SOCIALIST UNITY

from the Morning Star
Israeli leftwingers rallied outside a Tel Aviv court on Tuesday before the “political” trial of MP Mohammed Barakeh, who leads the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, or Hadash.

From 2006-9 Mr Barakeh participated in hundreds of rallies against Israel’s bloody 2006 assault on Lebanon and the illegal separation wall in the West Bank, at which the Israeli police or military tried to suppress the non-violent protests.

Mr Barakeh played a leading role in mediating with the police or the military on behalf of protesters and in some instances was subjected to violence from the police and the military.

His supporters alleged that the same officers submitted false complaints against him in a bid to justify their own wrongdoings.

Mr Barakeh was indicted in November 2009 for assault and interfering with a policeman in the line of duty.

The Adalah Arab legal rights centre insisted that the indictment was based on “false evidence” and “simply criminalises his legitimate political activities and attempts to harm his reputation.”

The picture shows Victor Agarwal, Labour PPC for the marginal seat of North Swindon addressing  a meeting organised for local GMB members and their families

From Labour List: Tories and Labour level in key marginals:

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Labour and the Tories are “neck and neck” the the key marginal seats, according to a new Populus poll in tomorrow’s Times. 

The paper says:

“The poll targeted 100 Labour-held seats where the Tories came second at the last general election and which are 50 to 149 in their list of targets. The poll excluded the 50 easiest seats for the Tories but included those the party needs to win for an overall majority.

In the key seats, Labour is still just ahead, on 38.2%, down from 45.3% in the 2005 election. The Tories are on 37.6%, up from 31.4%. This means that they should gain 97 Labour-held seats. Taking account of boundary changes, it is likely that the Conservatives would need up to 20 further seats from the Liberal Democrats and others for an overall majority.”

That amounts to a swing of about 6.7% to the Tories from Labour since 2005 in those seats. But the Times also says:

“That might be worth an extra 20 MPs to the Conservatives, smaller than many in the party would hope after the big spending on these targets. It might be enough only to take the Tories to the threshold of the 326 seats they need for a bare overall majority in the Commons.”

The poll also finds that the row over the tax status of Lord Ashcroft is damaging the Tory Party. Of the 68% who said that they had followed the story, 28% said that it had made their overall view of the party less favourable.

by Noah Tucker

 http://21stcenturysocialism.com/ 

 In the morning of 2nd April 1982, people in Britain listened to the news with bewilderment. UK territory was being invaded by a foreign power- and, even more astonishing, the invading country was Argentina. How on earth had a third class military power, in the southern hemisphere and on the other side of the Atlantic, managed to land its troops on a part of the British Isles?

The experience of Steve Cahill, an Englishman who contributed his memory of that day to a BBC article on its twentieth anniversary, was typical:

My first thought at the time was “Where are the Falklands?” Like the majority of my generation at the time, I had never even heard of them. A quick look at an atlas confirmed that they were not just off the coast of Scotland, as I first imagined.

Unlike the people of Argentina, the majority in the UK had no previous awareness that Britain still maintained a remnant of empire off the south east coast of Latin America; but nevertheless within a very few days they were roused to militaristic fervor on behalf of the 1,820 inhabitants of that outpost, who were nearly all of British descent and wanted to remain subjects of Britain, not Argentina.

907 people, most of them very young men, were killed in the war that followed- equivalent to almost half the number of those on whose behalf the war was supposedly fought- a futher 1,965 were injured, many of them permanently disabled. Hundreds more of the combatants have since succumbed to mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, and suicide, as a result of the psychological scars which they received.  A report in the Independent on 25th March 2007 included the following paragraphs:

Mr McNally, then a gunner in the Royal Artillery, is still consumed by the events of 25 years ago on rain-sodden islands 8,000 miles from Britain. As the anniversary of the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands approaches next week, an act that prompted “Maggie’s Army” to steam from England to the South Atlantic, Mr McNally lives day and night with the horrors of war. And he is not alone.

“We, like most people, didn’t have a clue where the Falkland Islands were,” said Mr McNally. “I assumed they were somewhere off Scotland. We didn’t take it seriously because we didn’t have a clue what was going on. You are a soldier, but you don’t envisage that you would actually have to go to war.”

Like thousands of British service personnel who have fought in the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan, he has battled mental health problems for years, triggered by guilt over the moment his missile system malfunctioned and he was unable to prevent the death of his comrades on bombed and blazing ships.

“Soldiers were jumping in the water, their clothes on fire,” Mr McNally said. “Many had limbs missing. The ship was in flames. All I could do was watch. I felt ashamed, embarrassed and guilty.”

Stephen Rawlins, a proud squaddie, with a happy smile, was another who was never the same after he returned from the Falklands. On Remembrance Day 2000, he attended the memorial service at his local Cenotaph. Then he went home and killed himself. He was 38. His father David, 68, found him hanged at their home in the village of Llanbradach, in south Wales.

“He went to the war as a boy and he came back a man,” Mr Rawlins said. “But as a man he thought that all of his emotions could be bottled up. He would not talk to me, but he’d sit up all night confiding in his mother. He would be screaming men’s names in his sleep, shouting to them to get out.”

More than 300 Falklands veterans have committed suicide since the end of the war. One of them, Charles “Nish” Bruce, an SAS veteran and freefall expert who served in the conflict, plunged 5,000ft from a plane without a parachute in 2002.

A small minority in Britain opposed the war, arguing that the UK establishment wanted to hang on to the Malvinas / Falklands at least partly for strategic and economic reasons including the possibility of future oil extraction, and that Margaret Thatcher was keen for a military conflict to enhance her Conservative government’s electoral prospects. Were the issue truly about the UK’s duty to the colonists that they should have the right to be British, then this could be assured by offering them relocation to England, Scotland or Wales- with generous financial compensation terms which, given their small number, would be very affordable to the mother country.

The unprinciple of self-determination

Almost three decades later, new advances in petroleum prospecting and extraction technology have made drilling for oil in the area potentially profitable; the UK’s justification for authorising drilling, however, is fundamentally similar to that which was used to win support for the war in 1982: the population of the Falklands (now risen to 3,140 civilian residents, plus 500 British soldiers) regard themselves as British, so the hydrocarbon resouces under the sea bed which surrounds the colony must therefore belong to Britain.

Noting the unanimous support for Argentina’s position by the 32 counties of South and Central America and the Caribbean at the ‘Rio Group’ meeting on 24th February, the BBC reported on the British response:

Its [the UK’s] minister for the region, Chris Bryant, said that Britain had “no doubt about our sovereignty over the Falkland Islands”.

“It is underpinned by the principle of democratic self-determination. Falkland Islanders want to remain British,” he added.

Earlier, Argentina had imposed a new requirement for shipping to get permission to go from there to the islands.

This was in response to the start of drilling for oil off the Falklands, within the exclusive economic zone claimed by the Falkland Islands government, with the support of the UK.

Were ‘democratic self-determination’ a genuine right for the inhabitants of the small but strategically important outposts around the world that Britain managed to retain in the twilight of its empire, one would suppose that it would be accorded universally to those inhabitants by the UK government. The sad fate of the Chagos islanders proves otherwise.

By the mid-1960s, the population of Britain’s main remaining colonies were demanding that ‘Britain must go’; and it was clear that the UK would have no choice but to allow Mauritius- as with the other countries that it controlled- to achieve independence. So the British government decided to detach the Chagos island archipelago- hitherto a part of Mauritius under the colonial administration- and hold onto it as British territory, insisting that the Mauritians would be allowed to leave the empire only on condition that Britain kept its ownership of the Chagos Islands.

The Chagos Islands became, like the Falkands and a dozen other small remnants of the British Empire around the world, a Crown Colony. (Later, in a terminological manoevre to deal with the fact that the tide of world opinion had turned against colonialism, the British Crown Colonies were re-named by an act of Parliament as the British Dependent Territories; and they were subsequently re-named again as the British Overseas Territories.)

In the process which followed, which was that of the forced expulsion of the population of the Chagos from the islands, the islanders were offered no recourse to self-determination. Dispossesed of their homes and their means of livelihood, the democratic choice offered to the Chagossians was to become slum-dwellers on the Mauritius mainland. For the inconvenience of having to accommodate these refugees, the government of Maurituis was compensated with the princely sum of three million pounds.

Like the Falklanders, the Chagossians were approximately two thousand in number. Unlike the Falklanders, they were dark skinned and not of British ancestry- they were the descendants of the African slaves and Indian workers who had been brought to the islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to labour on the coconut and copra plantations; and unlike the Falklanders, the perceived strategic interest of the British state lay not in keeping them in their homes but in expelling them from their homes. In the early 1970s, having accomplished the programme of cleansing the land from its population, Britain made good on a deal which it had negotiated with the United States of America, and the USA began constructing its naval and air force base on the largest of the Chagos islands, Diegio Garcia; by which the United States has since maintained its strategic command of the Indian Ocean.

No property rights

The Chagossians, who call themselves the Ilois people, did not give up their struggle for the right of return; and eventually the English courts agreed that they should be allowed to go back to the Chagos Islands, though not to Diegio Garcia, where most of them and their parents and grandparents had lived. But in 2008, the UK government successfully appealled that decision, persuading the highest lords of the English legal system that, despite the “unattractive aspects” of the dispossession of the Chagossians from their islands, the British financial and political interest, and even more imporantly, the USA’s military interest, must prevail. Duncan Campbell noted in the Guardian in July 2008:

Islanders seeking to return to the homes from which they were removed to make way for a US military base nearly 40 years ago have no right to return, the law lords were told yesterday. Allowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a “precarious and costly” operation, and the United States had said that it would also present an “unacceptable risk” to its base on Diego Garcia, the law lords heard.

The Foreign Office is appealing this week to the House of Lords against earlier judgments which have granted the Chagossians the right to return to the islands in the British Indian Ocean Territory. A group of islanders have arrived from Mauritius, where most of them have lived since being evicted, to hear the final chapter in their legal battle. Both the divisional court and the court of appeal have already found in favour of the Chagossians.

While there were “undeniably unattractive aspects” to what had happened to the islanders in the 1970s, that was no longer what the case was about, Jonathan Crow QC, for the foreign secretary, told lords Bingham, Hoffmann, Rodger, Carswell and Mance.

Democratic rights did not figure in the argument of Jonathan Crow QC, the lawyer representing the British government. Rather, he pointed out that the dispossessed islanders did not possess any property rights. Therefore, to allow these evicted people to return to their homes would be to concede to an act of “mass trespass”:

The issue now was whether the government had been entitled in 2004 to issue orders in council forbidding the return of the islanders, he said. Britain took the Chagos islands from France in the Napoleonic wars and, under a 1971 immigration ordinance, removed the inhabitants compulsorily so that the main island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, could be used as a US base.

Crow said that it had been regarded by the US since 9/11 as a “defence facility of the highest importance … a linchpin for the UK’s allies”.

Although the judgments being contested do not grant the islanders the right to return to Diego Garcia itself, repopulation of the other islands would present an “unacceptable risk”, the US believed.

“It has financial implications, political implications and defence implications,” said Crow. “The Chagossians do not own any territory … They have no property rights on the islands at all. What is being asserted is a right of mass trespass.”

Today, the Chagos Islands have a population of about 3,200, comprising 1,650 US military personnel, 50 British military personnel, and 1,500 privatised military ‘civilian contractors’. The name of the USA’s military base on Diegio Garcia is Camp Justice.

Marriage of inconvenience

Despite the British government’s steadfastness in preventing the return of the Chagossians, and the UK’s many other actions in support of the US global strategic interest, there is no quid pro quo from the United States in the form of open endorsement of Britian’s claim to the Falkland / Malvinas Islands. In an article entitlted ‘Hillary Clinton slaps Britain in the face over the Falklands’ in the web edition of the Daily Telegraph on 2nd March, Dr Nile Gardiner cited the following from the transcript of Secretary of State Clinton’s joint Press conference with President Kirchner of Argentina, held the previous day:

QUESTION: (In Spanish) And for the Secretary, it’s about the Falklands. The – President Fernandez talked about possible friendly mediation. Would the U.S. be considered – would the U.S. (inaudible) consider some kind of mediation role between the UK and Argentina over the Falklands? Thank you.

PRESIDENT DE KIRCHNER: (Via interpreter) (Inaudible) what we have (inaudible) by both countries as a friendly country of both Argentina and the UK, so as to get both countries to sit down at the table and address these negotiations within the framework of the UN resolutions strictly. We do not want to move away from that in any letter whatsoever, any comma, of what has been stated by dozens of UN resolutions and resolutions by its decolonization committee. That’s the only thing we’ve asked for, just to have them sit down at the table and negotiate. I don’t think that’s too much, really, in a very conflicted and controversial world, complex in terms.

SECRETARY CLINTON: And we agree. We would like to see Argentina and the United Kingdom sit down and resolve the issues between them across the table in a peaceful, productive way.

QUESTION: (In Spanish) Interpreter: The journalist was just asking how the U.S. intends to negotiate to get the United Kingdom to sit at the table and address the Malvinas issue.

SECRETARY CLINTON: As to the first point, we want very much to encourage both countries to sit down. Now, we cannot make either one do so, but we think it is the right way to proceed. So we will be saying this publicly, as I have been, and we will continue to encourage exactly the kind of discussion across the table that needs to take place.

Dr Gardiner, who is a true believer in the US-UK special relationship, boiled with rage about the ‘betrayal’ of the British interest by its US ally:

Hillary Clinton’s statements at this press conference are highly significant, as they demonstrate a clear shift in US policy from neutrality (last week’s position) towards siding with the Argentine position of pressing for negotiations over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands at the United Nations.

The Secretary of State, a highly skilled political operator, knows exactly what she is doing here. She is giving her full support for the official stance of Buenos Aires, despite the fact that Great Britain has made it clear that the sovereignty of the Falklands is non-negotiable. She makes no reference at all to the fact that Argentina recently threatened a blockade of the Falklands, or that its close ally Venezuela has been threatening war against Britain.

Hillary Clinton’s dire performance in Buenos Aires was not only an appalling display of appeasement towards a corrupt and authoritarian anti-American regime, which barely has the support of 20 percent of the Argentinian people. It was also an astonishing betrayal of the United Kingdom by her closest ally, and yet another slap in the face for Britain from the Obama administration.

These inaccurate and immoderate remarks reveal Nile Gardiner’s frustration that his idealised concept of the US-UK relationship is revealed as as an illusion as soon as the strategic interests of the United States diverge from those of Britain. The USA, which already finds itself losing political and economic hegemony in the American continent, would succumb to further isolation should it identify itself with the UK’s ‘non-negotiable’ position on the Falklands, because all the countries of South and Central America endorse Argentina’s position of a negotiated transfer of sovereignty to Argentina. And beyond pure strategy, there is also history and ideology. The United States won its own independence from Britain, its European colonial ruler, by military means; and after having done so, proclaimed with pride that only itself, to the exclusion of any European power, had the right to interfere in and dominate the affairs of the southern part of the Americas.

Dr Gardiner, who is the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, based in Washington, USA, ended his article with a lurid battle-cry:

Clinton has demonstrated, not the first time, strikingly poor judgment as Secretary of State. While currying favour with a third rate kleptocracy in Latin America, she is alienating America’s most loyal and valuable friend at a critically important time. She also underestimates the resolve of the British people, who will never negotiate the future of the Falkland Islands. If the Argentines want the Falklands they will have to fight for them, and if they choose to do so they will be emphatically defeated, just as they were in 1982. Hillary Clinton can cry for Argentina if she wants to, but the Falklands will be forever British.

But the truth is that the British, through their experiences as the USA’s special ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, have had enough of war; and the Latin Americans, for their part, intend to persue political and diplomatic, rather than military means.

Hair of the dog

That the Latin Americans unanimously back Argentina in the dispute over the Malvinas is no wonder. For all that the islands were uninhabited by indigenous people when the Europeans- in turns French, British and Spanish- occupied, abandoned, re-took and fought over them during the period of European colonial expansion (though discovered artefacts prove that they had been visited by people from the South American mainland before the Europeans arrived); they are South American islands, not European Islands. When, after1776, the Malvinas were ruled by the Spanish, they were not ruled directly from Spain as a separate entity- they were administered from Buenos Aires as part of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. After it won its independence from Spain, the nascent Argentinian state asserted that the Malvinas were part of its territory and established a settlement there; but Britain sent a naval expedition, which seized the islands from the Buenos Aires government in 1833.

Might was right in those days- and to a large extent this is still considered to be the case; the fact that the current inhabitants of the Falklands are descendants of British, rather than Latin American settlers, and therefore assert their ‘Britishness’, is owed entirely to that invasion of 177 years ago, and the subsequent maintennance of British control by the relatively superior military prowess of the UK; allied to Britain’s superior status within the international community, represented by its position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. MercoPress reported the observations of Brazil’s president Lula da Silva on 24th February:

“Our attitude is one of solidarity with Argentina,” said the Brazilian president adding the question: “What is the geographical, political and economic explanation for England to be in the Malvinas?”

“What is the explanation for the United Nations never having that decision? It is not possible that Argentina is not the owner while England is, despite being 14,000 km away.”

For the Brazilian leader the reason this happens is the fact that Britain is a permanent member of the Security Council. He used the occasion to once again call for the admission of more members to the council, increasing its representativeness. Brazil wants to be one of the new members.

“Is it possible that Britain can do everything and while others can do nothing?” Lula da Silva went on. “We need to start pushing so that the UN Secretary reopens this debate.”

UN Security Council members respect international rulings “only when they are functional to their own interests”, he emphasized.

The 33 presidents present in Cancun, including Lula da Silva, signed a document supporting the Argentine position, recognizing Argentina’s sovereignty claim over the Falklands and condemning the current oil drilling round by British companies.

But what about the Falklanders? One would not wish them to suffer a similar fate to that of the Chagossians; and the fact that Britain upholds the ‘principle of democratic self-determination’ for the inhabitants of its small remaining colonies only when that accords with the UK’s economic and strategic interests does not by itself prove that the claim of the people living on the Falklands / Malvinas islands should be given no moral or political credence. But what is that claim? They do not assert that they wish to be an independent nation- what they want is to be British subjects. Following from this, they have no special right which would trump a British decision on what to do with the land on which they live, and the natural resources which surround it- any more than do the people who live in the way of a proposed railway line, airport or power station. Their democratic position is that they, like any other group of a few thousand- or many more- UK citizens, have to accept the decisions of the elected British government.

For sure they have the right to campaign, or to seek recourse through the courts, but in the end they, if they insist on being British, must therefore abide by whatever choice is made by the British people as a whole, through their elected government. Should Britain decide to concede its colony off the coast of Argentina to the Argentinians, those who currently live there could choose to remain on the islands as ‘ex-pat’ Brits, or to relocate to England, Scotland or Wales with whatever financial compensation terms would be on offer; a small number of them might even decide to apply to become citizens of Argentina. That would be for them to decide, in the context of a negotiated solution.

Is the 60 million strong British bulldog really being wagged by its miniscule Falklands tail- or more precisely a hair on the tail, given that there are only 3,140 Falklanders? In the 21st Century, can a European power hide its colonial claim to the oil resources under the sea bed of South America by sheltering behind the ‘rights’ of its colonists?

Britain must go, and in the end it will have to go; the issue is one of how and when.

A NEW E-BOOK TO DOWNLOAD.

© Soundings 2010

We believe that now is the time for a new coalition of ideas and action on the centre left, working together to find common ground for change. At the heart of such a coalition is the belief that social democrats, liberals, greens and civic nationalists share a wide range of concerns. We all want to build a society in which individuals have more life chances, and we all fear for the future of the planet. We all believe that a more equal society is absolutely essential to secure these aims, and we all believe that greater democracy is crucial in giving people power, voice and the ability to secure more freedom and a sustainability economy.

Although Labour remains a central part of the progressive future, there are also tens of thousands of members of the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, along with progressive people in no party, who are prepared to discuss this kind of coalition politics. After the Crash is intended to help begin a conversation between these constituencies, so that we can find better solutions to the problems we face than are currently on offer from the mainstream of the major political parties.

Jointly published by Soundings, Social Liberal Forum and Compass
In association with the Media Department at Middlesex University and Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London
Supported by the Lipman Miliband Trust

Contributors: Jon Cruddas, Caroline Lucas, Steve Webb, Neal Lawson, Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, Richard S. Grayson, Jonathan Rutherford, Alan Finlayson, Jonathon Porritt, Leanne Wood, Richard Thomson, Stuart White.

After the Crash - re-inventing the the left in Britain

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The Spring issue of SOLIDARITY is now available. This is an article from it.

“The strength of the unions depends on the consciousness, organisation, and active involvement of their members …”

As we approach a General Election, whatever the outcome, we can be sure that public sector workers and the services they provide, are facing cuts across the board. For instance, even if the current government were to somehow hang on, the NHS would face cuts in spending of between £15 and £20 billion by 2014. Ken Clarke, for the Tories has promised deeper cuts than those made by Thatcher.

Whichever sector you look at management are seeking to cut jobs or services, or some measure of both. So the trades unions are going to face a severe test of their ability to defend their members and the services. In London the FBU is facing a stiff battle against management which wants to save money by unilaterally imposing new shifts (see Page 12).

Whilst UK union membership is comprised of 40.3% in the private sector, and 59.7% in the public sector there is no comparison in unity density. As Gregor Gall reports (see page 13) union density in the private sector is down to a meagre 15%, whilst in the public sector it is 57.1%. Those covered by collective agreements were 18.7% in the private sector and 70.5% in the public sector.

This shows the scope for recruitment in the public sector where collective agreements apply. Yet, in the case of Health and social work, despite an increase in staff numbers over the period of the New Labour government, union density has declined from 46.1% to 40.7%. Why? The reasons are surely connected with the collaboration of the Health unions with the government rather than mobilising their members against its market driven ‘reforms’. If they have criticised the introduction of the ‘health market’ they have nonetheless signed up to a partnership agreement designed to deliver ‘modernisation’.

This partnership was agreed in the context of the introduction of a ‘health market’ which has opened up the NHS to private companies, demanded Trusts break even year on year, and introduced ‘payment by results’. It has replaced cooperation with competition. This partnership has undermined union independence and meant they have failed to challenge the government’s agenda, despite their criticisms of it. If you look at the NHS Social Partnership Forum website you can read examples of ‘best practice’. Just to take one example, the report waxes lyrical about cooperation between management and unions at the Blackpool Trust, enabling 523 jobs to be cut! There is as yet no movement within the health service unions to break this partnership arrangement. Without such a break there can be no effective rebuilding of independent union organisation opposed to the fragmentation of the NHS.

Yet as the example of the North Devon UNISON strike shows, with determined leadership, even the lowest paid and downtrodden workers can be organised successfully if their interests are not identified with those of the management. As Mark Harper shows in his article (page 4) the key to building union strength is the involvement of union members. Or, as he puts it “a union is at its strongest when the distinction between activist and member is at its most blurred”.

Like the health unions, the CWU in Royal Mail has accepted the need for ‘modernisation’ as good coin. The leadership of the union seeks a partnership with Royal Mail, but the resistance of their membership to the impact of liberalisation on the job, and the service, is an obstacle to reaching one. Ironically a single CWU member, the pseudonymous Roy Mayall, on his own initiative in breaking into the mass media, has done more to explain the issues behind the dispute than the union apparatus has been able to do. As Roy explains (see page 5), there needs to be a campaign to end the ‘downstream access’ which is nothing other than a rigged market in which RM has to deliver the mail of its competitors. The strategy of the CWU – ‘modernisation’ of RM so it can compete with the private companies – can only lead to the destruction of jobs and a worsening of the service.

Defending public services requires an alliance between public sector workers and users of the services they provide. As the campaign in defence of Council housing has shown, such an alliance (in this case between council workers and Council tenants) has delivered successes despite the odds being stacked against them. Of course, there is the advantage of having a ballot of tenants to decide on transfer to the private sector. Other privatisations do not have to go through a ballot. But the principle remains the same. Public sector workers bolster their chances if they win the support of service users.

Local government workers have long been used to the annual budget crisis in which cuts are distributed across departments. Pressure is now being stepped up. For example, 2,000 job cuts have been announced in Birmingham. At the same time the ‘Single Status’ process draws to a messy end, with open discussion barred on the basis of ‘advice’ from the union solicitors.

The weakness of union organisation in local government is reflected by the fact that in only one local authority (Birmingham – see page 9) has there been strike action across all departments against pay cuts resulting from ‘Single Status’. In some areas there has been sectional action from groups with some industrial muscle such as the Leeds refuse workers (page 7). In some areas there was a not surprising outrage from members when local government unions have recommended acceptance of agreements which include wage cuts for a substantial group of their members. Now the situation seems to be that unions are making no recommendation whatsoever, for fear of the legal consequences; leaving their members leaderless.

During the period from 1980 the response of the union apparatuses to the defeats the movement suffered was ‘partnership’ and the ’service model’ - the provision of individual services. This strategy tied the unions to their employers and encouraged a passive outlook amongst members. All that they had to do was pay their subscription and miraculously a service was provided for them. This reinforced the impact of the defeats on collective union organisation. Yet even when such an approach was abandoned, or half abandoned, the unions were left with the consequence of encouraging a passive membership rather than building collective organisation.

The strength of the unions depends on the consciousness, organisation and active involvement of their members in the workplace and on the industrial level. It depends also, on their independence from management and government, and a recognition that their interests require a struggle. A break with ‘partnership’ in the NHS and elsewhere and the promotion of a vision of public services which are not turned into commodities, is necessary means of changing the unions from service providers to fighting collective organisations.

As Kim Moody shows (page 14) from the experience of the NUHW in the USA, a union with virtually no apparatus can be successful to the degree that it is literally a union of the members. There is a lesson for us there and from North Devon. The enthusiasm of workers for an organisation which they consider theirs, which brings them together in struggle for their interests develops a collective and combative spirit.

A call for urgent action by the

Indonesian and Australian governments

Merak asylum seekers need a just solution

The situation at Merak has dragged on much too long. For over 120 days, the 254 mostly Tamil asylum seekers have been stranded there. They have suffered hardships at the hands of the Australian and Indonesian authorities. The International Organisation of Migration funded by Australia to provide welfare assistance for asylum seekers has used its control over food, and medicine and other welfare to deprive the refugees of basic needs such as medicine, tarpaulins, and toilets to try to force people off the boat.

With each passing day, the conditions deteriorate further and the suffering grows. The lack of medical attention and basic care cost the life of a 29 year-old man, Jacob Christin, in December 2009.

Ministers of the Australian government and now Prime Minister Rudd, himself have indicated that the Australian government will re-settle people from the boat found to be refugees. 

The Indonesian government says that it will not use force against the refugees and asylum seekers. It also says that it expects the Australian government to play a role in resettling the Merak people. 

The misery at Merak must not be allowed to continue, day after day, week after week. 

Conditions needed to Resolve the Situation

The Indonesian government is proposing that the Merak people disembark and be held in a secure renovated warehouse – a detention facility - in Bekasi. They have agreed that there will be no sharing of information with the Sri Lankan government and no victimization of any of the leaders, or anyone else on the boat. They have agreed that UNHCR will have immediate access to the asylum seekers after they disembark.

These conditions go some way to meeting the minimum conditions necessary if people on the boat are to be confident that they have a secure future. 

But there are issues that must be settled if there is going to a just resolution to the situation at Merak:

(i) the Indonesian government must immediately open access to human rights, welfare, and other groups to provide support to the people at Merak; 

(ii) immigration verification and UNHCR processing can begin without having to disembark; 

(iii) that the asylum seekers have legal assistance for immigration verification and processing; 

(iv) that there is immediate access for human rights and other welfare groups to ensure the provision of medical and other humanitarian support, as well as independent supervision of disembarkation and on-shore accommodation conditions; (v) on-shore accommodation for the Merak people should be open, not locked. It is the height of hypocrisy for the Australian government to pursue the Indonesian Solution that allows conditions in Indonesia that would be unacceptable in Australia. Under the formal requirements of Australian refugee policy, families with children are not held in locked facilities; 

(vi) a guarantee that the people will be kept together; 

(vii) that the refugees are allowed to keep their mobile phones and the laptops that have been their lines of communication with the outside world;

(viii) a guarantee of non refoulment ie not returned to danger in Sri Lanka.

On its part, the Australian government should immediately provide whatever humanitarian and financial assistance is needed to allow the Indonesian government to meet these requirements. But most significantly the Australian government must move beyond the vague statements that it will play a role in resettlement, to stating clearly the conditions and timeline for resettlement. 

Unless these conditions are met, there can be no enduring solution for the asylum seekers and refugees. People who have left the boat have been kept in appalling immigration cells in Jakarta. Indonesian officials violated internationally recognized protocols regarding refugee rights by allowing Sri Lankan navy officers to interrogate refugees in the cells.

There must be an immediate improvement for the humanitarian conditions for the boat. The systematic deprivation and mistreatment of the asylum seekers must stop. Indonesian officers (such as the Indonesian police officer, Pakino) who have been shown to be guilty of harassment and abuse of asylum seekers must be withdrawn and disciplined for their actions.

Reject the Indonesian Solution

On a wider scale of refugee rights and regional policy, the Australian and Indonesian governments must commit to a drastic re-assessment of the Indonesian Solution. At the moment, the Indonesian government is effectively involved in a conspiracy with the Australian government to deny Tamil and other asylum seekers under the Refugee Convention.

Asylum seekers are not criminals. They have an internationally recognized right to seek asylum. They should not be arbitrarily detained in Indonesia or Australia. Australia should not be funding, and Indonesia should not be building, detention centres when people need houses, schools and medical centres. 

Australia must help Indonesia established refugee processing to international standards and it must guarantee re-settlement for those found to be refugees. last year Australia re-settled only 32 refugees from Indonesia.

Urgent Action Needed

The Indonesian government can act immediately to open access to the refugees, allow humanitarian assistance and begin immigration verification. It should release those being held in Jakarta and allow them to return to the boat if they wish. The Australian government should instruct IOM to return to the port area and provide humanitarian assistance. 

Urgent meetings are needed between the Indonesian government, representatives from the boat, Indonesian human rights, Legal Aid, refugee rights and welfare NGO’s to resolve the outstanding issues. These meetings should also include representatives of the Australian government and Australian refugee advocates to discuss the conditions of resettlement. 

The people on the boat at Merak are fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka. One hundred and nine of them are already recognized UNHCR refugees.

All they are asking is that their rights as refugees and human beings are protected by the Australian and Indonesian governments – both of which say that uphold human rights and the values of the Refugee Convention. 

Signatories

• Refugee Action Coalition (Sydney)
• Working Peoples Association (Indonesia)
• Tamil Solidarity (United Kingdom)
• Socialist Worker (New Zealand)
• Socialist Party of Malaysia 
• Indonesia Human Rights Committee (Auckland)
• Canadian Humanitarian Appeal for Relief of Tamils (HART)
• Indonesia Legal Aid Foundation
• Confederation Congress of Indonesia Union Alliance
• Refugee Rights Action Network (Perth)
• Save-Taimils, Tamil Nadu India

By Darinka Aleksic, from Labour List

In 2008, the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill through Parliament saw the most serious attempt to restrict abortion rights in Britain in the last two decades. Since then, apart from occasional shrieking headlines about levels of repeat abortions among teenage girls, abortion has generally fallen off the political radar. But this year, in the run up to the general election and beyond, the issue is again set to force its way up the agenda.

With over 100 MPs stepping down from Parliament, the make up of the House of Commons is set to change dramatically - and whichever party holds the balance of power after the election, the balance over abortion seems certain to shift.

Among those retiring are 71 MPs who voted in 2008 to maintain the current 24-week abortion time limit, and reports this week suggest that senior Tories are confident that a Conservative majority of just ten seats would give them enough votes to cut it to 20 weeks. Nadine Dorries, the Conservative backbencher who led the attack in 2008 and favours a 12-week abortion time limit, has declared her intention to re-open the issue adding that she “was always aware that the real opportunity for abortion law reform would arise with a Conservative government.”

But the time limit is not the only issue. A more anti-choice Commons could see the reprise of attempts to introduce mandatory cooling off periods and directive counselling sessions for women seeking abortions, both of which create further delays and obstacles to a process which can already take weeks.

Moves to restrict the availability of abortion on the grounds of foetal impairment could also become a major issue, particularly given current debates around assisted suicide and quality of life for those with severe disabilities. Trevor Phillips has indicated that the Equality and Human Rights Commission intends to consider the “implications of the law on abortion for the way we discharge our duty to disabled people”, opening the door to legal challenges on this basis.

In Northern Ireland, where access to abortion remains extremely limited even in cases of rape, incest and foetal abnormality, opportunities for reform are rapidly dwindling. The withdrawal last year of hard won guidelines on the legality of abortion in the province and the coming devolution of abortion law from Westminster to Stormont will place responsibility for reproductive rights entirely in the hands of local politicians who, whether nationalist or unionist, speak with one voice in their utter rejection of any improved access to abortion services.

In Scotland, Alex Salmond has made clear his desire for a similar devolution of abortion regulation away from Westminster. The SNP has capitalised on disaffection among some religious voters over Labour’s position on abortion and other ‘moral issues’ by emphasising a pro-life stance. Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy’s speech in Westminster last month, positioning Labour as the natural party of religious voters is seen as an attempt to win back Catholic and Muslim supporters, but risks jeopardising the party’s progressive reputation on social issues. So if the law was to change, what would be at stake for the thousands of British women who every year take the decision to terminate a pregnancy? If they live in Northern Ireland, it could mean joining the thousands of women making the expensive and distressing trip to the mainland for private sector treatment.

If they are among the 1.5% of women who need an abortion after 20 weeks - often facing the most exceptional and distressing personal circumstances, they may be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term regardless of the impact on their lives. And if they are among the tiny number of families taking the often heart-breaking decision to terminate a pregnancy of a child with serious abnormalities, they could risk legal scrutiny and political interference in what is already a deeply distressing and personal situation.

With so much at stake it is vital for pro-choice supporters, who make up the vast majority of voters in the UK, to look carefully at the voting record of their MPs, the position of their local PPCs and the platform of their chosen party before entering the voting booth this year.

Ralph Miliband’s corpse is revolving at high speed.

At the Iraq Inquiry today, hapless Foreign Secretary David Miliband defended the invasion on that little known international law of nursery rhymes. Like a demented grand old Duke of York, Miliband explained that it would do to be seen to have “marched to the top of the hill of pressure” and then to march back down again.

Meanwhile, Armando Iannucci must be more than a little amused to witness Miliband auditioning as a comic actor for any future Iannucci projects.

In the superb film “In the Loop”, the hapless Minister for International Development Simon Foster remarks that for peace to prevail sometimes it is necessary to “climb the mountain of conflict.”

David Miliband may sense his political future is over and is looking for a new career in comedy. He should go far. After all, his whole political career has been just about the funniest thing modern British history has witnessed. If Ed Miliband should see fit to join him, the long search for the new Laurel and Hardy of comedy will at last be over.

by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

http://www.independent.co.uk/  

I am but Muslim lite, a non-conformist believer who will not be told what and how by sanctimonious religious sentinels for whom religion is a long list of rules to be obeyed by bovine followers. Readers know I am often critical of Muslim people and nations. Bad things that happen to us cannot all be attributed to “Islamophobia”, a nebulous and imprecise concept that, like anti-Semitism, can be used to besmirch and sully and silence criticism.

But this week even I, even I, can see that for the British establishment Muslims are contemptible creatures, devalued humans. As I prayed before starting this column I felt tears stinging my eyes and my face was burning as if I had been slapped many times over. Do they expect me to turn the other cheek? Millions of other Muslims must have felt what I did. And some may well go on to do things they shouldn’t. Their acts will intensify anti-Muslim prejudices and will be used to justify injustice. The cycle is vicious and unrelenting.

Once again at weddings and birthday parties, in quiet, tranquil mosques, at dinner tables across the land, including those of millionaire Muslims, I am hearing murmurs of trepidation and disquiet – voices kept low, sometimes vanishing into whispers, just in case; you never know if they will break down the door. These people are, like myself, well incorporated into the nation’s busy life. Some own restaurants and businesses, others work in the City or law firms and chambers. At one gathering a frightfully posh, Muslim public school boy (aged 14), an excellent cricketer, said in his jagged, breaking voice: “I will never live in this country after finishing my education. They hate us. They’ll put us all in prison. Nothing we do is OK. Do you think I am wrong Mrs Yasmin?” No I don’t, though his hot young blood makes him intemperate.

Where do I start? Well, with the PM who takes himself to the moral high ground at every opportunity, to orate and berate as he did when called in by the placid Chilcot panel. The son of a preacher man, John Ebenezer Brown, Gordon has the manse gene. Unlike the shape-shifter Blair, he is authentically himself, driven by embedded values, and I admire that. But, like his predecessor, he is shockingly indifferent to the agony of the people most affected by the Iraq war, a war Brown still says was “the right” thing to do for the “right reasons”. His only regret? They should have thought a bit more about what to do next after they had defeated Saddam and pulled down his statues.

Not a word about the countless Iraqis killed when we bombed indiscriminately in civilian areas, no word of sorrow, however hollow or feigned, about the dead children or those now born in that blighted land with two heads and other grotesque abnormalities. John Simpson’s recent BBC report described the rising number of such births in Fallujah, picked for the cruelest collective punishment by America.

Are they not children, Mr Brown? You still cry for your own baby, who died so young. For Muslims, that only confirms native Iraqis are grains of sand to those who executed the imperial war. Martinique intellectual and liberationist Aimee Cesaire wrote: “Colonisation works to de-civilise the coloniser, to brutalise him … to degrade him.” We saw how with Brown, whose empathy is withheld from Iraqis, Muslim victims tortured with the connivance of our secret services and perhaps from all citizens who pray to Allah.

Meanwhile at Isleworth Crown Court, Judge John Denniss is industriously sentencing demonstrators who gathered near the Israeli embassy to rail against that state’s attack on Gaza, one of the worst acts of state terrorism in recent history. Our government said nothing then, and were therefore complicit. Protesters came from all backgrounds but the vast majority of those arrested were young Muslim men. Dozens are being sent down for insignificant acts of bravado. Some were about to go to university, to train as dentists and the like. Their homes were raided, families cowed and terrified. Joanna Gilmore, an academic expert on public demonstrations, says never before have such disproportionate sentences been handed out, not even with the volatile anti-globalisation protests. Denniss intends his punishments to be a deterrent. To deter us from what? Having the temerity to believe we live in a democracy and are free to march?

And then the crypto-fascist, Aryan Geert Wilders, is invited into the Lords by UKIP and crossbench peers to show his vile anti-Islam film in the name of freedom of expression. Freedom my arse. It is just another entertaining episode of Muslim-baiting. I dare the same peers to now invite David Irving, the Holocaust denier, to share his thoughts freely in the Lords, and get Omar Bakri over from the Lebanon with films of himself making fiery speeches on what to do with infidels. Again Muslims are made to understand that different standards apply to others. We are on trial, always, and always must expect to lose.

I am here accusing the most powerful in government, parliament and the judiciary, not those individual MPs, peers and judges who try to do the right thing. To them we are immensely grateful, and to the extraordinary lawyers, activists, journalists, artists, writers and ordinary Britons fighting ceaselessly for our liberties. We just witnessed Helena Kennedy in court passionately defending Cossor Ali, accused of providing active support to her convicted terrorist husband. The jury, scrupulously fair, bless them, acquitted the young woman. Muslims involved in crime and violent Islamicism must be tried and punished. But their acts do not give lawmakers and law keepers of this land licence to strip the rest of us of our humanity and inviolable democratic entitlements.

During the dark days of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Irish in Britain were often treated unjustly by parliament, police, judges like Lord Denning, and vast sections of the media. Under Thatcher, miners and trades unionists were mercilessly “tamed”, too. But this time, with Muslims, the establishment has surpassed its previous disgraceful record. They steal our human and civil rights and don’t even try to behave with a modicum of honour during and after war. The same people call upon us to be more “British” but treat us as lesser citizens. Deal or No Deal? You tell me.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

By Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford

In the wake of the financial crash, the left has to create a new model of the individual living in society. But what now is the ethical relationship of individuals to one another and to society?

The centre left has to refashion a politics that values the social goods that give meaning to people’s lives: home, family, friendships, good work, locality, and communities of belonging, imaginary or otherwise. In our affirmation of ordinary everyday life we can rediscover the common good. This understanding of the interdependency of individuals, and acknowledgment of the social nature of individual life, recognises that people increasingly see themselves as individuals, and seek individual fulfilment, but also understands that individuality can only flourish in a social environment. And this way of looking at the relationship between society and the individual - which is part of a long tradition on the left - is helpful to us now in rethinking these relationships.

Leonard Hobhouse, a leading New Liberal thinker, wrote in Social Evolution and Political Theory:

“Society exists in individuals. When all the generations through which its unity subsists are counted in, its life is their life, and nothing outside their life”

Like Marx, for whom the individual was a category of relations, Hobhouse described ‘man’ as “the meeting point of a great number of social relations”. He argued that a progressive movement must have an ethical ideal. One element of this ideal must be liberty, but it must find a synthesis with equality, “since it stands for the truth that there is a common humanity deeper than all our superficial distinctions.” For Hobhouse, social progress is the development of a society in which “the best life of each man is, and is felt to be, bound up with the best life of his fellow-citizens”.

New Liberal thinkers such as Hobhouse were the pioneers of the British tradition of ethical socialism, which addresses the material conditions which give form to individual being. It is a politics of equality founded in the belief that individuals are of equal worth and it is governed by the ethic of reciprocity: do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you. It recognises that the task of living necessitates inter-dependency with others, and that this inter-dependency leads to the question of equality and justice.

Equality is the ethical core of justice. It is also the precondition for freedom. Not simply the negative freedom from the compulsion of others, or the freedom achieved through a fair distribution of resources, but a positive freedom toward self-fulfilment.

Ethical socialism must animate radical change in the organisation of the economy and its relations of control and ownership. Alongside a critique of the current financial system and its structuring effects on our lives, we need to think about the economy from the perspective of human needs. Britain has to make the transition from casino capitalism to a low-carbon, more equitable and balanced form of economic development.

The transition demands an economics whose principles are sustainable wealth creation, durability, recycling, cultural inventiveness, equality and human flourishing. The fundamental logic of this new economy must be ecological sustainability.

Climate change, peak oil and the need for energy and food security are all core green issues that will lie at its heart. Social movements, single issue campaigns and civil society organisations will be essential to this process, but they are not enough. A plural politics of alliances capable of achieving transformative economic and political change requires a theoretical and philosophical grounding and coherence. Only by developing our traditions of socialism and social liberalism, in conversation with newer traditions, particularly green politics and a politics that recognises cultural difference, will we be able to build a new hegemonic politics.

The coming election is the endgame of an old era. Whether Labour remains in government or returns to opposition, we need a fundamental re-assessment of its identity. Nothing is guaranteed, but the opportunities for a more ethical politics and economy are real. In the years ahead, the goals of a centre left are a strong, responsive and plural democracy, a restoration of trust and reciprocity in public life, and an ethical and ecologically sustainable economy for social justice and equality.

The unabridged version of this article is published in Soundings issue 44, Spring 2010.