spread like swine flu, an infection few seem able to resist.

The disease is progressive. It started 20 years ago with the hijab, donned then as a defiant symbol of identity, now a conscript's uniform. Then came the jilbab, the cloak, fought over in courts when schoolgirls were manipulated into claiming it as an essential Islamic garment. If so, hell awaits the female leaders of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Soon, children as young as four were kitted up in cloaks and headscarves ("so they get used to it, and then later wear the full thing," said a teacher to me who works at a Muslim girls' school) and now for the graduation gown, a full burqa, preferably with dark glasses.

White liberals frame this sinister development in terms of free choice and tolerance. Some write letters to this paper: What is the problem? It is all part of the rich diversity of our nation. They can rise to this challenge, show they are superhuman when it comes to liberty and forbearance.

They might not be quite so sanguine if their own daughters decided to be fully veiled or their sons became fanatic Islamicists and imposed purdah in the family. Such converts are springing up in Muslim families all over the land. Veils predate Islam and were never an injunction (modesty of attire for men and women is). Cultural protectionism has long been extended to those who came from old colonies, in part to atone for imperial hauteur. Redress was necessary then, not now.

What about legitimate fears that to criticise vulnerable ethnic and racial groups validates the racism they face? Racism is an evil but should never be used as an alibi to acquit oppressions within black and Asian or religious communities. That cry was used to deter us from exposing forced marriages and dowry deaths and black-upon-black violence.

Right-wing think tanks and President Sarkozy of France scapegoat Muslims for political gain and British fascists have turned self-inflicted "ethnic" wounds into scarlet propaganda. They do what they always have done. Self-censorship will not stop them but it does stop us from dealing with home-grown problems or articulating objections to reactionary life choices like the burqa. Muslim women who show their hair are becoming an endangered species. We must fight back. Our covered-up sisters do not understand history, politics, struggles, their faith or equality. As Rahila Gupta, campaigner against domestic violence, writes: "This is a cloth that comes soaked in blood. We cannot debate the burqa or the hijab without reference to women in Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where the wearing of it are heavily policed and any slippages are met with violence." What happened to solidarity?

Violent enforcement is evident in Britain too. A fully veiled young chemistry graduate once came to my home, her body covered in cuts, tears, bites, bruises, all happily hidden from view. Security and social cohesion are all threatened by this trend – which is growing exponentially.

As for the pathetic excuse that covering up protects women from male lasciviousness – it hasn't stopped rapists in the most conservative Muslim nations. And what a slur on decent Muslim men, portrayed as sexual predators who cannot look upon a woman without wanting her.

We communicate with each other with our faces. To deny that interaction is to deny our shared humanity. Unreasonable community or nationalistic expectations disconnect essential bonds. Governments should not accommodate such demands. Naturists can't parade on the streets, go to school or take up jobs unless they cover their nakedness. Why should burqaed women get special consideration?

Their veils are walls, keeping them in and us out. We need an urgent, open conversation on this issue – which divides the Muslim intelligensia as much as the nation. Our social environment, fragile and precious, matters more than choice and custom should to British Muslims. If we don't compromise for the greater good, the future looks only more bitter and bleak. Saying so doesn't make me the enemy of my people.

Link: More from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

The wheels come off “the good war” in Afghanistan by Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition

The wheels come off “the good war” in Afghanistan by Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition.

We have had weeks of government and army propaganda selling the “good war” in Afghanistan as being for the benefit of the Afghan people and as necessary to Britain's interests. There has been:

• Endless stories in the tabloid media about "our boys" heroism bringing "stability and security" to Afghanistan;

• Armed Services Day on 27 June, with army parades and other events up and down the country glorifying mass murder as a career;

• The sponsoring by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) of toys depicting British soldiers as "action heroes";

• The rigid control of journalists reporting the war to ensure only the MoD's version of events gets media coverage.

All of this has been aimed at portraying the war in Afghanistan as an honourable cause on its way to being won. It was meant to culminate in a major British offensive in Helmand Province codenamed Operation Panther's Claw.

Biggest military operation

The biggest military operation by the British military since the invasion in 2001 was always as much a propaganda exercise to sell the war to the British people, two thirds of whom oppose the war in Afghanistan, as a military exercise with coherent aims. As even the pro-war Observer newspaper commented, "The reality is that the war in Afghanistan is increasingly aimless and lacking in coherent strategy."

It was utterly predictable that the wheels would come off the propaganda wagon trying to promote the "good war" with a troop "surge" in Helmand, not least because the Taliban were understandably not too keen to hang around to be incinerated by the horrific firepower used by the US and British military. They simply melted away.

Occasional hit and run tactics were still enough to inflict image denting casualties on the British army. Within the space of ten days, from 1-10 July, ten British soldiers were killed, including the highest ranking army officer to die in battle since the Falklands War in 1982. A number of others were seriously injured, adding to the statistic which we never read about in the mainstream media, that a British soldier has a one in eight chance of being seriously injured or contracting a serious illness when deployed to Afghanistan.

"For the good people of Afghanistan"

The latest British fatality brings the number killed in Afghanistan to 179, equalling the fatalities in Iraq.

According to the army commander of the latest dead soldier, "He laid down his life for his country and for the good people of Afghanistan". This is simply nonsense. He laid down his life for a war which many senior British officers say privately — and a few publicly — is unwinnable.

He sacrificed his life because Gordon Brown — as much a warmongerer as his predecessor — is determined to hold on to the coat tails of America's imperial strategy, wherever it takes British foreign policy, whatever the costs in the lives of those sent to kill and be killed in foreign lands, and whatever the financial cost to a British economy now so indebted that essential services such as the NHS, education and social services face draconian cuts.

Perhaps even the pro-war media is realising the game is up. The Observer now says there has to be "a final burying of the 'war on terror' rhetoric and the idea that what happens in Afghanistan presents a serious security threat that challenges us in an existential way... What is needed is a serious debate about what we are doing in Afghanistan".

The Observer concludes that without this debate, "the war in Afghanistan can only drag on, with deaths on all sides". Such a debate can only reach one conclusion: there is no possibility of stability or security in Afghanistan while a single foreign soldier remains in the country.

It is for this reason that the anti-war movement needs to maintain the highest level of active opposition to a war that is killing Afghan civilians at double the rate of a year ago and bringing endless devastation to country ravaged by the invading armies.

London Public Meeting: Monday 13 July: »The good war? Afghanistan in the Media...

Sign the Troops Out of Afghanistan petition here...

Link: Stop The War Coalition
Link: Military Families Against the War

Respect - which way now?

Respect - which way now?

At the Respect National Council meeting held in London on 27th June, a discussion was held regarding the strategy Respect should adopt in the aftermath of the Westminster expenses scandals and the recent European Parliament election results, including the election of two BNP members in the North of England.

There have been a variety of analyses of these results such as those published by Salma Yacoob and Southwark Respect branch (see this blog lower down).

In advance of the meeting a motion was submitted by National Council member Nick Wrack for discussion. However, this motion was ruled out of order by the National Chair Kay Phillips as it was received after the deadline for motions that she had set prior to the meeting. As a result this motion will now be discussed at the next National Council meeting, to be held on September 12th. It was the feeling of the National Council that this motion deserved wider debate across the organisation and so we are asking that branches and/or individual members consider the issues involved prior to the next National Council.

If individuals, groups of members or supporters or branches wish to make comments with regard to this motion please could they send them by email to myself, the National Secretary, at clive@respectnorthwest.org prior to 5th September so that these comments may be circulated to all the members of the National Council.

Yours in solidarity,

Clive Searle

MOTION by Nick Wrack
This Respect National Committee notes the resolution headed Respect perspectives (elections) that was agreed at the 2008 Respect conference. This included the following:

1. "Conference recognises that Respect cannot, at this stage, present an alternative at elections except in a few places. Conference therefore agrees that Respect will seek to work with other organisations and individuals who also want to build a leftwing alternative, with a view to presenting the broadest possible left-wing challenge at elections. This could include electoral alliances, non-aggression pacts, joint lists and other such methods of collaboration."

We believe that it is imperative that there is the biggest left-wing electoral challenge possible at the next general election, to give working-class people the opportunity to vote for candidates who represent their interests.

We note the continuing fall in the Labour vote.

We note also the recent collaboration between the RMT, the CPB, SP, AGS and others in NO2EU. We also note the recent Open Letter from the SWP.

We would welcome talks between Respect and these organizations and others with the aim of creating a left-wing electoral coalition to challenge at the next General Election.

In order to maximize impact it would be best if this coalition could agree to stand under a single name and with a common minimum programme.

We therefore agree to write to the above named organizations to propose that talks are set up to discuss these issues.

Proposed by Nick Wrack (past National Secretary of Respect)

Editors Note: The Editor of this bog would urge all Respect members and branches to support this motion at the September National Council of Respect - let your branch know your views (members can use the E-mail address posted above in this article)

Link: Respect
Link: Statement on left unity - Southwark Respect

Why not build the houses? - Morning Star

Why not build the houses? - Morning Star Comment

It is always frustrating when you watch a government palpably missing the point and failing to do something which is clearly necessary.

And it is even more so when the government in question is a Labour one, a government which should surely be able to add two and two to make four.

But we should probably have got used to it by now, given that new Labour has demonstrated an ability to miss the point at every available opportunity.

And new Labour's Cabinet shows no inclination to change its dreary ways.

We have an economy which is struggling to keep its, and our, heads above water. We have the best part of three million people unemployed, even by the government's phoney figures.

And that government is sitting by, merely trying to make small gestures to assist the private sector to reflate an economy which is stagnating, starved of cash by a banking sector, in large part funded by the taxpayer, that seems more interested in its bonuses than in recapitalisation.

And we have a construction industry that is overflowing with skilled and idle workers, without the jobs that they need and without the opportunity to exercise those skills. All this while we have a crisis in housing which is reaching epidemic proportions.

According to the National Association of Estate Agents, nearly one in four people claim they are unable to get a mortgage due to the tighter lending criteria being used by banks and building societies.

In addition, the Council of Mortgage Lenders says that eight out of 10 young people are receiving help from their parents to raise the huge deposits they need to buy their first home, which may be all right if your parents have that sort of cash to hand, but doesn't help the majority of young working people one iota.

And, in the midst of this, Shelter Scotland is warning that the number of council homes for rent in Scotland is at its lowest for 50 years.

The charity warns that the figure is 18 per cent lower than in 1998 and the lowest figure since 1959.

As Shelter Scotland director Graeme Brown said: " The figure lays bare the chasm between the number of homes needed and the number available to Scotland's people.

"It's a crisis that's built up over time and can only be solved by building more homes."

And the position in England and Wales is little better, if at all. But the private-sector housing industry is dying on its feet, starved of capital and, given the lack of mortgages for first-time buyers, neglecting the entry-level market where housing is most needed.

The government has made timid noises about changing the system to allow local authorities to recommence housebuilding. However, it's all too little and too late.

A scheme to answer this problem is certainly not rocket science. It's not even difficult to outline.

Release local authorities to restart the housebuilding projects that were, since the second world war, such an important and positive part of their function.

Stop ploughing billions of taxpayers' cash into banks which just pocket it and steer it towards large-scale housing development to answer the clear and obvious need.

And move away from the private sector and back into direct labour for this scheme, cutting out the profiteering cowboys who have been soaking up huge percentages of any public money that they can lay their hands on.

Workers in building, in manufacturing, in transport and in all the myriad skills that the construction industry needs would all gain from having the work.

More cash is pumped into the economy and the claimants become the consumers again. Everyone benefits, those needing housing most of all.

Unfortunately, it's still beyond new Labour to grasp that the bankers and the profiteers have no idea of social responsibility beyond profit.

It ain't rocket science, but it appears that it's still beyond new Labour's free marketeers.

Link: Morning Star
Link: Defend Council Housing

"Left unity and Class Politics" by Ian Donaovan

"Left unity and Class Politics" by Ian Donaovan

This is a contribution to the debate about the results of the European and local elections by Ian Donovan (Secretary Southwark Respect).

The analysis of the Euro Elections by Salma Yaqoob (Statement on the euro-election results, 8th June), makes a number of pertinent observations about the reasons for the disaster of the BNP’s winning two seats in the European Parliament.

One point she gets right is that “Labour is wholly to blame for its own crisis and has to take a large share of the responsibility for creating the conditions in which the far right is growing.” Many of the other things she says about the impact of the recession on working class people, about the attacks of the Labour government, the demoralisation which these are inflicting, and the danger that this can drive people into the arms of the far right, are correct.

Yet the political perspective she puts forward as a solution to this situation is badly flawed. Salma is advocating an alliance of ‘progressive’ forces to block the advance of the far right, centred on the Green Party and soft-left elements in Compass. This block assembles forces that are incapable of putting forward, or hostile to, the kind of working class politics that is needed to roll back the encroachment of the fascists in traditionally strong centres of the labour movement such as Yorkshire and the North West. The alliance of liberal, middle class forces she advocates will not stop the BNP; their aims and ideologies will not be attractive in the main to working class people alienated by New Labour whose alientation is fundamentally driven by economic hardship and class anger, which the BNP aims to exploit and misdirect against scapegoats such as immigrants and refugees.

Salma writes: “The broad left must work together, irrespective of party affiliation, to maximise the impact of the progressive vote at the next General Election.” This is wrong, and will not undermine the BNP because the question of a new party, separate from New Labour that will stand up for workers against the Labour government and all its neo-liberal attacks, is central to politically cutting the ground from under the BNP. We do not need a ‘broad left … irrespective of party affiliation’, we need a new broad party of the working-class left that puts class politics at the centre of its perspective. The alliance she is proposing is a cross-class alliance of Respect with the Green Party, and Compass and other soft-lefts.

The Green Party does not, in its ideology, appeal to workers as a class. It does have paper policies on a number of questions that are progressive and would benefit workers, such as opposition to privatisation and anti-union laws, but its central appeal is to people of all classes who want to stop climate change and save the planet for future generations. It has people in it who are sympathetic to workers struggles, but there is also a significant element who see the growth of the human population, and hence mainly of the working class and the poor, as one of the central causes of environmental degradation.

A recent YouGov survey taken between 29th May and 4th June – just before the European Elections took place – is very revealing about the class character of the Green Party’s support. The survey showed that in terms of social grade or occupation, the Green Party’s intended voters had the highest percentage – 64% – of those with a high income (grade ABC1) of all the major parties. That is, of professional people and the like. It also had the lowest percentage of those surveyed in social grade C2DE (36%) – which is predominantly composed of unskilled manual workers.

Conversely, the BNP has the lowest percentage of those in social grade ABC1 – 39%, and the highest percentage in social grade C2DE – 61% of all the major parties.

This is fairly indicative of the reason why it is an illusory idea that the Green Party can be the vehicle for undermining the potential appeal of the BNP to disillusioned working class voters. The Green Party, ‘progressive’ policies notwithstanding, appeals in the main to a middle class, not a working class, constituency, and because of that there is a real social gulf between its base of support and the kinds of alienated working class people, impoverished by the recession, that are in some cases being driven towards the BNP. It will take a completely different kind of politics, which centres its appeal on defending working class interests, to undercut the demagogy of the BNP and undermine this potential base of support.

Compass also is a middle class force. It is the loyal opposition within New Labour, and its left-wing criticisms of Blair and Gordon Brown do not go very far at all. As an example of this, on one key question of importance to working class people above all it showed its true colours. On the question of the housing crisis at its conference on 13 June, it failed to invite a speaker from Defend Council Housing – a campaign that does exactly what it says on the tin – in favour of a speaker from Shelter, the homelessness charity, which is fairly close to the government and places much store in promoting home ownership and first time buyers, and working with Housing Associations and other ‘social landlords’ who are in fact thinly-disguised private-sector organisations. Council Housing is not high on its ‘realistic’ agenda.

At the conference those attending were regaled by the likes of Harriet Harman and Liberal Democrat MPs, as well as the more hesitant, softer left trade union leaders like Billy Hayes. Also speaking was Caroline Lucas, the Green MEP who herself previously made clear her own middle class politics by saying that she equally opposes politics being at the behest of big business or the trade unions. Salma thus gives her credibility as an anti-war activist and Respect councillor to this gathering whose whole thrust is all-inclusive, classless politics hostile to independent working class political activity. This is seriously mistaken.

Compass itself has proved spineless in the face of pressure from the Labour leadership, including on issues that are close to Salma’s heart such as the Iraq War and the ‘war on terror’. Its main figures, most notably Jon Cruddas, supported the Iraq war and only belatedly decided they had been mistaken on this when the allies got bogged down and Bush/Blair’s political justifications were completely discredited. And then there is Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith’s ill-fated proposals for 42 days detention without charge. Jon Cruddas and co showed their true colours by voting for that in parliament. Most recently, Cruddas was seen denouncing those supporters of Unite Against Fascism who chucked eggs at BNP leader and fascist MEP Nick Griffin outside Parliament and disrupted his press conference.

Salma writes that “The challenge for the left is to renew itself and reassert some basic socialist critiques and solutions into mainstream political debate.” It is certainly positive to see a call for socialist politics as a road forward. But the vehicle for socialist politics is the working class; the perspective of Compass, Ken Livingstone’s Progressive London, the Greens etc is not to found a new party to fight for the independent interests of our class but rather to construct multi-class alliances, either for elections or for pressure politics between elections.

The prime example of this kind of politics in practice was Ken Livingstone’s London Mayorality from 2000 to 2008, which came to include Liberals and Greens as part of a ‘progressive’ administration. Which as everyone knows, notwithstanding the Mayor’s refusal to buckle to Islamophobia, involved systematic concessions to the City, and such disgraceful actions as the Mayor calling on workers to scab on tube strikes. These incompatible and often treacherous political forces will never be a vehicle for socialism or anything like it – the best they will ever produce is something like Ken Livingstone’s administration.

This is totally ineffective as a perspective to combat BNP influence on working class people … the concessions Livingstone made to business, and even more the left cover he gave to New Labour, also helped undermine the left and in fact played an important role in paving the way for the BNP’s previous election gain of a representative on the GLA. It was correct to support Livingstone when he broke from Labour in 2000 to campaign against tube privatisation, and correct to defend his idiosyncratic left-talking administration against the Tory challenge of Boris Johnson in 2008 – though the difference between Livingstone and Johnson has not so far been as marked as predicted – but to put forward Livingstone’s London as a model of ‘socialist’ solutions, as this perspective implies, undermines and demobilises the radical potential to advance working class politics that Respect originally had in it.

Finally, Salma’s criticism of No2EU and the SLP cannot go unanswered. She implies that simply by standing and refusing to unite behind the Green candidate in North West England, they allowed the BNP to win a seat for Nick Griffin. It is a conceit of the Greens’ that in this area at least, they were the barrier to the BNP gaining a seat. Yet the figures don’t add up. Salma points at the fact that the Greens fell behind Griffin by around 5000 votes, and laments that if only a small fraction of the combined No2EU and SLP vote of around 50,000 had gone to the Greens, Peter Cranie and not Griffin would have been in the European Parliament. Yet hundreds of thousands of votes were lost to the main parties in the same region – particularly to Labour.

The Green challenge was well known and long prepared. Why focus on the relatively few votes of the two working class campaigns, which were in a weak position in this election for well-known reasons, and yet fail to explain why the Greens did not have the ability to win over the necessary votes from among these many more thousands of disillusioned Labour supporters particularly? This, I think, says something about the class nature of the Greens as explored above. The allegation that simply by standing, the weak working class groupings were responsible for the BNP advance sounds like making an excuse for the inability of the long-established Greens to attract those many more from Labour they might have been expected to.

Salma’s statement, while aiming to promote what she sees as left unity, is in fact promoting something that is non-working-class in its content, and really involves middle class forces lording it over the workers. The shrill tone of various ‘left’ Greens in ‘condemning’ a workers organisation, the RMT, for initiating a left-wing ticket for the Euro elections, reflected sheer middle class arrogance and hardly a democratic spirit either. No wonder the Greens failed to win over disillusioned working class support from Labour – many of whom detest the BNP but failed to vote at all. To mobilise these people politically, a working class party and clearly working class politics are necessary. That is the only kind of ‘progressive’ politics that can be effective on this political terrain. We need unity of the working class left, and that is what leading Respect figures like Salma should be putting their energy into building, not promoting a form of cross-class politics that for all its pretensions, can never be truly socially progressive.

Link: Southwark Respect
Link: Southwark Respect statement on the European election results and left unity
Link: The Junius Blog

The sacking of the Lindsey workers is a challenge for the whole working class

The sacking of the Lindsey workers is a challenge for the whole working class - Socialist Worker

Support this statement on the construction dispute.

The sacking of 900 workers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) is an attack on every trade unionist in the country.

Total used the sacking of 51 workers as a threat to activists at the site. They have now moved to break the recent unofficial strike movement based around LOR. If the employers succeed in breaking this well organised group of workers then every trade unionist will suffer.

There is only one response to this outrageous attack. That is to shutdown every construction site, every refinery and every power station. Workers across the movement have to move now to support the workers at LOR.

The fact that workers have moved to do exactly that should be applauded.

Unite and the GMB unions repudiated the action at Lindsey. They say that they were forced to by the anti-union laws. But 12 years into a Labour government that Paul Kenny, Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson tell us to back why are these laws still in place.

There are 2.2 million on the dole now and soon there will soon be 3 million out of work. A job goes every 30 seconds. We have just seen British Airways ask their workers to work for nothing.

Its time to resist now. These sackings are a challenge to the whole working class movement. We have to back the construction workers to the hilt.

Earlier this year on some construction picket lines the slogan "British jobs for British workers" appeared. Every construction strike is now branded as "anti foreigner". This is not true.

But to win support from the whole movement it needs to be made crystal clear that the battle is for every worker to have decent conditions and one rate for the job, no matter where they are from.

Every trade unionist, every workplace has to get behind this fight.

Sometimes there are pivotal moments in the history of the workers’ movement. The sacking of the printers at Wapping in the aftermath of the miners’ strike was one such moment. It was used to intimidate the whole working class. At a time when resistance to the economic crisis is just developing we can't allow this to happen again.

This is a battle for everyone. We have to build the maximum possible solidarity, urgently. A victory for construction workers would be an inspiration for every worker who is fighting back for the right to work, this is a fight the labour movement has to win.

Add your name to this statement. Email michaelb@swp.org.uk

© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

Link: Construction workers walk out over union-busting - SW
Link: Exposed: construction bosses’ secret plans to block national strike - SW
Link: Total war: Protests solid as 650 workers sacked - Morning Star

Mark Steel: So this is New Labour's legacy...

Mark Steel: So this is New Labour's legacy... (missed this one last week but cant resist posting late) - from The Independent.

They sacrificed all to get elected and now can't get elected to anything.

What a pathetic "rebellion". The Labour Party is in its worst state for a century and all it took for their leader to save himself was a sentence about finding a vision, and a promise he would "learn to listen". So after 10 years as Chancellor and two asPM he's going to start seeing and hearing. Next time he's challenged he'll promise to learn to crawl and eat solids.

Similarly his speech last Friday, when it seemed he needed to deliver an inspired and courageous flourish to save his job, was a bumbling splutter of incoherence that would have embarrassed a regional manager announcing the quarterly figures for envelope sales. If Gordon Brown had been Braveheart, his speech to his troops as the English started to charge would have gone "Now then – we are in a, er, er, a crisis of being attacked by archers that is in as much as it is global in its nature, which requires a global strategy of yes lances which is to say shields, but the Scottish people expect us to deal with that global and that is what I intend to to to do, er, do to."

But that was enough, because then most of his ministers made statements such as, "Of course the Prime Minister is fully aware he's a useless tosspot, but the others are even worse, so let's stop this in-fighting as there is still much work for this government to bugger up."

Because none of them, in all the billions of hours of interviews and intrigue, either for or against Brown, have said a single thing they believe their party should be doing. Instead they make statements about "needing to reconnect with voters" but to do that they'd have to come on television going, "I'm a bloody disgrace, I am. And you should see the expenses I rake in, alright for some ain't it. I'm never voting for me again, I can tell you."

But there's no clue about what they want to do differently. Their last seven years looks like one long fiasco, from Iraq to reverence for a disastrous banking system, but there's no one prepared even tosuggest how they got in this mess and how it might be put right. So none of them can make a case for being any better, except for having a cheerier smile, so no one comes forward.

They might as well have a frog as their leader, and Ed Balls would be on Newsnight telling us the frog isn't the problem, and the way he responded to some sharp criticism by hopping off the table shows his determination, because they haven't got a clue. This is why they're in a much worse mess than the one in 1983. Back then, although the election was a disaster, the Labour Party had active branches in every area, with thousands of young members bursting with ideas of why they wanted to run local councils or the country. Now the branches barely exist, debate has been eliminated, and all that's left are careerists frightened of losing their careers.

For example, at four o'clock last Friday Caroline Flint was adamant she supported Brown, but two hours later she couldn't stand him. So either this was because she'd been snubbed for promotion, or she's genuine, and she honestly thinks he did a wonderful job for Labour for 15 years but then did one dreadful thing that negated all that, at around half past four.

This is New Labour's legacy. They sacrificed principles, debates, humanity, purpose and personality for the prize of getting elected. But now they can't get elected to anything so there is absolutely nothing left.

Link: Respect

Open Letter to the left: How we can join together

Open Letter to the left: How we can join together.

Michael Rosen welcomes the Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) open letter to the left and discusses how he thinks unity can be achieved.

The open letter to the left is a good move. We desperately need to make the things that unite us count more than the things that divide us.

The simplest way to do this would be to create some kind of federation or umbrella organisation.

At this stage, a federation need be no more than an electoral pact – an agreement to not contest candidates from each other’s groups or parties. This could also mean that we could put out some kind of joint platform, with shared publicity.

Obviously this kind of thing isn’t easy. There are long histories of mistrust and splits, and there are some big disagreements over ways of interpreting the past and the present.

The question in front of us now though is whether we would gain more or less by staying divided? I think it’s clear – the answer is less.

This is not only a matter of developing a more effective way of organising. It’s also a matter of political wisdom and thought. None of us has a monopoly on that.

We all have insights and we all make mistakes – but in the long run we have to acknowledge that it is only the collective minds and deeds of like-minded people that can change the world.

What we have to work out is how best to pool and mix those words and deeds.

My own view is that a federation or umbrella is one way of doing this. The years of analysis and organisation that each group or party has worked out wouldn’t be thrown away. No one is being asked to give anything up.

However, in the act of co-operating, we will come up against different ways of working, different analyses.

There will be local and sectional knowledge that might not have been shared, but would be in a federal structure.

So, for example, I’ve just been in Dagenham. The British National Party (BNP) has a whole bunch of their people on the council. When you walk about the area, you see devastation. Ford’s pulled out, and more than 25,000 jobs have gone.

Right next to the deserted factories and car parks, the government is putting up a brand new prison. The politics is clear: who closed Ford? Ford. It wasn’t any of the groups that the BNP target that closed the factory. And what’s the New Labour response? Lock people up.

Now, this situation may or may nor prevail elsewhere. What we know is that this has to be fought in the locality dealing with the conditions on the site.

Federation

In a federation, it may be that one or other of our groups or organisations has done the most work in that locality. Then we should be grown-up enough to give that organisation pride of place and the rest of us do what we can to support them.

Across the country, this is likely to even out – more or less. If it isn’t absolutely even Stevens, so be it.

It will be more important to make the effort to unite than to get too worked up about perfect divvying up of electoral battlegrounds.

Four key names have emerged over the last few years who have strong local bases of support. In alphabetical order – George Galloway, Michael Lavalette, Dave Nellist and Salma Yaqoob. There are others all over the country.

It would be great if we could create a network and give it time to develop.

I wouldn’t want to prejudge anything more than that. Let’s leave that to our dreams and hopes. In the meantime, let’s be simple, practical and strong.

Link: Socialist Worker

John McDonnell: We need change now, Gordon

John McDonnell: We need change now, Gordon.

The Campaign Group had nothing to do with the coup attempt, but if Brown does not offer real change, I will back a challenge.

About a month ago the weekly discussion meeting of the Campaign Group of MPs focused on the imminent electoral wipeout of Labour in the coming European and local council elections. We decided to write to Gordon Brown to seek a meeting with him to see whether any common ground could be found on the policy changes needed to win back support for the party. No response was received.

Over the following weeks we refused to be dragged into either the plotting to oust Brown or the positioning by others seeking to fill his shoes if he fell. Our line was straightforward – there's no point in changing the faces at the top if there is no change in political direction.

When I then learned that No 10 was briefing journalists that Campaign Group members were involved in the email plot calling for Brown to go, I wrote again to the prime minister requesting that his people desist from this covert briefing. I told him straight that allegations about our involvement in this backstage plotting were untrue and that whatever political differences we had with him they were always expressed openly and honestly. I got no reply.

Few realistically doubted that the prime minister would survive this half-hearted attempted putsch. Nevertheless at the parliamentary Labour party meeting on Monday a chastened Brown for the first time admitted to weaknesses and mistakes and assured Labour MPs that lessons had been learned and gave the strong impression that changes would follow with intensive discussions within the PLP and party, and that a raft of new policies would be announced.

Labour MPs have taken false comfort in the Tories not surging ahead in the percentage share of the vote, ignoring the role Ukip plays in siphoning off Tory votes in European elections that largely return to the Tories in general elections. They cling to the statistic that Cameron needs a 7% swing to win the next election, which has only been achieved twice in the last century, forgetting that they themselves were party to just such an achievement only 12 years ago.

On Wednesday the first of the policy announcements on constitutional reform produced typical Brown-like long-winded, turgid consultations and committees of inquiry, stretching well beyond the election and possibly into infinity.

If Labour is to stand any chance of surviving at the next election, real change has to be visibly under way and progress demonstrated at the latest by the autumn.

A consensus checklist of what constitutes real change is emerging from many sources. Securing jobs by intervening in manufacturing and restoring trade union rights; securing homes by a mass local authority house-building programme; stopping the squandering of public resources by ending the privatisation of public services; reasserting the government's green credentials with no third runway; for young people freezing, as the first step towards abolishing, student fees; for pensioners restoring the link between pensions and earnings; halting the attacks on welfare; paying for our programme by fair taxation and cutting out the waste on the likes of Trident renewal and ID cards; and making government ruthlessly clean, open and fair with immediate electoral reform.

Most of the policy changes are blindingly obvious and readily implementable to re-establish our credentials with each section of the broad coalition that enthusiastically ensured the rout of the Tories and Labour's election in 1997.

These all seem straightforward, sensible and popular. But what happens if Brown refuses to contemplate real change? If we go beyond November without real change visibly under way, what hope is left of Labour not only remaining in government but also surviving as an effective political force at all?

At that stage the only responsible act in the long-term interests of our movement would be to offer a real change in political direction by mounting a challenge to the political leadership of the party and letting the members of the party decide. Let me give notice now that this is the path I will take. If this route is blocked again by MPs failing to nominate, then the alternative is Labour MPs making it clear at the next election that they stand on a policy platform of real change as "change candidates".

Of course, they will be standing as Labour candidates but binding together as a slate of candidates committed within Labour to advocating a change programme, setting out the policy programme they will be advocating as a group and supporting in parliament if elected. Only in this way can we demonstrate to the supporters that want to come home to Labour that there is the hope and prospect of change.

Link: Labour Representation Committee
Link: Respect

Southwark Respect welcomes the appeals for action to be taken to pose a united socialist alternative at the next general election.

The following statement was passed at a well-attended Southwark Respect branch meeting last night.

Southwark Respect welcomes the appeals of the last few days for action to be taken to pose a united socialist alternative at the next general election.

In the face of the recession and the growing assault on working class living standards the left needs to unite in defence of our class.

The recession is also being accompanied by its ugly outrider the rise of the fascists as a force in politics.

The BNP represent a real danger. The anger at the corruption of the mainstream politics linked into the worsening recession means that the BNP now have the opportunity to establish themselves as a permanent fixture on the political landscape, and to solidify a still soft voting base into a harder, more racist and more openly fascist one.

This has happened in theses elections not through a spectacular growth of the BNP vote, but by the collapse of the labour vote.

A strategy that merely relies on stacking up as many votes as possible against the Nazis cannot succeed.

Support for the BNP is growing out of the lack of hope and the fear which is now stalking working class communities.

An real alternative has to be posed.

That is why we in Southwark Respect supported NO2EU in this election. It was a temporary platform formed shortly before the election and though it had imperfections, it was a real attempt to grapple with this question.

Though it might not have staged a dramatic breakthrough, NO2EU together with the SLP got 326,000 votes, more than Respect (standing as the sole national left force) got in the 2004 European elections in aftermath of the Iraq War. It also did better than Respect did in some important working class areas such as Wales and the North East.

The vote was not as large as we would have liked, but it proved that there is still, despite the difficulties that the project of a new political force to the left of labour has experienced, the basis for such a party.

The experience of constructing a political alternative to Labour has proved to be a difficult and bruising one for the left.

The project has suffered a number of setbacks and the left is now hampered by the fact that after twelve years of Labour government it has not managed to build a political force that can seriously challenge the mainstream parties or the fascists, across the country.

The need for unity however presses heavy on all now. We cannot let previous strife prevent us uniting again. We should not allow past differences to blind us to the importance of the task in hand.

We notice that there is a growing realisation in the trade union movement that there is a need to pose a political alternative to Labour and stand candidates against in the general election. No2Eu is the most concrete example of this, but the PCS is also talking about standing candidates, the FBU remains disaffiliated and relations between Labour and the CWU have been stretched to breaking point.

We welcome the appeals put out by Bob Crow, the CPB and the SP following their joint work in NO2EU. We also we welcome the moves by the SWP and others to seek unity again with the rest of the left.

These moves will not immediately result in the kind of party that we believe is necessary, but they could be steps towards it.

We in Southwark Respect have long maintained that what the working class needs a new party, rooted in the labour movement, to represent its interests.

We welcome every step taken by the working class to find its own political voice again.

Note: The editor of this blog fully supports the motion passed by Southwark Respect.

Link: Southwark Respect

Open letter: Left must unite to create an alternative - SWP

Open letter: Left must unite to create an alternative.

An open letter to the left from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)

Labour’s vote collapsed to a historic low in last week’s elections as the right made gains. The Tories under David Cameron are now set to win the next general election.

The British National Party (BNP) secured two seats in the European parliament. Never before have fascists achieved such a success in Britain.

The result has sent a shockwave across the labour and anti-fascist movements, and the left.

The meltdown of the Labour vote and the civil war engulfing the party poses a question – where do we go from here?

The fascists pose a threat to working class organisations, black, Asian and other residents of this country – who BNP führer Nick Griffin dubs “alien” – our civil liberties and much else.

History teaches us that fascism can be fought and stopped, but only if we unite to resist it.

The SWP firmly believes that the first priority is to build even greater unity and resistance to the fascists over the coming months and years.

The BNP believes it has created the momentum for it to achieve a breakthrough. We have to break its momentum.

The success of the anti-Nazi festival in Stoke and the numbers of people who joined in anti-fascist campaigning shows the basis is there for a powerful movement against the Nazis.

The Nazis’ success will encourage those within the BNP urging a “return to the streets”.

This would mean marches targeting multiracial areas and increased racist attacks. We need to be ready to mobilise to stop that occurring.

Griffin predicted a “perfect storm” would secure the BNP’s success. The first part of that storm he identified was the impact of the recession.

The BNP’s policies of scapegoating migrants, black and Asian people will divide working people and make it easier to drive through sackings, and attacks on services and pensions.

Unity is not a luxury. It is a necessity. If we do not stand together we will pay the price for a crisis we did not cause.

The second lesson from the European elections is that we need a united fightback to save jobs and services.

If Cameron is elected he will attempt to drive through policies of austerity at the expense of the vast majority of the British people.

But the Tories’ vote fell last week and they are nervous about pushing through attacks.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne told business leaders, “After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.”

We need to prepare for battle.

But there is a third and vital issue facing the left and the wider working class. The crisis that has engulfed Westminster benefited the BNP.

The revelations of corruption, which cabinet members were involved in, were too much for many Labour voters, who could not bring themselves to vote for the party.

One answer to the problem is to say that we should swallow everything New Labour has done and back it to keep David Cameron, and the BNP, out.

Yet it would take a miracle for Gordon Brown to be elected back into Downing Street.

The danger is that by simply clinging on we would be pulled down with the wreckage of New Labour.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS civil service workers’ union, has asked how, come the general election, can we ask working people to cast a ballot for ministers like Pat McFadden.

McFadden is pushing through the privatisation of the post office.

Serwotka proposes that trade unions should stand candidates.

Those who campaigned against the BNP in the elections know that when they said to people, “Don’t vote Nazi” they were often then asked who people should vote for.

The fact that there is no single, united left alternative to Labour means there was no clear answer available.

The European election results demonstrate that the left of Labour vote was small, fragmented and dispersed.

The Greens did not make significant gains either. The mass of Labour voters simply did not vote. We cannot afford a repeat of that.

The SWP is all too aware of the differences and difficulties involved in constructing such an alternative.

We do not believe we have all the answers or a perfect prescription for a left wing alternative.

But we do believe we have to urgently start a debate and begin planning to come together to offer such an alternative at the next election, with the awareness that Gordon Brown might not survive his full term.

One simple step would be to convene a conference of all those committed to presenting candidates representing working class interests at the next election.

The SWP is prepared to help initiate such a gathering and to commit its forces to such a project.

We look forward to your response.

© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

Link: Socialist Worker

No2EU calls for unity to defeat the BNP

No2EU calls for unity to defeat the BNP

No2EU:Yes to Democracy coalition convener Bob Crow has called for urgent discussions involving socialist organisations, campaigns and trade unions to build a concerted response following the election of two fascists from the BNP to the European Parliament.

No2EU was the first progressive EU-critical coalition to stand in Britain in any election and it gained 153,236 votes despite an almost complete media blackout.

The combined vote in Thursday’s poll for No2EU, the Socialist Labour Party and some of the smaller left parties stacks up to nearly a third of a million votes - just over 2% of the total. In Scotland, the combined left vote was close to 4%.

Meanwhile, the Labour share of the vote has dropped by a massive 31%, the Lib Dems by over 7% and the Tories, despite all the hype, have only managed a tiny increase in share with turnout collapsing to just over 30%.

Bob Crow said today:

“There is no question that the BNP have benefitted from the collapse of the establishment political parties and from media coverage that has pumped them up like celebrities on “I’m a Nazi - Get Me Out of Here.”

“Sections of the press, which have deliberately ignored anti-establishment parties from the left, need to take a long, hard look at the way the blanket coverage they have given to the fascists from the BNP has contributed to their success.

“But it’s the collapse of public support for the three main parties - each of which is pro-business, pro-EU and supportive of the anti-union laws - which has created the conditions for the scapegoat-politics of the BNP to thrive.

“The fascists support in former mining communities like Barnsley is shocking and throws down a massive challenge to the Labour and Trade Union movement.

“Along with our colleagues from the SLP and other left groups we won nearly a third of a million votes. From No2EU we won over 150,000 supporters from a standing start in the teeth of a media blackout. That gives us a solid platform to build from.

“We now need urgent discussions with political parties, campaigns and our colleagues in other unions like the CWU to develop a political and industrial response to this crisis.

”I also want to pay tribute to our colleagues from the Hope Not Hate campaign. There is no doubt that without their tireless efforts the BNP would have won even more seats,” he said.

Link: No2EU - Yes To Democracy

Seizing the moment by Steve McGiffen

Seizing the moment by Steve McGiffen - from the Morning Star.

Last month I used my column to try to persuade No2EU - Yes to Democracy to drop its abstentionist line and, should it win seats in the European Parliament, use them to further resistance to neoliberalism and the fight for socialism.

I don't want to return to that subject exactly, though I note that, while there has been no public evolution of this position, candidate Dave Nellist said recently in an interview on these pages that he felt that the No2EU list could and should become the basis of a new workers' party.

That such a party is urgently needed seems to me to be beyond dispute.

The game is well and truly up with the Labour Party. The threat from the BNP must be countered - and fast.

We need a mass activist party and we need it now.

Parliamentary politics is in deep disrepute.

Britain and Europe are run by crooks and liars in the pay of corporate capital. The danger is that the now almost universal understanding that this is the case is currently most likely to benefit the enemies of democracy.

On the other hand, the combination of financial crisis, open greed in the corporate world and corruption in politics offers the left an opportunity to reconstruct itself.

There is a country not very far from here where the left has spent the last 15 years successfully doing just that.

In 1994 the Dutch parliament contained not a single radical socialist.

To the left of the Dutch Labour Party there was nothing but a ragbag of Europhile remnants of moribund left parties, the so-called Green Left.

In the general election of that year, however, the radical left Socialist Party (SP) entered national politics for the first time, winning two seats.

In 2005 the SP, which by then had grown considerably in membership and had nine seats, led the campaign against the European constitution.

Almost two-thirds of the Dutch electorate voted No to this neoliberal con trick.

Over the next two years, the SP tripled its vote in local, regional and national elections.

It is now the country's biggest opposition party both inside parliament, where it has 25 seats, and outside.

With almost 50,000 members, the SP has never succumbed to the tempting comforts of parliamentary politics.

It remains an active presence on the streets of the Netherlands, in its workplaces and social organisations, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with every campaign of resistance to neoliberalism, to the destruction of social provision and of the environment and to the undermining of democracy by political parties which have forgotten what the word means.

Every SP member of parliament, local representative and employee is paid a salary based on the average skilled workers' wage (ED: this needs further discussion as a lot depends on what you mean by an average skilled workers wage).

Those who receive a salary from the state must comply with a rule under which any amount above that level is handed over to the party.

Expenses are paid against receipts and only against receipts.

Such a rule should be the first principle of any socialist political party.

Such a party is badly needed in Britain and must be organised in good time to fight the next general election.

It should adopt a broad but clearly anti-neoliberal platform and make it clear that it will not be confining its activities to Parliament or to council chambers but will be out on the streets and standing at the side of everyone and anyone who is fighting back.

It should be active in its solidarity with every victim of workplace exploitation, of racism or sexism, every person resisting the degradation of our environment, the sullying of public life and the cynicism of the whole pack of political opportunists, from the formerly social-democratic Labour Party through to the BNP.

People want their vote to make a difference.

They want people to represent them who understand the real problems of real people.

If we offer a clear alternative and avoid speaking as if it were 1917 or 1968, or as if we have all the answers and are therefore by definition not interested in listening to people's views and concerns, we can create a new political force capable of setting fear into the hearts of the political establishment.

The tired old argument that standing candidates against Labour will let the Tories in is now laughable.

The Labour Party no longer has the slightest claim on the loyalty of working people or the left.

In any case, it is in for a thorough tonking whatever we do or don't do, so we really don't need to worry about costing it votes.

They have spent the last quarter century collaborating with increasing enthusiasm in the theft of the people's property, not just in the case of the relatively trivial amounts stolen in fiddles expenses, but in the wholesale corporate trough-snouting that was privatisation and deregulation.

They have supported illegal wars and illegal torture camps.

They claim to be "green" while planning new airport runways and new motorways.

They claim to respect civil liberties while allowing the police to behave like the militarised force which is the hallmark of a repressive state.

I believe in a broad and diverse socialist movement, but surely not so broad that it includes the flimflam artists currently governing the country.

The left must seize this moment, before the far-right does.

A salary rule similar to that of the Dutch SP should be at the heart of our programme.

This would leave plenty of money to cover the legitimate, receipted expenses of MPs and other party personnel, reducing or even eliminating the need to claim reimbursement from the state.

Whatever is left would be used to run the party and finance campaigns.

If we tell the people the truth and show them that we live by our principles, we can yet reconstruct our movement, save democracy and begin to offer the real and effective resistance which Britain has not seen in a quarter of a century.

Steve McGiffen is editor of the EU-critical website Spectrezine.org. He is a former environmental adviser to the European Parliament's United European Left group.

Link: Morning Star
Link: No2EU - Yes to Democracy

No2EU - Yes to Democracy Election Broadcast

Vote No2EU - Yes to Democracy on June 4 (Election Broadcast)

The broadcast was televised on Channel 5 on May 26.

It will also be shown on the following stations and times:

* S4C – Wednesday May 27, 7.25pm (Welsh language)

* BBC One - Wednesday May 27, 10.35pm

* BBC Two - Wednesday May 27, 11.20pm

* BBC Wales - Wednesday May 27, 10.35pm

* BBC Scotland – Wednesday May 27, 10.35pm

* ITV Scotland – Wednesday May 29, 10.30pm

* ITV – Friday May 29, 10.30pm

* ITV Wales – Friday May 29, 10.30pm

Video: Tony Benn explains why there should be a referendum on the renamed EU Constitution

No2EU - Yes to Democracy is a coalition of trade unionists, political parties and campaigning groups which have come together to defend democracy here and across the European Union, so lend us your vote in the Euro elections on June 4.

Link: Help Southwark Respect with their No2EU campaign.
Link: No2EU Web site

Labour's car crash - Morning Star

Labour's car crash - Morning Star.

The rats are now openly attacking the captain of their sinking ship.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson, who in Monday's Times set out his allegedly "modernising" credentials, talks of the need to "overhaul the engine, not just clean the upholstery." Morning Star readers would no doubt agree.

But to run with Mr Johnson's motoring analogy, there is a dodgy tactic in the car trade known as "cut and shut."

It's the illegal welding of parts of two damaged cars together to create a "new," fundamentally unsafe vehicle that will temporarily fool - and potentially kill - an unsuspecting buyer.

Whatever Mr Johnson has in mind for the Labour government would undoubtedly bear more resemblance to a cut and shut than an engine overhaul.

And the tired, abused electorate which voted Labour in on a landslide in the hope of heralding a brighter post-Thatcherite era have become so used to the blatant betrayal and hypocrisy of careerists such as Mr Johnson that they are unlikely to be attracted by the outdated model of vehicle he is offering, regardless of whether the engine is purring like a cat, the upholstery has been cleaned or it comes with a set of free red fluffy dice.

The truth is that none of the self-interested individuals who now comprise the top echelons of the Labour Party has what it takes to avert the slow-motion car crash that the party and democracy now face.

Talk of proportional representation, at least from the likes of Mr Johnson, is a red herring, one that will on its own do little to avert the spectres of falling participation in our partial democracy and the rising fortunes of the far-right.

Whatever the merits of PR - and there are many on the left who would advocate such a system - the ongoing disappearance of Westminster up its own rear is the result of something far more fundamental.

So long as MPs are hand-picked centrally rather than chosen freely by local democratic structures, so long as alternative ideas on the structure of society are wilfully ignored in craven deference to the failed financial sector formerly feted as Britain's road to wealth, so long as elected representatives in Parliament hang blindly on the mumbo-jumbo spouted by private-sector consultants and wealthy business figures, the crisis of our political system will continue.

The rest of the media may blind people to the truth by obsessing over Blairites and Brownites, incestuous leadership bids and rivalries. In reality, not one of the media's supposed "players," whether Johnsonites, Milibandonions or Purnellniks, has the imagination or desire to see past sell-offs, spin and private-sector sycophancy.

Labour and British democracy are indeed in need of a complete overhaul, but this cannot come from the bankrupt remnants of new Labour, their greedy cuts-obsessed counterparts the Tories or the falsehoods and hate of the far-right.

The People's Charter, which is currently being discussed and engaged with by trade unionists and political activists, MPs and ordinary people, offers a tantalising glimpse at another path.

Its aim - to draw together a broad coalition that transcends party boundaries around policies that will help the majority in Britain - is both commendable and essential.

The alternative just does not bear thinking about.

Link: Morning Star
Link: The Peoples Charter for Change

Interview with Dave Hill who tops the No2EU list in the South East

Interview with Dave Hill who tops the No2EU list in the South East (Dave is in the middle of the picture). Article from the Mac Uaid blog. This article was first published in the The Weekly Worker when Dave Hill spoke to Peter Manson.

How do assess the campaign so far?

It’s the beginning. No2EU is a new party. The manifesto comes out on May 21 – the same day as the national television broadcast. In the meantime I am making a regional broadcast on The politics show.

We reckon that the South East is the area where we can get elected with the smallest percentage of the vote anywhere in the country – we only need about eight percent to get in. And we could be on line to do that – it depends on the way the national publicity goes – there’s only so much we can do locally.

We’ve got a vibrant local campaign – I must say, mainly run by the local Socialist Party, but also with the RMT and some independents.

There isn’t much by way of the Communist Party of Britain in your neck of the woods then?

No, not in the Brighton area. But in other parts of the region, yes, there are – in Kent, Oxford and Southampton, for example, the CPB is active. In the Brighton area, where I’m mainly going to meetings, doing interventions, etc, we have a group of young comrades from the SP.

I believe you’ve recently come out of retirement from politics?

Yes, I joined the Labour Party when I was 16 – I was brought up in poverty in fact. All my family are working class and I was a socialist from a very early age. I was a parliamentary candidate a couple of times. But in the early 90s I started to go deaf. At the same time I was getting pretty disgusted with Labour – this was before New Labour, under Kinnock – because of the expulsions, which I always opposed. I also decided it was time to concentrate on my career.

But then I got new hearing aids from the NHS about three years ago and it made a huge difference to my life – I could actually hear what people were saying! I left New Labour finally in 2005 after 40 years – most of my friends and comrades had left in tranches over the previous years. The sense of relief I felt was incredible.

I then joined what seemed at that particular time to be the major group on the left, Respect, and indeed the International Socialist Group.

Are you still in Respect?

I am a member, yes. I have been engaged in very vigorous attempts to get Respect involved in No2EU. When I saw the campaign was being set up, I immediately got in touch – then it was just the CPB, SP and RMT on board, so I got in at the beginning. I thought, wow, this is what I’ve been looking for for years – a reconfiguration on the left; a trade union-backed, working class-backed movement and hopefully party to the left of Labour.

Respect at that time was still considering standing and I was opposed to that. Since then Respect, I’m delighted to say, along with Socialist Resistance, has come on board and supported No2EU.

Isn’t it more a case of Respect leaving it open to individual members?

Well, you and I are both right. They have supported No2EU except where there are local considerations – we’re really just talking about the North West …

… where they’re voting Green.

My view is that the Greens are a bourgeois party – a lot of them are very good people – but they’re not a working class party and they are not socialist, even though individual members might be.

I could not believe it and I was very angry. My hope is that the layers that have been involved in Respect – that is to say, predominantly the middle and working class layers of the Muslim population and some others – will fully join No2EU. My hope is that after the election the promised convention does take place and I want to see the development of a democratic and pluralist party grow out of it.

But the main forces involved have divergent positions on that. The official position of the CPB is that No2EU is just an electoral platform and after June 4 it will cease to exist.

Well, you go round the blocks probably more than I do, so you will be well aware that there is a momentum building. If there is a tiny vote, then perhaps the momentum will be lost. But I think that by the time of the election No2EU will actually do well. There is a very good chance that there might be one or two MEPs elected, of whom I reckon to be one. The disgust with the mainstream parties is such that many people to the left of Labour have been looking for something substantial they can vote for.

But, to get back to the convention, history moves. I know the SP is very committed to the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party – which incidentally I support – and I think the CPB and RMT will come on board, and hopefully small groups like the Alliance for Green Socialism, which are also involved. I just hope that the momentum will be such that we are living in historic times, so that a successful party to the left of Labour will be launched some time in the next couple of months.

I see from your blog that you are part of the wing that is for taking up your seats if you get elected.

I’ve always admired the integrity of what was the Militant and SP and their position of a workers’ MP on a skilled worker’s wage – even though I’ve disagreed with them historically on various issues.

Here I’m going to be careful what I say – I think the historic position of working class parties and socialists seeking election has always, quite rightly in my view, been to take up those positions and to use them as a platform and an arena of mobilisation. In the South East election material – and indeed in the television and radio broadcast – I have been very firm about saying we are for a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage.

That’s an advance on the position on the website.

Absolutely. I think we should view No2EU as developmental, and that website was put up at the very beginning. I would like to see a development of that in the manifesto. What I’ve been saying when I’ve been interviewed is that we’re working class and socialist activists. We will be mainly in Britain, but of course we’ll be supporting workers’ slogans and workers’ issues in Europe. But there will no bathplugs or bungs on expenses for us!

We’ll be workers’ MPs on a worker’s wage, fighting for working class issues, rights, conditions and pay and opposing privatisation and neoliberalism.

It seems to me that the ‘Yes to democracy’ slogan is without content. It is posed in a way which suggests that the British parliament, House of Lords and monarchy is the alternative.

Yes, I agree with that 100%. I think a better slogan would have been ‘Yes to a workers’ democracy’ or ‘Yes to a socialist democracy’.

We have an article in the Weekly Worker calling for republican democracy.

I’m a convinced republican.

What we’re saying is: abolition of the monarchy and the second chamber, annual parliaments, as with the Chartists; recallable MPs on a worker’s wage, which you’ve already referred to; an end to the secret state …

… I haven’t thought about the annual parliaments, but I agree with retiring the monarchy and giving them all an old-age pension; and getting rid of the House of Lords and having an elected second chamber – if there is to be a second chamber. The term of the parliaments I’m not so sure about.

What I would say in defence of No2EU is, looking at the speeches of Bob Crow, Dave Nellist and various other comrades, it has been pretty clear that it is a leftwing, internationalist campaign that goes beyond the initially thought-up slogans.

I want to ask you about internationalism, but first can I put to you our last point on republican democracy? That is, replace the standing army with a popular militia and the constitutional right to bear arms, as in the United States. What do you reckon on that?

I haven’t given that any thought. I wouldn’t want to comment without doing so and discussing it.

OK, fair enough. Then let me take you up on what you said about internationalism. For example, the platform – which seems to be inspired by the worst part of the CPB’s programme of anti-EUism from a nationalist perspective – comes out against Fortress Europe, but gives every impression of being for ‘Fortress Britain’.

I fully understand what you’re saying and where you’re coming from. During an election campaign I’m not going to attack other constituent parts of the campaign of which I am a candidate.

What I would say is that in my view the enemy is capitalism, based in both the European Union and in Britain. They are the same. What I have been arguing for in the meetings I’ve been involved in is workers’ internationalism with no illusions in the sanctity of British capital. We’re a movement seeking to replace capitalism with socialism – and I’m not just talking about neoliberalism, which is simply the current version of the class war from above.

What I do think is that we’re living in tumultuous times. We’ve seen 30 years of incredible war on the workers since Thatcher and Reagan, and this is the chance that working class, socialist and progressive forces have to ally, nationally and internationally, to pose and to organise for a working class and socialist alternative to combat and replace capitalism.

If the platform read, ‘No to Fortress Europe, no to Fortress Britain’, how would that sound to you? In other words, for the free movement of labour.

I was a politician for many years, so I’m well used to not answering questions! What I will say is that the views expressed, for example, over the Lindsey refinery workers’ strike by the leaders of No2EU from all its sections have not been narrow little Englandism. What they have defended is the rights of all workers in Britain, wherever they might come from.

So I take heart not from the odd phrase that needs developing, but from the more lengthy phrases that No2EU speakers have been expressing on the stump and in public statements.

I agree with what you say about Lindsey and in fact I think the Socialist Party did a good job in helping to divert the strike away from the ‘British jobs’ slogan …

It was a dreadful slogan …

But that wasn’t actually the nature of the strike, which was to defend jobs. However, what about immigration controls? I’m against them.

Well, I’m not sure that the No2EU campaign has got a particular view on that …

What’s your view?

My personal view is that in my political life I’ve been opposed to racism and active in the Anti-Nazi League – and indeed was attacked on two occasions by fascists because of my leading local role in anti-fascist activity. My working life has involved teaching against race, gender and sexuality discrimination.

My view is that this is not a time to have completely open borders. On the other hand, I think that the current controls are racist and that people who are in this country should be treated with full human rights and have full workers’ rights. The conditions under which many refugees and asylum-seekers live are horrendous.

If ever – god forbid – there were a fascist government in this country, then people like me or you would have to seek asylum somewhere else unless we went underground. I would want us to be treated with full human rights and dignity and have the ability to lead a happy, healthy, safe and employed life.

So the anti-racist slant of No2EU is hugely important to me. I fear that now, unlike any time since the late 70s, when the left basically kicked the fascists off the streets, and unlike the 1930s, when the Battle of Cable Street did the same, the dangers of fascism and of a BNP revival are greater at this moment than at any time in the last 30 years. So we must have no truck with nationalistic slogans and must make very clear our internationalist and anti-racist beliefs.

Finally, I do hope that all of the left, including the CPGB, will come into No2EU and make it a democratic and pluralist organisation. I am including in that people like the Socialist Workers Party and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty – I am totally non-sectarian. I look with great hope to the new anti-capitalist party in France, the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal and some of the experiences of Die Linke. That’s what I want this to develop into.

Editors Note: And on that hope Dave you have my full support - a position I will fight for on the National Council of Respect - Neil Williams

Link: Mac Uaid blog
Link: No2EU web site
Link: No2EU - Yes To Democracy, South East Region

ALICE MAHON BACKS NO2EU

ALICE MAHON BACKS NO2EU - report from the Socialist Unity Web Site.

Alice Mahon, the former Labour MP who resigned last month from the Labour Party after 50 years membership, will speak at her first public meeting since leaving the party in Birmingham on Tuesday, May 26th, in support of the No2EU campaign in the Euro elections.

Mrs Mahon, 71, was the Member of Parliament for Halifax from 1987 to 2005.

She joins a number of former Labour figures backing the anti-EU coalition - including the former leader of East Sussex Council Labour Group, Prof Dave Hill, former deputy Labour leader of Carlisle Council, John Metcalfe, and former election agent for Peter Shore MP, John Rowe, who are all candidates for No2EU on June 4th.

The former Labour MP for Coventry, Dave Nellist, is the lead candidate for the trade union backed campaign in the West Midlands.

Mrs Mahon in her resignation letter said she could no longer be a member of a party “that at leadership level has betrayed many of the principles that inspired me as a teenager to join”. Her letter, sent to former colleagues in her Halifax constituency, was sharply critical of Labour’s failure to deliver a promised referendum on the EU “Lisbon Treaty”.

“If that Treaty is ratified”, she wrote, “we can say goodbye to any publicly owned services…… we will be handing over to private corporations, social services, education, transport and postal services. Even the NHS will be up for grabs”.

Ms Mahon will be joined at the election rally on Tuesday, May 26th, 7.30pm at the Carrs Lane Church Centre, Birmingham by Brian Denny, national officer of the RMT trade union, and West Midlands No2EU candidates Cllr Dave Nellist, and Joanne Stevenson, the General Secretary of the Young Communist League.

Link: Socialist Unity web site

Can you help Southwark Respect? - No2EU activity in Southwark

Can you help Southwark Respect? - No2EU activity in Southwark.

Sunday 24 May - 11.00am - 1.00pm - leafleting
2.00pm - 4.00pm - leafleting

Monday 25 May - 11.00am - 1.00pm - leafleting
2.00pm - 4.00pm - leafleting
(If there are Bank Holiday events we will aim to cover them with leaflets.)

Tuesday 26 May - 6.30pm - leafleting

Thursday 28 May - 6.30pm - leafleting

Respect members/supporters - Can you help next weekend? - please call Ian on 07941936 087

Saturday 30 May - 11.00am - Stall (probably Camberwell. If we have enough people we will try to have more than one stall.)
2.00pm- leafleting
5.00pm- BARBECUE - This is for all supporters and to help raise funds for the Southwark Respect NO2EU leaflet, which has cost over £600.

Sunday 31 May - 11.00am - leafleting
2.00pm - leafleting

Monday 1 June - 7.00pm - NO2EU Public Meeting at Friends Meeting House - opposite Euston Station, with BOB CROW, lead candidate for London, DAVE NELLIST, lead candidate for West Midlands, and others

Tuesday 2 June - 6.30pm - leafleting

Wednesday 3 June - 6.30pm - leafleting

Thursday 4 June - POLLING DAY

Any inquiries - please call Ian on 07941936 087

We hope to see you over the next two weeks. Please try to make some of the activities.

Link: No2EU
Link: Southwark Respect

June 4 and beyond - Dave Nellist

June 4 and beyond - Dave Nellist.

Former Coventry Labour MP Dave Nellist is fighting a vigorous campaign as No2EU - Yes to Democracy's lead candidate in the West Midlands.

Now a Socialist Party councillor in the city, he recalls the 1975 referendum campaign, when the left was united in branding what was then called the European Common Market as "a bosses' club."

"The Labour manifesto on which I stood in 1983 was against the European Community," Nellist recalls. And he hasn't changed his mind since - although Labour has.

"Without No2EU, there would be a largely sterile debate in this forthcoming election, since all the three big parties agree with the free-market philosophy of the European Union - and the only opposition to the EU would come from the far-right.

"New Labour, particularly under Tony Blair's leadership, has become increasingly wedded to big business and so when, for the first time in 100 years, a trade union decided to stand independently in a national election, the Socialist Party wanted to help," he remarks.

In Nellist's view, past campaigns against the EU have suffered from a "confused identity," with business and right-wing politicians being involved.

"This campaign is based solidly on the working class and offers a socialist alternative which no other platform does," he enthuses.

In the West Midlands, Nellist identifies two key issues as jobs and the rise of the extreme right.

Unemployment is rising faster there than most other regions of Britain, which in turn accounts for one-third of all jobs lost in the EU since January.

"Major manufacturers have been taking advantage of the free movement of capital and labour promoted by the EU, to export jobs and factories to areas of Europe where trade unions are weak and wages are low," he says.

Nellist cites the local case of Peugeot at Ryton, where the firm shipped the factory to Slovakia to avoid paying decent trade union rates of pay at £500 per week.

"There, they can get away with paying £350 per month!" he says.

The export of jobs, the import of exploited labour and growing disillusionment with the main parties, particularly in working-class areas, has inflated support for the BNP. The fascists now have 16 councillors in the West Midlands EU region - a third of their national total - and regularly poll votes in the hundreds in local council elections.

"It's not that the people of the West Midlands are becoming more racist - for many, it's a protest vote," Nellist insists. "We intend to offer a trade union alternative to the barmy politics of the far-right."

He fears that merely portraying the BNP as Holocaust deniers - although he notes that "their leaders clearly are" - who believe that the wrong side won the second world war is not enough.

"I think you have to approach potential BNP voters differently," he argues. "Many of them are working class, formerly voted Labour and, in an election where most electors are switched off from the big parties mired in sleaze and scandal, they are unlikely to be won away from the BNP if their only other option is to support one of those establishment parties.

"Thanks to No2EU - Yes to Democracy, working people will be able to vote for a non-nationalist, anti-EU, left alternative in these elections."

And Nellist hopes that its impact will be felt beyond June 4.

"We hope No2EU will be the first step towards the development of a new mass left party. Given the severity of the economic crisis facing working-class people, this is now particularly urgent," he says.

He is particularly encouraged by the new networks being built up during the election campaign.

"Obviously, the organisations involved will want assess the project and their involvement in it - but I hope that after the June elections we can come together to jointly look at what comes next."

The diversity of the No2EU alliance has raised some eyebrows on the left. How does Nellist find sharing a bed with the Communist Party, for instance?

"What has happened is a growing realisation not only that the Labour Party is on a trajectory away from working-class people, but that the forces of the left still inside Labour do not appear to be strong enough to hold back the tide.

"The Socialist Party has always been prepared to work with other forces on the left in any project which advances the cause of the working class, whether that is on the industrial or the political front.

"Having consistently called for 15 years for the development of a serious left alternative to new Labour, we were very pleased that the RMT, the Communist Party and others wanted to form an electoral bloc for the European elections."

On a more personal note, Nellist downplays his own position as lead candidate in the West Midlands. He certainly doesn't miss the Westminster Parliament in which he sat for nine years.

"I found the privileged gentlemen's club atmosphere very unpleasant and, unlike some former MPs who have haunted the place since they left, I've only been back five times in 17 years," he points out.

"Like fellow Militant supporters Terry Fields and Pat Wall, I took only a worker's wage. That made sure we were not sucked into the unreal world we see in recent revelations, but remained in touch with our working-class constituents."

Nellist spent much of his time as an MP campaigning outside Parliament, notably against the poll tax.

"That balance of work - predominantly outside Parliament and involved in working-class struggles - is what I'd like to see any successful No2EU MEP doing," he says.

"Whether it's me is not really the issue, but there clearly is a desperate need for more politicians who don't have their snouts in the trough and stand up for the millions instead of the millionaires," he concludes.

And millions of people in sleaze-ridden Britain today will agree with that.

Link: Read this article on the Morning Star web site
Link: No2EU - Yes to Democracy

The dangers of anti-politics - Jeremy Corbyn

The dangers of anti-politics - Jeremy Corbyn.

Monday was one of those surreal days that happen at Westminster.

Parliament Square and the streets around were blockaded for most of the day by Tamil people, desperately worried about families and loved ones in Vanni as news of the Sri Lankan army's final push came through.

Later, as news of Velupillai Prabhakaran's death was reported, the crowds became bigger and more angry.

Last Saturday, a march in Birmingham asked for government action to protect jobs and save companies in the recession.

Another march in London expressed support for the Palestinian people and demanded a new policy towards Israel.

Parliament, on the other hand, was discussing MPs' expenses, or, more prosaically, the additional costs allowance.

The long-drawn-out saga of MPs' battle to get out of having to disclose their expense claims in response to a request issued under the Freedom of Information Act finally ended with agreement to publish all the details... in July.

The Daily Telegraph jumped the gun, having apparently bought the information from a stolen disk, and has been publishing ever since. Non-London MPs have been able to claim up to £23,000 per year and the effects have been dramatic in media and political terms.

Obviously, those who make fraudulent claims should suffer the consequences and equally obviously the system needs a big change.

Michael Martin as Speaker vainly tried to make an appropriate statement on Monday but, if anything, only managed to make the situation worse.

This is one of the few issues relating to Parliament that has sustained the interest of both the "heavy" papers and the tabloids at the same time and consequently has filled the airwaves of chat shows and dominated most political programmes.

But what initially emerged as an understandable anger and revulsion at individual examples of excessive claims has now become, first, a contest between the party leaders - in which Cameron has had the easiest ride - and, second, an attack on politics as a whole.

In the failure of MPs to get to grips with public feeling, a space has been created for other forces.

These are not progressive forces but the harbingers of desperation and doubt.

Thus UKIP has apparently gained much ground ahead of the European elections and the BNP is already making hay.

Strange, as one of UKIP's MEPs has spent most of the time since his election in prison for fraud, while the BNP's racist policies and the record of its candidates go unchallenged in most of the media.

We now have an openly right-wing agenda designed to ignore the issues of the recession, the massive bail-out of the banks and the bonuses paid to directors, and which focuses only on attacking democracy.

Unless Labour can get to grips with this and provide a viable alternative, the ground is open for a Conservative government and a frightening rise in intolerance and the far right.

But this anti-democratic atmosphere has its antecedents in the 1980s and the rise of new Labour.

Essentially, the economic strategies of Reagan and Thatcher came down to money being everything - how it was made was irrelevant. Thus asset stripping, tax cutting, privatisation of public services and impoverishment of the poorest became articles of faith.

New Labour under Blair sought to accommodate these attitudes and, while they did invest in public service improvements, they also went even further in deregulating financial services and threatened - and carried out - privatisation of public services.

At no stage did new Labour ever challenge the notion that public services run by publicly employed people are intrinsicially better than private services run for profit by unaccountable companies. New Labour also demonstrated an attitude to welfare and means testing that has no place in socialist thinking at all.

These attitudes did not stop at government policy. They were the product of a wider agenda.

The whole new Labour project was to weaken and ultimately destroy the link between trade unions and the Labour Party and to ensure that its funding came from the wealthy and influential, who gradually became the main source of income.

This has led to a loss of party members, a reduction in activity and a whole movement vulnerable to the anti-politics debate through disillusionment. A weak and unfocused Labour movement at a time of recession is the perfect breeding ground for the far right.

The saga of the Speaker, the expenses, the claims and the ridicule will be played out in the next few weeks and we may even end up with a more accountable system and openness as a result. The damage, however, will extend to the very idea of representative democracy.

Unless the labour movement can deliver protection of the poorest in the recession, permanent control of the banks and the banking system and provision of homes, jobs and opportunities, then we leave ourselves vulnerable to the far right.

Essentially the BNP and UKIP are the same thing. The BNP has all the accoutrements of a fascist party - UKIP are much the same but with blazers and more refined accents.

Their message is one of despair and division, blaming the poorest and most vulnerable migrant workers for the economic failures of a system built on greed and exploitation.

Opposing the BNP means campaigning for high electoral participation to minimise their influence and adopting policies of substance for those most affected by the recession.

Parliament must urgently get its house in order and be seen to be of relevance. The alternative is a return to naked monetarism and its enforcement by fear and bigotry.

Link: Read this article on the Morning Star web site

Speaker Martin: a prize scalp for English snobs - George Galloway

Speaker Martin: a prize scalp for English snobs - George Galloway.

English snobbery can do a morris dance of delight at the political demise of the Speaker, Michael Martin. The bigots have put the taigs back in their place. Above all the MPs desperately seeking solace from the evisceration of the expenses scandal hope this will be enough to staunch the haemorrhage in public confidence.

For a certain class of Englishman every Catholic is a Mick and every working-class Scot is from the Gorbals. In fact, Michael Martin – it was always Michael! – has no connection to the Gorbals, but his elevation was a fillip to both: the first manual worker to sit in that ancient seat and the first Catholic since Cromwell to surmount the still considerable prejudice. Thanks to Speaker Martin my grandson Sean enjoyed the first Catholic baptism in the House of Commons Crypt since Cromwell turned it into a stable.

His accent never cut through the cut-glass ceiling, he appeared mentally sluggish and the arcane vocabulary of great parliamentary occasions seemed beyond him. His tearoom skills are what had landed him the job. He lay in wait for a generation of MPs to charm avuncularly. Government office was never likely to come his way, and a remaining parliamentary lifetime of high teas and grand tours seemed ample compensation.

But that which seemed charming and solicitous offstage in the warren of Westminster was cruelly exposed in the unforgiving glare of the television lights. It was Martin's bad luck to have been caught up in a maelstrom of crises andpublic odium. He did not invent the discredited system of parliamentary allowances – that came largely under the "distinguished" speakership of Lord Weatherill and became especially lucrative during the golden era of Betty Boothroyd. Under both, MPs believed that allowances were but a supplementary salary, their receipts notional and in any case highly secret. The consistent deferment of recommended salary increases, the tearoom mafia would nod and wink, justified this deceit.

But caught in the white heat of this unprecedented focus, the former sheet-metal worker melted. He might have avoided the complete destruction had he decided to leave over the Damian Green affair where policemen were allowed to trample through the parliamentary estate on a political witchhunt of an opposition politician merely doing his job. If Martin didn't know they needed a warrant to be there he was too stupid to be Speaker; if he knew but turned a blind eye then he was too wicked. But that was also an opportunity. He could have admitted an error, apologised humbly and gone back to Springburn with a grain of respect left. MPs might have even shaken his hand for doing the decent thing while looking over his shoulder for a successor.

Martin's fall from grace is necessary but not sufficient. The election of a new Speaker in this parliament will be effected by the same people who brought it into disrepute. Similarly the "constitutional convention" now being touted would merely be a conclave of the self-regarding great and good and the conclusions would crucially lack credibility in the harsh public spotlight. Only a new parliament where the public have cast judgment on those who have disgraced our political life can be trusted to set in place the new dispensation.

We need a revolution in public life, halving the size of the lower house, and directly electing the revising chamber – all by proportional representation. We need transparent and contemporary disclosure of all financial details – publish the income tax returns and all details of perks, outside jobs and jollies. Party funding and election spending decisions must be part and parcel of the reform. None of this can be done by the current discredited House of Commons.

Link: Read this article on the Guardian web site
Link: Respect

Southwark Respect backs No2EU

Southwark Respect backs No2EU.

Nick Wrack, Southwark Respect and No2EU candidate in London, writes:

Southwark Respect has decided to support to No2EU in the Euro Elections in London. Other branches of Respect have also voted to back it.

The NO2EU list in the capital is headed by Bob Crow, leader of the rail workers union, the RMT and the most militant union in the country.

Other candidates in London include Kevin Nolan, convener of the Visteon workers in Enfield.

NO2EU is an important initiative that that seeks to pose an alternative for working class people to vote for across the country. It is backed by the RMT, many other trade unionists, the CPB and the Socialist Party.

The European Union is a bosses club. Its purpose is to create a Europe in which there are no barriers to big business and to allow the free rule of the market.

It is the EU that has been the greatest force for deregulation and privatisation across the continent in recent years.

Laws passed by the European parliament and the decisions of the European Court have undermined workers’ rights. The posted workers directive, which was at the centre of the Lindsey dispute, is only the best-known example in this country.

The neo-liberal Europe being pushed by the EU must be opposed.

Up until now in this country the arguments against the EU have mostly come from the right.

They create fear that it is scheming foreigners who want to undermine our way of life and whip up feeling against migrant workers.

Yet it has been British governments, whether Labour or Tory, that have pushed most enthusiastically for privatisation and deregulation in the EU.

No2EU stands for international workers solidarity. It is an opportunity to undermine the racist lies of the right.

Mainstream politics is dominated by a deadening consensus. Despite the economy sliding into the greatest crisis since in fifty years the differences between the major parties are miniscule.

Rather than reject the economic policies that have led to this crisis Gordon Brown’s government is giving us more of the same. Rather than taking the failed banking system into full state control and using it for the good of ordinary people they have thrown billions to the bankers.

And we will be paying for this for a generation to come. Whoever forms the next government they will push for massive cuts in public spending and services.

New Labour has betrayed the working class and accepted the bosses’ agenda lock stock and barrel.

They have betrayed the hopes that millions put in them in 1997. This has created conditions for the growth of the BNP and other parties of the right.

To resist the shift to the right, and to defend working class people against the crisis and the inevitable attacks on jobs, wages and conditions that it will bring, the working class needs a political alternative that can gain mass support. The working class needs a new party to represent it. That is the reason why Respect was formed five years ago.

In 1901 the RMT (the NUR as it then was) became one of the founding members of the Labour party because it realised the labour movement needed its own political voice. In 2004 it was expelled from that same party.

The fact that it is now one of the main moving forces behind No2EU is of massive importance. It is a sure sign that many in the labour movement now see the necessity to pose an electoral alternative to the neo-liberal consensus.

NO2EU is a temporary platform for the European elections, not a new party. Mistakes will be made, but lessons will also be learnt. But that is why we welcome this and support every step taken by the labour movement to find its own political voce again.

That is why in these elections we will be campaigning for No2EU.

Link: To find what Southwark Respect will be doing to support NO2EU click here

Link: To contact Southwark Respect click here

Link: For the No2EU – Yes to Democracy website click here

No2EU - Yes to Democracy

No2EU - Yes to Democracy is a coalition of trade unionists, political parties and campaigning groups which have come together to defend democracy here and across the European Union, so lend us your vote in the Euro elections on June 4.
No2EU-Yes to Democracy is a response to the growing cynicism across Europe towards the undemocratic direction the EU is taking and to the rise of extremists like the BNP who are benefiting from this disillusionment. Come to one of our public meetings and find out more.

Keep your public services public:
The Lisbon Treaty and the EU’s privatisation agenda represent a significant threat to working class communities and to the services we all rely on.

The renamed EU consttituion forces governments to hand public services over to private corporations – that means handing fat cats control of railways, schools, postal services, energy and even social services across Europe.

Under Article III-147 of the EU Constitution: “A European framework law shall establish measures to achieve the liberalisation of a specific service”. That provision remains in the Lisbon Treaty.

This commitment to ‘free competition’ enshrined in successive EU treaties was the main reason that Tories originally supported the EU. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986 to establish a single European market and John Major agreed the Maastricht Treaty, which created the Euro, the European Central Bank and tied European economies into a ‘Growth and Stability Pact’ that squeezes public investment in public services.
The current economic crisis was created by these discredited neo-liberal policies yet, under the Lisbon Treaty, they become constitutional goals. We should be defending public services in Britain not allowing bankers and eurocrats take them over in order to make money for big business in Europe.

Vote No2EU - Yes to Democracy to defend public services such as Post Offices and the NHS and to renationalise our railways and develop manufacturing in Britain (see web site for more policies).
Now read this: Southwark Respect backs No2EU
Link: No2EU Facebook site
Link: No2EU National Web site

The new Repect Party Web site is up and running

The new "Repect Party" Web site is up and running.

At last after five years we have a new Respect Party web site that is a pleasure to visit. I will be helping with this site from now on so there will be less posts on this blog ( a final decision on the future of this blog will be made soon).

Go to (where you will find my news posts):

http://www.therespectparty.net/

Miners strike 1984 A tribute to the miners and their families

And in memory of my father and grandfather both miners in the Kent coalfield.
Link: Strike84 Images from the 1984 Miners Strike UK
Link: NUM
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Gaza Convoy 2009 - Viva Palestina

Viva Palestina Convoy - some of the team.

Viva Palestina Convoy update:
Mudasir Saeed sent a message to the members of Gaza Convoy 2009.
Subject: Day 8 - When the people lead, the leaders will follow

The mile-long convoy of 100 plus vehicles and 315 drivers and peace activists today drive through the Moroccan/Algerian border in what is supposed to be a low key event, but the significance of that small journey can not be over estimated. Today’s border crossing will be recorded in the history books.

Morocco and Algeria agreed to put aside their differences to open their land border for the first time in 15 years for the sake of Palestine.

This wonderful gesture is something Condaleezza Rice failed to persuade the neighbouring countries to do - her last attempt before the departure of George W Bush was made in September.

But the peace mission and genuine humanitarian nature of the Viva Palestina convoy has melted the hearts of those on both sides of this vital land border. Despite their difference both sides have stepped aside for their mutual love and affection for the people of Palestine and, in particular to show their solidarity to the people of Gaza.

It is an astonishing gesture and both countries are to be congratulated on this generous move.

Another fine example of when people lead, the leaders will follow.

****NEWS FLASH*******

21:00 GMT…Update from the A Team…..

The convoy have been at the Algerian Border since early this morning. There have been thorough thorough thorough oh and did i mention thorough checks made by customs!!!!!. Whilst on the phone to Naveed, the loud cheering by the Algerian people could be heard. Naveed reported that hundreds of Algerians have been waiting eagerly just outside the border since dawn to recieve the convoy, but the convoy has been continuously stalled by the police with different excuses given every hour. The drivers fear that they will be made to travel in the dark of night.

There is a growing suspician that the authorities want to minimise public exposure of the convoy, to avoid public pressure on its government to provide humanitarian aid to the palestinians. It appears that the Moroccan Government may have shared this motive, when they provided a police escort to the convoy. At first the drivers felt that the police escort was a novelty. But the police avoided the planned original route in Morocco where rallies had been organised such as that in Casablanca.

Despite the interventions of certain governments and the lack of interest by the mainstream media, it is encouraging to see that people know and seek the truth about Palestine. Whatever maybe the agenda of the governments, what is certain is that the people’s hearts and minds are all in support of the Palestinian cause. And that Freedom to Palestine is no longer an Islamic or Arabic issue – its now an issue of right or wrong between justice and injustice, weather you are a Muslim, Jew, Christian or any other religion, faith or background. Viva Palestina!!!

Subject: Quick Update on Day 8

How a negative can turn into a positive…..

February 22nd, 2009
21st February 2009

Inital reports showed the Algerian authorities were somewhat stalling the convoy at the border, and indeed this was the case. however I have just learnt that after all the comotion, delays and checks, the convoy crossed the border and the Algerian authorities have provided fuel to fill up the vehicles. Im sure if the likes of Shell, BP or Esso advertised that they would provide free fuel for any cars that came through their stations, hundreds of us would gladly queue, many throughout the night to benefit from a full tank of fuel, on the house.

In this instance we are talking about free fuel for not one but many vehicles all on the house courtesy of Algeria just outside Maghnia!

It just goes to show, some things that start off negative can lead to a positve outcome…..

TEXT UPDATE: Naveed from the A Team 00:25 (GMT)

"Salaam we went through centre and hundreds of people here, it was amazing as its somthing we have never seen before. There were hundreds of people on the streets cheering. We were on the roof of our van, hanging off the back ladder with Mudasir tannoy. It was top, even the police are cheering 'Allah Hu Akbar'. The youths, kids and men were hugging us...a 15yr old boy told me that even the muslims who drink came on the street to shout 'Allah Hu Akbar' and they make dua for us everyday to succeed.
We have come to a caravan site to sleep now"

More update: by Farid Arada from Viva palestina Web Site
14.00 GMT
Sunday 22nd February
After spending the night in a caravan park, the convoy set off this morning at 08.30 towards the city of CHLEF(click map). Under police and gendarme escort,they hit some major trafic problems en route which slowed the pace down.They stopped on a couple of occasions for some rest. They are hoping to get to Chlef before dark.Then in the morning they will head for Algiers.I am told that they are bypasing the major cities to avoid congestion.

Link: Viva Palestina
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Viva Palestina: Gaza Convoy 2009 - Facebook Update

Viva Palestina: Gaza Convoy 2009 - Facebook Update.

Day 1: The Journey Begins

A huge convoy of more than 100 vehicles snaked its way out of London on route to Gaza, where more than £1 million-worth of aid, including a boat, several ambulances and a fire engine, will be delivered.

Later that night, the show-stopping convoy rolled off a freight ferry in Ostend to embark on a historic mission of mercy to help the Palestinian people.

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Day 2: Mayor of Bordeaux greets convoy

After spending a gruelling night in sub-zero temperatures, the convoy made its way to the french city of Bordeaux where it was met with a very warm reception by the mayor and the people.
The city has kindly provided a sports hall for our brave brits to camp in for the night..an appreciated break by all I'm sure, especially those suffering from arachnophobia :

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Day 3: Post From George Galloway Daily Record

"My mile-long convoy of aid to Gaza has snaked across the Pyrenees into the Basque country and the splendours of St.Sebastian.

Tonight we hit Madrid, where no less than the Prime Minister of Spain awaits our arrival at the steps of the Cortes (Editor: And the Prime Minister of the UK??).

The police will have cleared the roads for a triumphal entry of now nearly 150 vehicles, over 300 Brits, more than one mile long."

Link: Gaza Convoy 2009 Facebook Group
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Not as easy as it sounds by Yvonne Ridley

Not as easy as it sounds by Yvonne Ridley.

If you ever thought travelling in a convoy was easy, think again.

This latest drive from Bordeaux in France to Madrid via San Sebastian in Spain was back-breaking and some of the vehicles just simply gave up ... unlike their drivers.

The indomitable spirit, true grit and determination of those on board Viva Palestina refused to be beaten by mere mechanical failures and set backs which challenge long distance travellers.
Tool kits, spare parts and willing hands were in evidence everywhere, along with lashings of wonderful hot tea brewed by a man wearing a bright red Fez.

I'm not sure what time the main body of the convoy rolled up to a sports hall on the outskirts of Madrid but it is now 3am (gmt) on Tuesday and I know scores of my fellow travellers are still on the road.

Unable to face the challenges of the steep hills, some have simply headed south to the ferry where they will wait for the rest of us to catch up.

Spirits were lifted in San Sebastian when all the vehicles pulled in to a giant car park where they were greeted by George Galloway, MP, the mastermind behind Viva Palestina. We'll all be back up in a few hours time to get the latest news and developments planned en route from George.

There's still a long way to go, but as I talked to the group it is quite clear that the focus is Gaza and each and every one on board is determined to reach the Palestinians there.

"It's that focus which keeps us going. We do feel like moaning, and it's only Day Three but we get our inspiration from each other and from the example set by the Palestinians.

"Let's face it, they could have given up a long time ago but their determination to rebuild their shattered lives feeds our determination to help them," said one man from Birmingham which is represented by 20 vehicles on the convoy."

Another morale booster, they say, has been Press TV's coverage on both the website and TV news which has been avidly watched by the families, friends and supporters in Britain as well as across the world.

No other media outlet has been on the convoy since Day 1 apart from Press TV which is becoming the first station of choice for viewers tuning in to Sky 515 and other satellites in search of news without spin.

The reason for me filing this particular report to you so late?

Well the Press TV crew also suffered a malfunction - our GPS system went down and yours truly did the navigating from Bordeaux to San Sebastian. I knew confidence in my map reading skills collapsed when our technical engineer Omid Gharbifard began using his compass and the position of the stars!

The good news is that we now have a replacement electronic navigating system in place and Omid has already keyed in the final destination ... Gaza City.

So, can we do it? In the words of a certain Mr Obama: "Yes we can."
* Yvonne Ridley will be giving regular updates from the convoy for the duration of the trip. Her website is www.yvonneridley.org

Link: Viva Palestina
Link: pictures - Convoy leaving London
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Viva Palestina aid convoy for Gaza off to flying start

Watch out for the boat in the video!

Press release:

Viva Palestina aid convoy for Gaza off to flying start

In an extraordinary and unprecedented spectacle, 102 vehicles gathered in Hyde Park at noon on Saturday before setting off with aid supplies to Gaza. The convoy included 18 ambulances, a fire engine, a boat and two buses.

The convoy was given a rousing send off by veteran politician Tony Benn and by George Galloway who will be joining the convoy today.

The total aid on the convoy is etimated at over a million pounds. Last night they were given a civic reception in Bordeaux. Today they travel to a rally in San Sebastian before going on to a rock concert for Gaza in Madrid.They will then cross to Morocco via Tarifa and then travel across North Africa through Algeria and Libya before entering Egypt. Many more supporters from Britain are travelling out to join the convoy in Cairo around 6th March. The convoy will then head on to Gaza.

Press: For more information, comment, etc, phone Rob Hoveman on 07507 600561

Link: More video
Link: Follow the Convoy on Twitter
Link: Viva Palestina web site
Link: Respect
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