Spailpin1903

FAREPAK VICTIMS COMMITTEE

2011-11-06T21:00:00.003Z

On the 13th October, 2011 at 4.13pm it will be five years since the collapse of Farepak Food & Gifts Limited.

Tens of thousands of people had their savings stolen resulting in approx £38 million being owned to Farepak Victims.

What has happened since the collapse:

BDO Stoy Hayward - On the 13th October 2006 were appointed Joint Liquidators. The last accounts given in 2010 stated that payments made totalled £4,489.716.

Included in this total is £822,445 for Liquidator's Fees; £9,050 for taxation work and £1,450,384 for forensic work.

www.farepak.co.uk/2010CreditorsReport.pdf

In April 2008 BDO initiated proceedings against the Directors to try to recover further monies that were owed to the Farepak Victims. A settlement with no admission of liability was reached with the Directors. An amount of £4 million (inclusive of costs) has been received by BDO. The terms of the settlement are confidential and the Liquidation Committee and the Joint Liquidators cannot say anthing else about this.

On 21st September 2009 cheques are sent out to 5,900 Farepak Victims who had payed monies into Farepak Food & Gifts Limited bank account after the 13th October, 2006. They are still owed monies payed in before the date of liquidation.

It is estimated that the Farepak Victims will receive 15p in the £ but BDO are unable to confirm when these payments will be made.

2011 Report to the Creditors is yet to be published.

The Directors - February 2011 the Government's Insolvency Service applied to the High Court to disqualify all nine former directors of Farepak and its parent company.

One of these Directors is Sir Clive Thompson who currently is Deputy Chairman of Strategic Equity Capital with £3,030,000 in Ordinary Shares.

If the High Court action is won and Thompson is disqualified (could take 2 years) the question is will he really be all that concerned? He has had 5 years to increase his vast wealth.

www.strategicequitycapital.com/secapital/en/home

FAREPAK VICTIMS - December 2006 the Farepak Response Fund issues vouchers worth around 15p for every £ lost.

October 2011 116,413 Farepak Victims are still owed £36.9 million.

The unfairness of this situation is very apparent – When will there be justice for the Farepak Victims?

To continue the fight for justice the Farepak Victims Committee has lodged a Government e-petition which currently is being look at by HM Treasury.

epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/18820

The views of a British Tax expert.

2011-11-06T20:51:00.001Z

There's a sickening dimension to today's agreement between the UK and Switzerland that is getting to let thousands of wealthy tax criminals off the hook – without them ever being held to account or even having to admit to their crimes.

At the moment the UK government is turning this deliberate blind eye to massive, large scale, organised looting of the UK's tax system it is also bringing criminal charges against more than thirty young people who recently took part in a in a wholly peaceful UK Uncut demonstration against tax avoidance.

They are facing criminal charges in the UK for having leaflets condemning tax avoiders when at exactly the same time the government was negotiating a deal to make sure that tax criminals were let off without ever facing the consequences of their crime.

This is a sickening indictment of the UK criminal justice system, our respect for free speech, the values of this government and the fact that we live in a society where it is now a crime to criticise the criminality that did and does pervade much of the financial services sector that deliberately promotes tax havens to facilitate crime of the sort which those using Switzerland have just been excused of.

No wonder people are angry. They have every right to be. We are being led by moral cowards who excuse crime whilst prosecuting those who exercise the supposed human right of free speech to criticise those facilitating it. It's Cameron and Osborne who should be in the dock, not the Fortnum and Mason's protesters from UK Uncut.

SLP Policies - Scottish Election

2011-04-15T23:08:00.003+01:00

The Socialist Labour Party was founded to fight for socialism. Unlike New Labour, SNP, Tories and Lib Dems in this election, Socialist Labour understands that: "It is capitalism, not the complexion of governments, which is responsible for the economic and social devastation which results in: the destruction of basic manufacturing industries, mass unemployment, homelessness, helplessness and despair. Only by dealing with the root cause - capitalism itself, can this devastation be stopped and a long term alternative be constructed." -Arthur Scargill, SLP Leader. Socialist Labour's programme: EMPLOYMENT FOR ALL. The scourge of unemployment can be tackled but only with radical policies: a four day week without loss of pay. a ban on all non-essential overtime. voluntary retirement at 55 on full pay. INDUSTRY. To deal with the immediate economic and social crisis we propose: regeneration of our manufacturing and production capacity. re-opening deep mined coal, engineering and shipbuilding works. rebuilding all industries that generate real wealth and opportunities for Scotland's battered communities. investment in renewable energy industries. ENVIRONMENT. Environmental concerns must go hand in hand with resurrecting our industry: an immediate end to the madness of nuclear power stations. clean coal technology with carbon capture and an end to open cast mining. development of renewable energy resources. HEALTH & SOCIAL SERVICES. Rebuilding and further development of our NHS and social services will be a high priority for Socialist Labour: universal access to free health and social services the right to health and social services enshrined in law. the abolition of private health schemes - no one should get rich from the suffering of others - private health care also undermines our NHS. HOUSING. To tackle the housing crisis and provide work for thousands of unemployed building workers: the building of thousands of new homes each year for the duration of the next Scottish Parliament. all empty properties to be identified, modernised and converted into homes. POVERTY. Recent surveys have told us that one third of children live in poverty. This is a national disgrace, we propose: the introduction of a national minimum wage based on two thirds median male earnings. no taxation on income below £15,000. the doubling of state pensions coupled with their linking to wages and the cost of living. EDUCATION. Our comprehensive, further and higher education system is under attack and faced with deep cuts from those in government who have benefitted from a free system in the past: free, high quality education for all. free access to lifelong education. abolition of the class privilege of private education. restoration of mandatory student grants and state benefits linked to minimum wage levels. PEACE. Socialist Labour is against war. This country has got involved in many wars that are not in the interests of the Scottish people and has caused death, misery and destruction across the world. We would campaign to end current wars, to bring troops home and oppose future wars of conquest and aggression on sovereign countries. We would: remove the Trident nuclear system from the Clyde and support unilateral nuclear disarmament. withdraw this country from the aggressive NATO military alliance. oppose the concept of a "European" army oppose the arms trade. INTERNATIONALISM. With today's world racked by unjust wars, we oppose all of Britain's racist asylum and immigration laws which condemn people seeking refuge to detention, imprisonment, torture or death. The Socialist Labour Party is committed to fighting racism and fascism wherever they occur. We would: oppose the illegal and unjust sanctions upon the Cuban people. support FAIR trade and oppose "free" trade policies imposed upon impoverished nations. develop international links with peace and environmental movements, trades union organisations and womens' movements. Socialist Labour has detailed policies on these and other issues - see www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk for full details.

OUR DEMANDS MOST MODERATE ARE - WE ONLY WANT THE EARTH

VOTE SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY ON THE 5TH MAY

2011-04-15T23:01:00.004+01:00

On 5th May we ask you to vote for the Socialist Labour Party with your second or regional vote.

Why?

Because the SLP is committed to fighting for full employment, a free NHS and education system, a housing programme which guarantees everyone a home and the restoration of fairness in the workplace by repealing anti-Trades Union laws.

The SLP wants to see a socialist Scotland. We do not see the point in gaining autonomy for Scotland simply to give it away to the unelected and unaccountable European Union. EU bureaucrats in Brussels deny the Scottish Parliament the right to introduce common ownership and the rebuilding of industry, large and small, that has been butchered by the indifference of consecutive governments of ALL the main parties. The SLP is the only party campaigning to get Scotland out of the clutches of the EU.

The regional vote allows smaller parties the chance to gain enough support to get MSP's elected with as little as 5% of the vote. Socialist Labour MSP's in Holyrood will fight the coming deep cuts that will be imposed no matter which "main" party or coalition of parties forms the next Scottish government. We will work with local communities to campaign for more, not less, resources and services that are so essential to the life and soul of communities throughout Scotland.

Vote Socialist Labour Party - Regional Vote

Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention

2010-12-18T12:06:00.002Z

by Neil Clark

15th December 2010.

'The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." So declared the neocon US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman back in 1999 at the height of the US-led military intervention against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia.

It would be interesting to hear what Senator Lieberman makes of the report of the Council of Europe – Europe's premier human rights watchdog – on his favourite band of freedom fighters. The report, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, details horrific rights abuses it claims have been carried out by the KLA, the west's allies in the war against Yugoslavia 11 years ago.

The council claims that civilians – Serbian and non-KLA-supporting Kosovan Albanians detained by the KLA in the 1999 hostilities – were shot in northern Albania and their kidneys extracted and sold on the black market. It names Hashim Thaçi, the former leader of the KLA and Kosovo's prime minister, as the boss of a "mafia-like" group engaged in criminal activity – including heroin trading – since before the 1999 war. The report is a damning indictment not only of the KLA but also of western policy. And it also gives lie to the fiction that Nato's war with Yugoslavia was, in Tony Blair's words, "a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship".

It was a fiction many on the liberal left bought into. In 1999 Blair was seen not as a duplicitous warmonger in hock to the US but as an ethical leader taking a stand against ethnic cleansing. But if the west had wanted to act morally in the Balkans and to protect the people in Kosovo there were solutions other than war with the Serbs, and options other than backing the KLA – the most violent group in Kosovan politics. They could have backed genuine multi-party negotiations, or offered to lift sanctions on Belgrade if a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo could be found.

Instead, a virulently anti-Serb stance led the west into taking ever more extreme positions, and siding with an organisation which even Robert Gelbard, President Clinton's special envoy to Kosovo, described as "without any question, a terrorist group". In 2000 the Sunday Times revealed that, prior to the Nato bombing, US agents had been training the KLA. Shaban Shala, a KLA commander, claimed he had met British and US agents in north Albania in 1996.

It was the KLA's campaign of violence against Yugoslav state officials, Serbian and Kosovan civilians in 1998, which led to an escalation of the conflict with the government in Belgrade, with atrocities committed on both sides. We were told the outbreak of war in March 1999 with Nato was the Serbian government's fault, yet Lord Gilbert, the UK defence minister, admitted "the terms put to Miloševic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were absolutely intolerable … it was quite deliberate".

The subsequent 78-day "humanitarian" bombardment of federal Yugoslavia massively intensified the ethnic cleansing of Kosovan Albanians by Yugoslav forces. Between 2,000 and 10,000 Kosovan Albanians were killed by these forces, with between 500 and 1,500 people killed by the Nato bombing.

But even after Russian pressure forced a Yugoslav withdrawal from Kosovo, ethnic cleansing and rights abuses in the region continued. Under the Nato occupation an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been forced from their homes.

A report on Kosovo by Minority Rights Group International claimed: "Nowhere [in Europe] is there such a level of fear for so many minorities that they will be harassed or attacked, simply for who they are." And in October 2010, a report by Human Rights Watch stated that "Roma and related minority groups deported from western Europe to Kosovo face discrimination and severe deprivation amounting to human rights abuse". As for democratic advances, Sunday's elections in Kosovo, boycotted by the Serbian minority, have seen widespread allegations of fraud, with a turnout of 149% reported in one area.

Far from being Tony Blair's "good war", Nato's assault on Yugoslavia was in its own way as immoral as the assault on Iraq. But as the Iraq war has become discredited, so it is even more important for the supporters of "liberal interventionism" to promote the line that Kosovo was in some way a success. The Council of Europe's report on the KLA's crimes makes that position much harder to maintain. And if it plays its part in making people more sceptical about any future western "liberal interventions", it is to be warmly welcomed.

Ireland and the European Union: Who is to blame?

2010-12-05T20:46:00.004Z

by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey,
Pravda.Ru

21.11.2010

Like a house of cards, one by one, the European Union starts to collapse. First Greece, then Ireland, next who knows? The "experts" blame the banks, blame the bankers, blame the financiers...but who is apportioning the blame to where it really lies: to the system itself?

It is by now patently obvious that no system is perfect. The Communist system in which the State provides security for its citizens, where everyone contributes towards the common good, was implemented in many countries in the twentieth century where in general terms it was hugely successful. The capitalist system, one whose vision is a society in which people are free to create their own business and stimulate the economy by creating wealth and jobs, while paying taxes to create a social umbrella, operating alongside Trade Union movements which protected workers' rights was a nice idea and on paper a good ideal.

The problem is, one system worked and the other did not. In the Communist countries, healthcare was excellent and free, schooling was excellent, and free; having a house and a job was a birthright; public transportation was free, public utilities were free; basic foodstuffs were free and distributed by the State, which in turn provided national security with strong, defensively-oriented armed forces and security on the streets - people were free to walk around without being attacked by marauding gangs of drug addicts, inner cities were free of feral children.

The other side of the Iron Curtain spent trillions of dollars trying to sabotage the model, trying to assassinate the political leaders of Communist countries (such as Fidel Castro) and from day one in Russia started interfering (the Civil War). This side of the Curtain was happy to call Stalin Uncle Joe when 26 million Soviet citizens were losing their lives defeating Hitler (90% of the Wehrmacht casualties were sustained on the Eastern Front) yet after the Great Patriotic War finished, settled back into its customary policy of antagonism against a political and social system which freed millions from the tyranny of Imperialism across the globe and brought impoverished and backward societies into the front line of development in just a few decades.

Instead of siding with and working towards the success of this system, this side of the Curtain sabotaged it and by a skilful policy of dangling carrots in front of the noses of a generation of donkeys which blindly took the bait, sent the entire world, just two decades later, into the worst economic and financial crisis it has known. And it isn't over yet. Make no mistake: the economic black hole is so vast in certain countries that there is no sunshine on the horizon and there will not be for decades to come.

And what has this wonderful capitalist system done? For a start, it turned against the attractive ideals which underpinned its basic policy, that of creating societies free to reap the reward of personal endeavour. Predictably, it has turned into a system whereby dog eats dog. Where are the high street grocery stores? They have gone, sucked into horrific black holes called hypermarkets or big spaces, where all your movements are controlled from the minute you enter to the second you leave, by the use of aromas (bread, makes you buy), the strategic placing of goods, leading you to go past the products you would not normally buy as you make for the staple goods, by manipulation of music to make you walk faster or slower, right up until the check-out, where the impulse buys are placed at just the right height to catch the attention of the average baby sitting on a supermarket trolley or the average toddler walking beside mother.

While the Communist system distributed houses for free, the other side of the Curtain turned people's lives into a nightmare from the moment they are born to the second they give up and die, no doubt being asked if they know how much money they are costing the National Health Service days before they do (as was the case with a close family member). After twelve years of education, it seems many cannot even write, higher education has become a business, as has healthcare, leisure time activities and transportation. Getting and retaining a job is a drama, buying and maintaining a house another, while a decent pension is a thing of the past. This, while bottom-line policies dictate how few police there are on the beat as the citizens grapple with living in societies in which an old lady does not feel safe to go out after dark.

Wonderful. However, that is just the start of it. As if the system itself were not bad enough, they brought in international mechanisms of control which directly affect the lives of citizens the other side of the world and in the EU, they exported it and imposed it on an inter-continental scale, in a top-down attitude of "do as I say and shut up", repeating referenda in countries whose populations obviously did not want to live in a Federal State. Take Ireland as a prime example.
And here we reach the crux of the matter: the globalization of stupidity. As if it were not enough for the "system" to turn its back on its founding principles, which were valid, it invented vectors by which rating agencies such as Fitch, Standard and Poor and Moody's (based in the USA, where else?) can stipulate how much a country's capital is worth and thereby directly affect the lives of its citizens. This has nothing to do with a system in which citizens are free to create wealth and therefore let's not call it Capitalism any more. It has morphed into something far, far worse: The speculative system.

In a word, gambling. Whereas in the past money was based upon value, i.e. trading in sea shells or the value of a silver coin (which was in Medieval times cut in half or quarters to provide the real value of a payment) speculation took its first uneasy steps when the promissory note became the currency in circulation, not worth the paper it was printed on, but having the value of the promise to pay the bearer a certain amount of money (e.g. one pound). The stake into the heart of the money-based-on-value system was the decision by the Nixon Government to unilaterally end the policy of fixing the value of the dollar to gold in 1971, destroying the Bretton Woods agreement to peg exchange rates among currencies.
The second step was the insurance market, tying monetary sums to eventualities and as time went on, these products became more and more complex, drawing in the banking system itself, insurance and reinsurance policies, investment funds, pension funds, municipalities, University funds, healthcare authorities' trusts, basing their wealth on future products of commodities, shares, government bonds, taking out insurance policies on these values...and when the public confidence in the economy collapsed, all of these products lost value because they were never based on anything tangible, purely on speculative and intangible waves of euphoria.

Nobody knows exactly how many trillions were vaporised because the knock-on effects are still being felt. It was this catastrophic backdrop which the banks were facing, their investment funds intrinsically tied up in this fog of ratings agencies and a more and more globalised economy: a world-wide house of cards waiting for a hurricane.

This system was bound to be wide open to the effects of its endemic and chronic vector of failure to create employment, where a 4% unemployment rate is classified as "healthy" (creating an underclass from the outset) and by now based upon the power of the USD, was wide open to the effects of the USA manipulating the value of the dollar to stimulate exports and to reduce its debt.
With the banks up to their ears in catastrophic investments and with unemployment rising, it came as no surprise that the system itself had positioned itself on thin ice. In Ireland's case, the budget deficit had reached 32% of its GDP, while the European Union had stipulated in its Convergence package that economies could only have a 3% deficit.

How Ireland gets back from the brink without seriously harming its consumers, who after all have fulfilled all the demands made of them, paying their taxes and following the laws imposed upon them, is a telling question for today's globalised world.
Suffice it to say that were the intelligent powers that be to raise just a one per cent tax on financial derivatives traded, hundreds of billions of USD would become readily available, taking the burden away from the citizens. This will never happen, because this system is controlled by a handful who have become super-rich at the expense of the rest of the population, consigned over time to becoming members of a global under-class.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have allowed ourselves to be duped by a global system controlled by the few, catering to their interests and rendering the endeavour of billions of people meaningless. It is as if a cabal of gamblers has taken over the world.

And guess who gets to pay their debts?

Ends.

STEALING HAITI'S FUTURE !

2010-11-09T17:48:00.000Z

What exactly are 20,000 USA troops doing there?

Is it a pretext of Humanitarian Aid!

by Steve Whatham (Lawyer and member of The Socialist Labour Party).

I watched a news item from Haiti on the evening news, 4th November. It showed Haitians surviving in make shift crude shelters following the earthquake which occurred quite a long time ago on January 12th 2010. Very little appeared to have been carried out to provide proper shelters.

My thought drifted back to reports that International help was flooding into this impoverished country. I was aware already that Cuban doctors in great numbers had already been working in Haiti for a number of years and had set up clinics where sick people could get medical help at no cost.

News reports stated that the United States had sent in Navy ships and up to 20,000 troops. My, what you can do with this amount of help if sent for the purpose of helping the people.

Assuming this huge deployment was to help the afflicted but not trusting the intentions of the Americans with their record of interventions throughout the world I surfed the web and obtained the following assertions.

Writing for “Global Research Articles”, Marguerite Laurent states the following which I have shortened but not altered the information.

"After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti's oil, strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy...

The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the report. Among nations in the northern Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica have awarded offshore leases for oil and gas development. Trinidad and Tobago, South American islands off the coast of Venezuela, account for most Caribbean oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

I've been writing for years now that the US has been trying to get rid of Haiti's democratically elected government since 1991 so they could get to "their" strategic reserves without any fear of a populous president nationalizing the oil and gas reserves to benefit the miserably poor majority in Haiti as has been done in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America. (See, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, where these scientist say there's more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) No one has been listening. Not even the white liberals who are such defenders of Haiti. To the best of my knowledge, other than Haitians, over the long years before the earthquake, the only non-Haitian observers who ever paid attention and picked up on our reports and concerns about the plundering and pillaging of Haiti's riches, were John Maxwell and Chris Scott of CKUT Radio in Canada. That's it. All the others bought the State Department line that Haiti was a charity case and had no resources to mention.

Today Haiti has oil and 20,000 troops are down there to secure it and Haiti's other riches while the vision is to perhaps herd the displaced earthquake victims - who don't die from their TV-aid - into hastily constructed pre-fabricated houses and let the ghettos fester as they do in Kingston, Jamaica, while the areas the whites and Haitian oligarchy want are developed into tourist havens and all capital is flown out of Haiti.

There exists a “Lavalas map” of Haiti's resources which shows that Kafou's Morne Cabrit the area affected by the quake housed a huge reserve of oil. Here's the article I wrote, last year documenting that Haiti had oil and that was the reason for the US/UN forced removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. I do so hope, this time, to honour the lives lost and really help protect the remaining survivors of Bush the first and Bush the lesser's two regimes changes in Haiti and now this total occupation, that conscious Americans and all decent folks on this earth, are paying attention and will help us stop this latest travesty.

The just thing for now, is to allow former President Aristide who was kidnapped out of Haiti on a rendition plane by the US Special forces and has been practically under house arrest in South Africa for 6-years, forbidden first by US Secretary of State Condi Rice and now Hillary Clinton from returning home, to return to his country. He ought to be returned to Haiti so he may assist Haiti’s majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation".

A further article dated October 15th on Axis of Logic by a columnist called Dady Chery was headed:- Hatians Demand UN to take its colonial Army, MINUSTAH Out and said:-

"It is high time to bid good riddance to MINUSTAH (MIssion des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haďti), a colonialist army that has terrorized Haiti for the last six years and is currently overseeing the sham presidential and legislative elections in the country.

The most popular political party, Lavalas, is being excluded from the elections. MINUSTAH’s 1994 appearance came on the heels of Aristide’s transport into exile after he decreed a minimum-wage increase. Brazil, Canada, and the United States, all countries with powerful interests in Haitian sweatshop labour, are the key supporters of this army, which consumes more than one fourth of Haiti’s state budget.

Haitians -- rich and poor, and throughout the political spectrum -- despise MINUSTAH. Its horrors range from the daily confiscations of drivers licenses and computers, to well-documented cases of rape and murder.

Even so, year after year, the UN Security Council renews MINUSTAH’s mandate. Such renewals typically follow several weeks of insecurity so predictable one could set one’s watch to it. This year is one year too many. Throughout the critical first 72 hours after the January 12th earthquake, cowardly MINUSTAH soldiers scrambled to rescue their own personnel and left the Haitian earthquake victims to themselves.

On October 15, 2010, MINUSTAH’s mandate expires. Perhaps readers can offer some other reason for the deployment of the 20,000 American soldiers?"

The full article by Marguerite Laurent and Ezili Danto is on the web and gives possible reasons for what triggered the earth quake which for some reason was in the area where oil is said to be present and did not go as far as the border with the Dominican Republic.

The Welfare State

2010-11-05T19:06:00.000Z

As the Second World War drew to a close discontented British troops and workers were determined not to return to the conditions of the 1930s.

As author John Gorman emphasised in his work ‘To Build Jerusalem’ -

“For the labour movement the war strengthened the commitment of ‘no return to the thirties’. After the experience of fighting from Dunkirk to Berlin, and in deserts and jungles, there was a resolve to refuse to return to a Britain of class privilege, private wealth and public squalor”.

The government’s response to this unrest was the Beveridge Report, also known as ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, published in 1942, which formed the basis for establishing the Welfare State and National Health Service after WW2.

The Report claimed “It is, first and foremost, a plan of insurance - of giving in return for contributions benefits up to subsistence level, as of right and without means test, so that individuals may build freely upon it.”

To this end the report’s principle proposed change was “Unification of social insurance in respect of contributions, that is to say, enabling each insured person to obtain all benefits by a single weekly contribution on a single document.”

(Above quotations from the Beveridge Report November 1942).

This weekly National Insurance contribution would serve as access to benefits such as free health care, unemployment pay and a State pension upon retirement and thereby a comprehensive system covering people ‘from cradle to grave’.

By any objective assessment this was an historic gain for the population of Britain.

The Beveridge report was at the time a culmination of the welfare policies that had been adopted previously. The report acknowledges for example, the Poor Law, the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897, the Pensions Act passed in 1908, the Unemployment Act of 1934.

This move for more State intervention in welfare and social policy grew during the Second World War; free school milk and meals were introduced for example, and apart from initiating the Beveridge Report the government introduced white papers on education and a national health service. These developments materialised in the Education Act of 1944 which provided free secondary education for all and in the reforms introduced by the Clement Attlee led Labour government after the war, with the passing of the National Insurance Act and the NHS Act.

Since the 1980s we have seen successive governments attempt to roll back these historic gains, culminating today in the attempt by the current coalition government to end welfare and social provision completely.

Trade unions, which represent millions of workers, must not only secure the interests of workers at their place of employment but must see it as their duty to also protect and defend all the past gains, made at great sacrifice, by our ancestors.

Ends.

The Chilean abuses kept in the shadows

2010-10-16T19:21:00.002+01:00

by John Pilger

The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a facade.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile, but the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Copper is Chile's gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile's privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the men work, became so unsafe in 2007 that it had to be closed - but not for long.

On July 30 last, a Labour Department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies," but no action was taken. Six days later, the men were entombed.

For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken.

At Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: "The forgotten past is full of memory."

This was the torture centre where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile.

Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beautiful Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.

I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara de Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived.

Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on September 11 1973 - Latin America's own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.

Everywhere, it seems, Allende's name has been eliminated. Only on the lone memorial in the cemetery are the words engraved, "Presidente de la Republica," as part of a remembrance of the "ejecutados politicos" - those "executed for political reasons."

Allende died by his own hand as Pinochet bombed the presidential palace with British planes and the US ambassador watched.

Chile is now a democracy, though many would dispute that. In 1990, Pinochet bequeathed a constitutionally compromised system as a condition of his retirement and the military's withdrawal to the political shadows.

This ensures that the alliance of broadly reformist parties, known as the Concertacion, is permanently divided or drawn into legitimising the economic designs of the dictator's heirs.

At the last election the right-wing Coalition for Change, the creation of Pinochet's ideologue Jaime Guzman, took power under President Sebastian Pinera.

The bloody extinction of true democracy that began with Allende's death was, by stealth, made complete.

Pinera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet's coup and during the free-market "experiments" of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys.

His brother and former business partner Jose Pinera, a labour minister under Pinochet, privatised mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions.

This was applauded in Washington as an "economic miracle," a model of the new cult of neoliberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north.

Today Chile is critical to President Barack Obama's rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Pinera's closest ally is Washington's main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet's terror.

Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in the shadows. Families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved one bear the prejudice of the state and employers.

Those not silent are the Mapuche people, the only indigenous nation the Spanish conquistadors could not defeat.

In the late 19th century, the European settlers of independent Chile waged a racist war of extermination against the Mapuche, who were left as impoverished outsiders. During Allende's thousand days in power, some Mapuche lands were returned and a debt of justice was recognised.

Since then, a vicious and largely unreported war has been waged against the Mapuche. Forestry corporations have been allowed to take their land, and their resistance has been met with murders, disappearances and arbitrary prosecutions under "anti-terrorism" laws enacted by the dictatorship.

In their campaigns of civil disobedience, none of the Mapuche has harmed anyone.

The mere accusation of a landowner or businessman that the Mapuche "might" trespass on their own ancestral lands is often enough for the police to charge them with offences that lead to Kafkaesque trials, with faceless witnesses and prison sentences of up to 20 years.

They are, in effect, political prisoners.

As the world rejoices at the spectacle of the miners' rescue, 38 Mapuche hunger strikers have not been news.

They are demanding an end to the Pinochet laws used against them, such as "terrorist arson," and the justice of a real democracy. On October 9, all but one of the hunger strikers ended their protest after 90 days without food.

A young man, Luis Marileo, says he will go on. On October 18, President Pinera is due to give a lecture on "current events" at the London School of Economics.

He should be reminded of their ordeal and why.

This article appeared in the New Statesman.

Arthur Scargill Speech

2010-09-14T21:46:00.004+01:00

Arthur Scargill, legendary leader of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Great Strike of 1984/85, spoke at a Socialist Labour Party public meeting in Barnsley on 6th September 2010. This is a recording of the speech and it makes excellent listening.

Working class people are under attack, our jobs, our wages and conditions, our pensions, our public services fought for over generations are all threatened. Youth unemployment is rising at an astronomical rate on top of an already record level while at the same time education opportunities are being cut...

It's time to fight back! It's time to stand up for the socialist society - the only viable long term alternative to a decaying capitalist system.

Chile's trapped miners

2010-08-27T19:25:00.004+01:00

Even those who have done the dangerous work of mining can only imagine what the 33 men are going through in Chile

By Ken Capstick (NUM & SLP)

Guardian 25th August 2010.

The 33 miners trapped below ground in Chile’s San José mine since 5 August are suffering the worst nightmare of miners the world over, who will be sharing their pain and that of their families, desperately hoping the rescuers succeed.

I spent 38 years of my life working as a coalminer and many long hours underground. I will never forget leaving school and jumping for joy – we said it was “the end of bondage”. I was 15, it was Easter 1956. Normally we would get a week’s holiday – I got two days and then found myself feeling imprisoned in what seemed worse than any dungeon. Deafening noise, constantly moving machinery, little light with which to see, grimy surroundings and hard physical work was my lot in life.

I was out of bed by 4.30 in the morning, trudging to the pit with my father; weather conditions, however bad, never stopped him or most miners. Men would crush on to the cage, as it was known, and then there would be a sudden plunge into the shaft as it hurtled for almost half a mile into the depths of the Earth. The bricks of the shaft wall were just a blur – four Blackpool towers end-on-end would just about reach from top to bottom.

I would start work at 6am and work until 1.30pm. Looking back now I realise how dangerous it was. At the end of the shift I would wash in the pithead baths and catch the bus in the pit yard, known as the pit paddy, which circled the mining village and dropped everyone off near their homes. Mother had the dinner on the table. I often fell asleep eating it.

I finished my first five days, Monday to Friday, in what seemed like a year. Saturday was voluntary in those days. I told my father I wasn’t going. He told me I was.

There was constant danger, and supervision by older miners was essential. They took care of you, but not in a mollycoddling sort of way – it was rough justice if you didn’t do as you were told, back-chatted or got “too big for your boots”.

I became an electrician and worked in every part of the mine. It was regarded by other miners as a cushy number. It was, but only by comparison with the work they did. Conditions were often cramped, crawling on hands and knees, breathing foul air, coughing and spitting out black coal dust from deep in your lungs.

Miners didn’t suffer fools gladly: coalmining was harsh. Conditions could be freezing cold or boiling hot in different parts of the same mine. Miners worked often on their bellies, using a pick and shovel all day, doing crushingly hard work. They ended up with bronchitis and emphysema, industrial deafness, broken limbs, dust on the lungs and were called greedy by people who could never understand. And we have had our share of disasters that have killed hundreds of miners in the time it takes to say, “Look out”. Sometimes they would be torn to bits after being dragged into brutal machinery, quite literally carried out in bags like chunks of mincemeat. It would be announced in passing on the news.

I once helped to carry a friend out of the mine. He was dead. He had been buried by a large fall of ground. We worked feverishly to get him out. That was 40 years ago. I laid a wreath at the altar in memory of him recently. It never goes away.

Eight miners have died in Britain’s coalmines in the past four years.

www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/sense_of_place/lofthouse_colliery_disaster.shtmlan inrush of water killed seven. Their comrades worked for a solid fortnight before being forced to leave them buried where they died.

Miners depend on each other for their own safety, which creates an unbreakable bond of camaraderie. Some might find it strange that a coalmine echoes to the sound of laughter. If I miss anything, it is the humour.

A miner is a miner wherever he works. Sometimes I spent 18 hours at a stretch in a coalmine, but can only imagine what it must be like for those fellow miners trapped in the unimaginable darkness of the San José gold and copper mine.

Leadership will be a vital element, someone experienced who they trust and respect, with the authority and mental strength to maintain his own morale as well as that of the others. I have met many men of that calibre. And in San José, 670 metres underground, it seems a natural leader has emerged – 54-year-old shift foreman Luis Urzúa.

If you have ever called a miner greedy, say a prayer with me tonight for those in Chile who, if reports are accurate, look like being there until Christmas.

Ends

The Case for Clean Coal

2010-05-03T19:32:00.003+01:00

Ken Capstick, former Vice President of Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers gives a speech on British and world energy issues and makes the case for the use of Clean Coal utilising Carbon Capture and Storage as an integral part of an Integrated Energy Policy for Britain.

Essential listening for anyone concerned for future energy provision and a world that tackles CO2 emissions in the only practical way available.

Ayrshire, Scotland.

May 2010

Lockerbie – the Truth

2009-09-05T12:12:00.003+01:00

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and the Elephant in the Room.

Comment by Dave Roberts SLP vice-president

The press and media are full of hysteria over the release of the convicted “Lockerbie bomber”. The moralising outrage stretches across the Atlantic. The Scottish Justice minister is being slated for going soft on terrorism by senior FBI officials, the SNP and Scotland are being threatened with international isolation and even pariah status. Mandelson, Brown, Blair and Straw are being accused of doing a grubby back room deal with the Libyans for oil contracts in exchange for the release of the “greatest murderer” in British History.

To add to their squirming misery Saif Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi’s second son has confirmed to the world’s media that al- Megrahi’s release has been on the table of every oil trade negotiation meeting during the last two years.

So has the Scottish and British establishment completely lost the plot and are they going soft on terrorism? Is the frantic scramble for oil now so paramount that it threatens a British rift with the US establishment?
In the smoke and mirrors of what passes for international diplomacy what is actually going on?

The answer is simple, if not even more troublesome for the British and American establishments and many of their media sycophants who insisted throughout the Lockerbie case in elevating their journalism to the dizzy heights of the gutter.

The enormous elephant in the room that at the moment everyone is painfully trying to ignore is that al Megrahi is an innocent man and in that sense yet another victim of the Lockerbie bombing and the whole world was about to be told it and shown it.

Terminally ill he was given the opportunity of release on compassionate grounds in return for dropping his appeal. An appeal that would have proved that he was innocent, that he was fitted up by the British and American Governments in what Professor Robert Black (the lawyer responsible for brokering the deal for the two accused of the bombing to stand trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law) describes as one of the greatest travesties of justice in the history of the Scottish Judicial System.

An appeal that was welcomed by Dr Jim Swire .who lost his 28 year old daughter Flora in the bombing and who represents many of the families of the British victims because he knows al-Megrahi to be innocent, an appeal that would have shown that it was the British and American governments that engaged in a grubby deal with Syria and Iran to keep them out of Gulf War1 by lifting arms and trade sanctions and dropping the investigation into their involvement in the Lockerbie bombings. Until that time the investigation had centred on an Iranian sponsored Syrian/Palestinian revenge attack for the mass murder of 290 Iranian pilgrims when their civilian airliner was shot down by the American aircraft carrier Vincennes.

This grubby deal was done to allow the Americans to invade Iraq without Syrian and Iranian intervention and the investigation was conveniently realigned, pointing the finger at Libya, which paved the way for the American and British to commit mass murder in Iraq.

This is the substantive truth of the case which the British and American establishment fear would surface in any appeal. A truth that many of the victims’ families are painfully aware of and now demand the evidence.

Dr Jim Swire often quotes a telling fact from Thatcher’s biography in which she triumphantly claims that since in the face of international condemnation, she agreed to join the Americans in the bombing of Tripoli Benghazi and much of costal Libya and specifically the targeting of Gaddafi’s home, a raid which left his 7 year old daughter dead, and another 280 civilians killed, “Libya had not been involved in any further attacks on western interests”.

Unfortunately for Mrs Thatcher, if the fabrication of Libyan involvement is to be believed, she seems to have forgotten that the biggest single attack on Western interests before 9/11, involving an American plane in British airspace and a death toll of 270, took place nearly 24 months after the bombing of Tripoli. Unless of course she knows something different?

It is Kafkaesque for Jack Straw, who with the rest of the Labour government has conspired to keep an innocent man in jail for 8 years whilst ensuring that the war criminal General Pinochet goes free, is titled the Minister for Justice. Some Minister, Some justice !

Open the files, for a non- redacted public enquiry now and show some real compassion and justice for all the Lockerbie victims including Abdel Basset al- Megrahi!

Ends.

What Economy?

2009-07-18T13:39:00.003+01:00

The following article was forwarded to me by an American friend. It's written by the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. No leftwinger then! If he's correct in his assessment it makes for scary reading.

July 16, 2009

There's Nothing Left to Recover

What Economy?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.”

The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by “free market” financial deregulation, which unleashed financial gangsters to new heights of debt leverage and fraudulent financial products.

The real economy was traded away for a make-believe economy. When the make-believe economy collapsed, Americans’ wealth in their real estate, pensions, and savings collapsed dramatically while their jobs disappeared.

The debt economy caused Americans to leverage their assets. They refinanced their homes and spent the equity. They maxed out numerous credit cards. They worked as many jobs as they could find. Debt expansion and multiple family incomes kept the economy going.

And now suddenly Americans can’t borrow in order to spend. They are over their heads in debt. Jobs are disappearing. America’s consumer economy, approximately 70% of GDP, is dead. Those Americans who still have jobs are saving against the prospect of job loss. Millions are homeless. Some have moved in with family and friends; others are living in tent cities.

Meanwhile the US government’s budget deficit has jumped from $455 billion in 2008 to $2,000 billion this year, with another $2,000 billion on the books for 2010. And President Obama has intensified America’s expensive war of aggression in Afghanistan and initiated a new war in Pakistan.

There is no way for these deficits to be financed except by printing money or by further collapse in stock markets that would drive people out of equity into bonds.

The US government’s budget is 50% in the red. That means half of every dollar the federal government spends must be borrowed or printed. Because of the worldwide debacle caused by Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, the world needs its own money and hasn’t $2 trillion annually to lend to Washington.

As dollars are printed, the growing supply adds to the pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. Already America’s largest creditor, China, is admonishing Washington to protect China’s investment in US debt and lobbying for a new reserve currency to replace the dollar before it collapses. According to various reports, China is spending down its holdings of US dollars by acquiring gold and stocks of raw materials and energy.

The price of one ounce gold coins is $1,000 despite efforts of the US government to hold down the gold price. How high will this price jump when the rest of the world decides that the bankruptcy of “the world’s only superpower” is at hand?

And what will happen to America’s ability to import not only oil, but also the manufactured goods on which it is import-dependent?

When the over-supplied US dollar loses the reserve currency role, the US will no longer be able to pay for its massive imports of real goods and services with pieces of paper. Overnight, shortages will appear and Americans will be poorer.

Nothing in Presidents Bush and Obama’s economic policy addresses the real issues. Instead, Goldman Sachs was bailed out, more than once. As Eliot Spitzer said, the banks made a “bloody fortune” with US aid.

It was not the millions of now homeless homeowners who were bailed out. It was not the scant remains of American manufacturing--General Motors and Chrysler--that were bailed out. It was the Wall Street Banks.

According to Bloomberg.com, Goldman Sachs’ current record earnings from their free or low cost capital supplied by broke American taxpayers has led the firm to decide to boost compensation and benefits by 33 percent. On an annual basis, this comes to compensation of $773,000 per employee.

This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents.

The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.

The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.

Retirees dependent on state pension systems, which cannot print money, might not be paid, or might be paid with IOUs. They will not even have depreciating money with which to try to pay their bills. Desperate tax authorities will squeeze the remaining life out of the middle class.

Nothing in Obama’s economic policy is directed at saving the US dollar as reserve currency or the livelihoods of the American people. Obama’s policy, like Bush’s before him, is keyed to the enrichment of Goldman Sachs and the armament industries.

Matt Taibbi describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentless jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Look at the Goldman Sachs representatives in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. This bankster firm controls the economic policy of the United States.

Little wonder that Goldman Sachs has record earnings while the rest of us grow poorer by the day.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

The Hidden Story Behind Rwanda's Tragedy

2009-07-13T20:34:00.003+01:00

Below is a recent article by Chris Black from Canada. It deals with the background to the Rwandan tragedy and contains information not to be found in the western news coverage.

Toronto-based Christopher Black is a Barrister and International Criminal Lawyer. He is Lead Counsel for General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff, Rwandan Gendarmerie before the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda (ICTR).

The Hidden Story Behind Rwanda's Tragedy By Christopher Black July 3rd, 2009 Rwanda before 1990 was considered the Switzerland of Africa, a model of social development.

The result of the 1959 social revolution that deposed the Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy and freed the majority Hutu population from serfdom and a lifetime of humiliation was the establishment of a collective society in which both Hutus, and Tutsis, as well as Twas, lived together in relative harmony.

Tutsis were members of the government, its administration, present in large numbers in the education system, the judiciary, and controlled most of the large private commercial companies in Rwanda.

The Rwandan army was a multiethnic army composed of both Hutus and Tutsis, and it stayed a multiethnic force even when the Rwandan Army was forced by the invaders from Uganda to retreat into the Congo forests in July 1994 because it ran out of ammunition due to the Western embargo on arms and supplies.

Rwanda descended into chaos in 1990 when the self-described Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) forces launched a surprise attack on October 1, 1990, from Uganda. In fact, every one of the enlisted men and officers of that invasion force were members of the Ugandan national Army. It was an invasion by Uganda disguised as an independent force of “liberation”. Liberation from what, has never been stated.

Initially the justification put out by the RPF was that of attaining the return of Tutsi “refugees” from Uganda to Rwanda. However, that problem had been resolved by an agreement between the RPF, Uganda, Rwanda, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the OAU, a few weeks earlier.

The Rwandan government had agreed to the return of all those Tutsis in Uganda who wanted to return to Rwanda. That accord required that Tutsi representatives of the refugees travel to Kigali for a meeting to determine the mechanics of that population-movement, and how to accommodate all those people in a small country. They were expected at the end of September 1990. They never arrived. Instead of civilians returning in peace, Rwanda was viciously attacked on October 1, 1990, by a force that unleashed unbridled savagery.

During that invasion the RPF forces of the Ugandan Army slaughtered everyone in their path, Hutu or Tutsi. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority Hutu, were butchered. These crimes have never been accounted for.

The RPF’s favorite method was the bayonet or knife with which they disembowelled men and women, or to tie their hands behind their backs and smashed their skulls with hoes, the farm tool iconic of the Hutu peasantry.

After several weeks of intense fighting, the RPF forces were destroyed by the small Rwandan Army and the remnants fled, on US instructions, back into Uganda to regroup and reorganize. The RPF still never justified this aggression and the needless slaughter of civilians in a peaceful country. Individual Tutsis had always been allowed to return to Rwanda from the early 1960s and several times the Rwandan government invited them all to return. However the Tutsi aristocracy, jealous of its lost power and viewing the Hutus as merely subhuman, refused to return unless their absolute power was restored. This the people of Rwanda, even the Tutsis who remained in the country, refused.

In the 1960s and early 1970s various Tutsi groups in Uganda and elsewhere had organized terrorist raids into Rwanda in which they murdered without pity anyone they caught. These raids were repelled by Rwanda’s tiny armed forces. The years that followed were a period of development and peace for Rwandans.

Even though one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world, it had the best roads, healthcare, and education systems in Africa. Until the late 1980s, it prospered and received help from both the socialist countries, like the USSR, North Korea and China, and West Germany, France, Israel and others.

Some Tutsis in Uganda became involved in the civil wars there between the socialist Milton Obote and the US- and UK-puppet, Yoweri K. Museveni, who was supported by the West to get rid of socialism in Uganda. By 1990 Tutsis composed a large section of the Ugandan Army and all the senior officers of the RPF were high officers in the Ugandan NRA (the National Resistance Army). Paul Kagame, himself, was one of the highest-ranking officers in the intelligence services of the Ugandan army and was notorious for his enjoyment of torturing prisoners. Rwanda until 1990 was a one-party socialist state.

The ruling party, the National Movement For Revolutionary Development (MRND), was not considered a party as such, but rather a social movement in which everyone in the society took part through local elections and the mechanism of consensus, much like the system in Cuba.

The fall of the Soviet Union led to pressure from the West, notably the United States and France to dismantle the one-party state system and permit multiparty democracy. The President, Juvenal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to a change in the constitution, and, in 1991, Rwanda became a multiparty democracy. The fact the Rwandan government did this in the middle of a war is more than remarkable. It was also an offer of peace. The RPF, since its abject failure in 1990, had changed its strategy from a frontal assault to the tactics of terrorism. The RPF likes to refer to this phase as ‘the guerrilla’.

However, it was not the guerrilla of a liberation struggle like the FLMN in Vietnam or the FARC in Colombia. It was, instead, a mirror image of the Contras campaign of terrorism conducted against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Its purpose was not to make revolution. Its purpose was to overthrow the 1959 revolution. And, like the contras, the RPF was supported by the United States. This was clear from the beginning of the war. When the RPF launched their attack, President Juvenal Habyarimana was in Washington, lured out of the way, by the US State Department. The evidence that the US was aware of and supported the October surprise attack was the US Administration’s offer to Habyarimana of asylum in the United States if he surrendered power to the RPF. Habyarimana refused and immediately flew back home. There was no condemnation of the Ugandan-RPF aggression by the United States--a matter France raised at the United Nations--or any of its allies despite the big noise they made at the same time about the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. Further, the Rwanda ambassador to the UN, then on the Security Council, filed a protest with the UNSC, but the US had it taken off the agenda.

In fact the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda from its onset, and US Special Forces operated with the RPF from the beginning. Recently, while former president Bill Clinton was in Toronto, he denied any involvement in Rwanda--this is one of the Big Lies of the century. Clinton and George W. Bush are up to their necks in the blood of the Rwandan and Congolese people.

With the arrival of multiparty democracy in 1991, the RPF took full advantage and created several front parties to take away support from the popular MRND. These parties, though claiming to represent different political views, were, in fact, the main front parties for the RPF. The press was expanded and many of the new papers were financed by and acted as mouthpieces for the RPF.

At the same time as these parties sprang up, criticizing the government, the RPF continued its terror campaign: planting mines on roads that killed Hutu and Tutsi alike; assassinating politicians and officials; and blaming it, with the help of various western intelligence agency-funded NGOs, on the government. In 1992, a coalition government was formed with the RPF, with its front parties seizing control of key ministries and appointing the prime minister. Through these agents they also controlled the civilian intelligence services that they then began to dismantle. The RPF engaged in a “talk and fight” strategy. Always agreeing to a ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on civilians. The most egregious of these ceasefire violations was their major offensive in February 1993 in which they seized the major town of Ruhengeri, while murdering 40,000 civilians, most of them Hutu, in the process. The Rwandan Army, even though hamstrung by the civilian ministries controlled by the RPF, managed to drive the RPF back. Finally, in August 1993, under pressure from the United States and its allies, Rwanda signed the Arusha Accords, giving the RPF major concessions in return for the formation of a broad-based transition government, which was to be followed by general elections.

However, the RPF knew they could not win such elections, as they were not only unpopular with the majority Hutu population, but it did not even enjoy the support of many internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses had been destroyed by this war that they did not see a need for. Instead of preparing for elections, the RPF prepared for their final offensive. As far back as December 1993, UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming in from Uganda.

A UN force was deployed supposedly to ensure a peaceful transition; in fact, it was a cover for the US and its allies to assist in this build up. General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN force, hid this build up from the Rwandan army and the President. The build up was accompanied by death threats against the president. According to an account of Habyarimana’s last conversation with Mobutu Sese Seko, president of what was then Zaire, just two days before the Rwandan president was murdered, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen had, in October 1993, told Habyarimana that unless he ceded all power to the RPF they were going to kill him and drag his body through the streets. These threats were punctuated by the murder by Tutsi officers in October 1993 of the first democratically-elected Hutu president of neighboring Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, a terrorist act in which Kagame and the RPF also had a hand; the officers who committed the murder, including Lieutenant Paul Kamana, later fled to Uganda. Ndadaye was in office a mere four months, having won the country’s first free elections. In the aftermath of that murder, 250,000 Hutus weremassacred by the Tutsi army of Burundi and hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled to Rwanda.

The result of the 1993 offensive was that one million Hutus fled the RPF terror in northern Rwanda towards the capital, Kigali, so that by April 1994, over a million refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds of thousands more in camps in the south, all having fled RPF terror. The RPF did all it could in 1994 to paralyze the functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial tensions, and to prepare for war. Then on April 6, 1994, they launched their final surprise attack by shooting down the Rwandan presidential plane returning from a meeting in Tanzania that had been arranged by Uganda’s president Museveni. In fact, it is known that Museveni’s half-brother, General Salim Saleh, was at the final meeting in which the date for the shoot-down was fixed. The missile attack killed Habyarimana, as well as Burundi’s new Hutu president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and Rwanda’s military chief of staff, and everyone else on board. This was the first massacre of 1994, and it was a massacre of Hutus by the RPF.

The RPF then immediately launched attacks across Kigali and the north of the country. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera, they killed everyone on the night of the 6th and the 7th, wiped out the Gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami and launched a major attack against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali and the main gendarme camp at Kacyriu. The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire the same night and the next day. The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government asked for more UN help to control the situation. Instead, the US arranged for the main UN force to be pulled out while flying in men and supplies to the RPF in C130 Hercules aircraft.

The Rwandan Army, short on ammunition and unable to contain the RPF’s advances, even offered to surrender unconditionally on April 12th. The RPF rejected even this offer, and, instead, shelled the Nyacyonga refugee camp where one million Hutu refugees were located, provoking their flight into the capital. The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment cannot be described. The RPF used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind Rwandan army lines. This created panic among the Hutu population, which began killing anyone they did not recognize. It was clear that the RPF was not interested in saving lives, even Tutsi lives, but only in seizing total power and did not want to negotiate at all. The late Dr. Alison Des Forges, the American who was considered a noted scholar on Rwanda, in her testimony in the Military II trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2006, testified that the RPF’s claim that they attacked to stop a “genocide” was a myth; just propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms. She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute genocide. This accords with the testimony of General Dallaire, who also confirmed an earlier statement that there was no genocide planned by the government, as well as that of the deputy head of Belgian Army intelligence, Col. Vincent, who also testified at the ICTR that the idea of a genocide was a fantasy. The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers–confirming what has been said by Rwandan and RPF officers who have testified—state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour, round the clock, while the Rwandan Army ran out of hand grenades in the first few days and was reduced to fighting the RPF with hand made explosives. The vaunted RPF could not take Kigali. The siege of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of ammunition and ordered a general retreat into the Congo forest. RPF officers have stated that the RPF killed up to two million Hutus in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akagera River, the full-length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of the Hutus massacred on its banks. The RPF claimed these were Tutsis, but there were no Tutsis in that area and only the RPF had access to it.

Robert Gersony, of the USAID, in an October 1994 report to the UNHCR filed as an exhibit at the ICTR, stated that the RPF carried out a systematic and planned massacre of the Hutu population.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gersony

As the Rwandan Army, including Tutsi officers within that army and its enlisted men, retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu population, in fear for their lives, fled in the millions along with them. In local villages, Hutu neighbors attacked Tutsis in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. Tutsis also attacked Hutus. It was total war just as the RPF had wished. The RPF later pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest between 1996 to 1998 and killed hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. They were shelled, machine gunned, raped, cut to pieces with knives.

Accounts of that trek are difficult to bear. The RPF was assisted in its offensive by the United States. The UN Rwanda Emergency Office in Nairobi, in fact, was manned by US Army officers, and acted as the operational headquarters for the RPF, giving them intelligence on Rwandan Army movements, on actions and directions.

Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, telephoned the Rwandan Army chief of staff in May 1994 and told him that unless he surrendered he must know that he was fighting the United States of America and would be defeated. US Special Forces fought with the RPF. There is also evidence that Belgian forces of the UN were involved, as an intercepted radio message from Kagame to his forces in the field refers to the help they had received from the Belgians. There is also evidence that Canadian forces were likewise involved, and Antoine Nyetera, a Tutsi prince, who was in Kigali in that period, testified for the defense in the Military II trial and stated that not only were there no massacres committed against Tutsis by the Rwandan Army, but that it was the RPF that began the massacres after they took Kigali and began killing Hutus. Nyetera testified that despite the claim by the RPF of being a Tutsi liberation group, when he saw their long columns enter the capital, he saw that most of them were Sudanese, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Tanzanians and others speaking Swahili or Sudanese languages, in other words, mercenaries.

Several RPF officers have testified at the ICTR that they fled the Kagame regime because they had been promised that they were fighting for liberation of the Tutsis. However, when they wanted to take over the streets of Kigali to stop reprisals against Tutsis by Hutu civilians the junior officers were forbidden to do so, putting the lie to Kagame’s claim that he attacked to save Tutsis. These officers testified that Kagame wanted deaths to justify his war. The RPF could have controlled large parts of Kigali as they had at least 15,000 men in or near the capital opposed to 5,000 Rwandan Army forces. Instead, Kagame used his men to ethnically cleanse the rest of the country of the Hutu population.

The Rwanda War was a total war. All means were used to destroy that country and the Hutu people. The ultimate objective was the resources of the Congo. The US agreed to support the RPF in return for the RPF’s acting as a US proxy force to invade the Congo and seize its resources. The US now has several military bases in Rwanda, and the country is nothing more than a colony of the US and UK, run by thugs who control the majority of the people through intimidation, murder and disinformation.

None of this could have happened if those in the UN like Kofi Anan, then in charge of the Department of peacekeeping operations, had done their jobs. None of this could have happened without the connivance of the NATO countries and Uganda, from where the invasion was launched. Ultimately, the prime responsibility rests with the United States of America and, in particular, with the regimes of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--and now with President Barack Obama.

As Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then UN Secretary General, stated to Canadian historian Robin Philpot in 2004: “The United States is one hundred percent responsible for what happened in Rwanda.”

Toronto-based Christopher Black is a Barrister and International Criminal Lawyer. He is Lead Counsel for General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff, Rwandan Gendarmerie before the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda (ICTR).

How Belarus Fought the Fascists

2009-07-13T20:25:00.003+01:00

July 3rd 2009 marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazis. Here is Neil Clark's article on the massive contribution Belarus made to the anti-fascist struggle.

Question: Which currently existing nation lost the largest percentage of its population in World War II - a higher percentage than that of France, Britain and the US combined?

The answer is Belarus, which lost a staggering one-third of its people in The Great Patriotic War - a total of 2.5 million citizens.

As Stewart Parker states in his excellent book The Last Soviet Republic, "the destruction wrought on Belarus was immense in terms of human life and of infrastructure."

Thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, many, like Katyn, burnt to the ground with all their villagers.

This week marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the nazi occupation and the event will be commemorated across the country and in Russia too.To find out more about the sacrifices that Belarus made during World War II in the struggle against the nazis - and the way that its experiences during the war has helped shape the country's foreign policy today - I met up in London recently with the country's ambassador to Britain Aleksandr Mikhnevich.

"Not a single country involved in the hostilities was faced with such appalling atrocities and destruction," Mikhnevich told me. "The war left a deep mark in history and in the minds of the Belarus people."

I asked him for some examples of heroism in his country's anti-nazi struggle.

"One can talk for hours about the heroism of the Belarussian people and all the peoples of the USSR during the war. I will give one example. A small garrison deployed in the Brest Fortress was fighting with invaders for a month. The German troops were already near Smolensk but battles in Brest - 600km from the front line - were still underway. Even Hitler arrived by plane to Brest in July 1941 as he couldn't understand why his powerful army could not capture this small islet on Belarussian soil."

By the end of 1941, six months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the whole of Belarus was under nazi occupation. But the people refused to lie down and lick the jackboots of the illegal invaders. The resistance movement was strong and determined. By 1943, there were 75,000 partisans active in the country.

Overall, a total of 370,000 partisans fought in Belarus, with fighters coming from other Soviet republics and from western European countries too. "The scale of the partisan movement was self-evident as single partisan zones sprang up in 1943 - two and half years before the hostilities were over," says Mikhnevich.

"Around 60 per cent of the occupied territory was recaptured by the partisans. Government was restored in those areas, bringing the life of civilians back to normal. Belarussians took part even in the French Resistance."

Arguably no other country invaded by the nazis did more to protect its Jewish population than Belarus. In July 1941, the nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the capital Minsk with over 100,000 inmates.

Parker relates how the head of the ghetto, Yefim Stolerovitch, recounted after the war that though the Germans did find individual collaborators, "they were the exception and not the rule.

The dominant characteristic of the Belarussian population was one of friendship and sympathy towards the Jews." An example of this took place on July 21 1941, when the nazis roped a group of 45 Jews into a pit and then ordered 30 Belarussian PoWs to bury them alive. The PoWs refused and subsequently the Germans shot all 75.

Such acts of solidarity in Belarus were, as Parker notes, "in stark contrast to the overt anti-semitism that was reported by Germans in Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian territories."

The role that Belarussians played in protecting Jews in World War II has been acknowledged by the Israeli authorities. The Righteous Among the Nations is a secular award given by Israel to gentiles who risked their lives in the Holocaust to save Jews.

There are no fewer than 587 recipients of the award in Belarus.

One of the Belarussians so honoured is Galina Imshenik who, together with her husband, rescued a little Jewish toddler named Yelena Dolgov. Sixty-five years later, Yelena and her husband care for Galina, who is now 96, round the clock. It's a wonderful story of human kindness being repaid.

Eventually, the combined might of the Red Army and the partisans evicted the nazi invaders from Belarus.

Due to the worldwide recognition of the role that it had played in defeating fascism, Belarus, despite not being a sovereign state at the time, was made a founding member of the United Nations. And at the very first session of the UN general assembly a resolution proposed by Belarus was passed on the extradition and punishment of war criminals. The enormous losses the country incurred during World War II continues to shape the foreign policy of Belarus today.

"Belarussian people as nobody else value peace, prosperity and universal values," Mikhnevich told me. "Our foreign policy is aimed exactly at the creation of a zone of neighbourliness. We will never forget the price of our freedom."

Since becoming a sovereign state in 1991, Belarus has taken a consistently pro-peace and anti-war line, opposing both the illegal NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and the equally unlawful aggression against Iraq in 2003.

The country that was at the forefront of the anti-fascist resistance 65 years ago is still standing up for the rights of free, independent nations today.

Shrewsbury 24 Rally

2009-07-05T20:25:00.007+01:00

An excellent and spirited rally of the Shrewsbury 24 campaign took place in Shrewsbury itself Saturday, 4th July 2009.

The Shrewsbury 24 campaign is fighting to clear the names of twenty four rank and file trades unionists who participated in the 1972 national building workers dispute. These men were singled out by the state acting on behalf of the major building companies and were prosecuted on trumped up charges of "conspiracy". The show trial passed down vicious sentences on the men intended to intimidate other workers from effectively furthering trades union struggles for better wages and conditions. Des Warren and Ricky Tomlinson received the heaviest sentences of three and two years respectively. Both men refused to bend the knee and defied the prison authorities claiming political status. Des Warren suffered greatly and died still a young man as a consequence of drug induced Parkinson's Disease as a result of the "liquid cosh" - a cocktail of sedative drugs administered during his time in jail.

The campaign now is to have all the men's name cleared through a public enquiry as well as to expose the role of successive governments and the secret services in the events surrounding this important time in labour history.

More info can be found at http://www.shrewsburypicketscampaign.org.uk/

The platform of speakers was superb and all gave outstanding contributions including Ricky Tomlinson himself and Arthur Scargill photos of whom are with those shown above...

CWU Dispute - Irvine

2009-06-28T18:43:00.002+01:00

COMMUNICATION WORKERS UNION

Glasgow & District Amalgamated Branch

Tam Dewar CWU Area Delivery Rep DG/KA

www.cwuglasgowdistrictamal.co.uk

The last national Postal strike in 2007 was concluded when the CWU and Royal Mail agreed a process to negotiate change in response to new technology. This Pay and Modernisation Agreement, endorsed by 60% of the membership, laid out a four phase process to conclude by April 2009 in a new pay and reward scheme and methods of working in Delivery.

From 2007 till 2009 the CWU agreed changes locally through the PMA which resulted in massive savings to Royal Mail. Some units were rewarded by a 50/50 bonus scheme, most units received no bonus. Lump sum awards and a 1.5% increase in basic pay in 2008 was largely self funded. Royal Mail has now walked away from the final phase of this Agreement, not only announcing a pay freeze, at a time of growing company profits, but introducing changes to working practises which affect members earnings and job security. Royal Mail have a view of future delivery jobs being largely part time.

The recent CWU national conference in Bournemouth was dominated by requests for industrial action from units throughout the UK in response to Royal Mail’s misuse and eventual abrogation of the Pay and Modernisation Agreement. Many members feel that if Royal Mail can walk away from this agreement then the CWU should declare the PMA dead and return to established ways of working. It is worthy of note that the Postal Executive which endorsed this Agreement was returned to office with around 10% of the membership voting.

Postal workers in the East of Scotland were the first to use the collective power of the CWU to resist the RM model of “Modernisation” spreading eastwards. Their action had such an effect on the service that Ayrshire managers (members of Unite) were ‘drafted’ to deliver mail. Now that members from the Ayrshire Coast will take to the picket line to explain their case, these managers will be occupied in Ayrshire.

Members in my home unit of Irvine took strike action on Saturday 20th June in response to Royal Mail managers who ignore agreements with the Union on working practises, only after months of talks at local level have been exhausted.

This may well be a prolonged action given the complete inability or unwillingness of senior RM managers to pay due regard to the wishes of the men and women who deliver and collect the mail. Although Irvine DO is the first to take action they will be followed by other units in Ayrshire unless Royal Mail negotiate “modernisation” plans.

Although the Irvine strike is local, in that it concerns the abuse of working practises and the intimidation and threats against senior serving and part time staff, it illustrates the attitudes of RM managers to national and local agreements. We need the protection, at local bargaining level, of a strong Union with national bargaining power.

In addition CWU members face the possible “Part Privatisation” of Royal Mail by a Labour Government elected with a mandate from the British electorate to maintain RM in public ownership. Likewise the Leadership of the CWU believed they had a similar commitment from the Labour Party through the “Warwick Agreement”.

My old Aunt, who read palms and tea leafs, had more accurate powers of prediction than the Leadership of the CWU have managed over what Labour will do next. Prior to the release of the Hooper report we were told that the CWU had a good working relationship with the Business Secretary John Hutton and that Labour would fulfil the “Warwick Agreement”. The very next day Hutton was replaced by Lord Mandelson, “Warwick” was forgotten and Labour intended to privatise Royal Mail. At a briefing in May we were told that the Prime Minster need CWU help out of the privatisation hole, Mandelson would be moved and the CWU view would prevail. Less than two weeks later the PM’s jacket is on a slack nail and Lord Mandelson rules supreme, showing no sign of backing off Privatisation. Not a lot of return for the £1m of CWU members money flowing into Labour coffers. On a more positive note the CWU have run a faultless campaign to influence the public and politicians on Royal Mail privatisation. It would make more sense to spend the political fund on more of the same as the legislative programme rolls on.

That it should be a Labour Government which proposes privatisation of Postal jobs holds it own paradox for Irvine workers. A clandestine meeting of the newly formed Ayrshire Miners Union met on Irvine Moor in 1887 to adopt resolutions advocating “the formation of a Labour Party in the House of Commons“. The Ayrshire miners, following the lead of James Keir Hardie, realised that industrial strength and political representation of the working class in parliament were necessary to change society for the better. Now that the political representation has been corrupted, despite the views of ordinary Labour members, we depend even more on our industrial strength to defend jobs and conditions.
　
　
　
　
Tam Dewar
(in a personal capacity)

SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY EUROPEAN ELECTION RESULT

2009-06-08T23:25:00.001+01:00

The Socialist Labour Party has achieved a stunning vote in the European Union elections. It has polled more than 20,000 more votes than the coalition known as NO2EU which was supported by the RMT, CPB and a variety of other so called "Left organisations". All who really want the UK to remain in the European Union.

The Socialist Labour Party was the only Socialist Party in this election which called for the total withdrawal from the European Union and at the same time called for the building of a campaign to establish Socialism in the U.K.

Socialist Labour Party Leader, Arthur Scargill, said that "the result was a substantial increase on the Party's performance in the 1999 European Union election and represents a lesson that all those who claim to be socialist but who seek to remain within the European Union which is the epitome of Capitalism and the free movement of capital and labour".

Arthur Scargill congratulated all comrades within the Socialist Labour Party and in particular the magnificent achievement of our comrades in Scotland whose policies won the support of all those who want to shake off the shackles not only of the European Union but also of a rotten, corrupt, bankrupt capitalist society.

Ends.

2009-06-07T15:32:00.003+01:00

Irvine Meadow celebrate as 2 - 1 Ayrshire Cup winners over Auchinleck Talbot. Before the game the West of Scotland Premier League Champions trophy was presented.

Onwards to the Scottish Cup next season !

Meadow manager Chris Strain celebrates with the trophies in Irvine's Porthead Tavern after the match.

Vote Socialist Labour Party June 4th 2009

2009-05-25T23:07:00.004+01:00

Hungary Tears Up the Ballot Paper

2009-05-16T15:48:00.001+01:00

by Neil Clark

His approval ratings are among the lowest ever achieved by a prime minister. As the former manager of the country’s finances, many blame him for its current economic predicament. By nature an introvert, he is finding it hard to build up a rapport with the electorate. His name is Gordon B.... No, not Gordon Brown, but Gordon Bajnai, who last month was sworn in as the new prime minister of Hungary.

The similarities between the political situations in Hungary and Britain are striking. In both countries a nominally left-of-centre – but actually pro-big business and pro-privatisation – government has presided over an unsustainable credit boom. Both have been hit hard by the global recession. We should also note that Bajnai’s predecessor, Ferenc Gyurcsány, was widely referred to as “Hungary’s Tony Blair” and is a friend of Peter Mandelson.

But there are important differences, too. Britain’s Gordon B may not have had his elevation to the premiership endorsed by the electorate, but he is nonetheless a democratically elected member of parliament. Hungary’s Gordon B has not been elected to any office.

A millionaire businessman, nicknamed “Goose Gordon” for his controversial role in the liquidation of a poultry firm in which hundreds of producers lost their savings, Bajnai became prime minister due to the support of the neoliberal SZDSZ party (Alliance of Free Democrats), who despite having the support of only 1 per cent of the electorate, according to recent opinion polls, hold the balance of power in parliament.Bajnai is not a member of any political party, but a friend and former business partner of both Gyurcsány and the SZDSZ leader, János Kóka.

Imagine if in Britain the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the next parliament and Nick Clegg installed an old business buddy, who was not an MP, as PM.It sounds far-fetched, but it has happened in Hungary. Realising that they stand little chance of winning seats in the next election, the SZDSZ, who reacted angrily when voters in a referendum last year rejected the imposition of hospital and doctor’s visit fees and higher-education tuition fees, have been pushing for a “government of experts” to impose the draconian cutbacks in public spending that they have long advocated. Now they have got what they wanted.In addition to the prime minister, other unelected “experts” in the new government include finance minister Peter Oszko, formerly head of Deloitte Hungary; economy minister István Varga, the former head of Shell in Hungary; and minister of transport, telecommunication and energy, Peter Honig, the former CEO of the airline Malev.

The fact that unelected figures hold so much power in a European country that styles itself a democracy is alarming. The formation of “non-political” governments to introduce swingeing cuts in public expenditure – and privatise health care, lower pensions and drastically reduce welfare provision – is an undemocratic development that could spread.Such governments are a long way from being “non-political”. On the contrary, they are espousing ideologically motivated economic policies, but do so under the smokescreen of “financial necessity”. Unable to receive a popular mandate for their reforms, neoliberals in Hungary have stuck two fingers up at the democratic process. As the economic crisis deepens and public unrest grows, don’t rule out their counterparts in other countries

This article first appeared in the New Statesman 14th May 2009.

Neil Clark will be speaking at the Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales on 23rd May 2009.

Scroungers, Parasites & the Crisis of Capitalism.

2009-05-16T15:43:00.001+01:00

A Comment by Ian Johnson

The recent expenses scandal, which has at the last count covered over 400 of the 646 Members of Parliament, cannot fail to appal and disgust all who have followed, even in passing, the nauseating details.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “I want to apologise on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened in the events of the last few days.”
The last few days? As we now know this scrounging from the public purse has been going on for years!

The politicians meekly whisper that the expenses claims are necessary for them to function properly as MPs. However, claims for moat cleaning, chandeliers, mansions, non-existent mortgages, non-existent cleaners and gardeners, stables, three homes, right down to bath plugs and pornographic films among countless other such abuses, are not, even with the widest stretch of the imagination, essential to the job of representing their constituents.

Communities’ secretary Hazel Blears stood in front of the television cameras, not to apologise, but to wave a £13,332 cheque proclaiming “Look, I am paying it back”

The cheque was for capital gains tax which Blears had not paid on the sale of one of her homes, yet she insisted she had done nothing wrong and she had acted within the rules. Apart from the fact that MPs themselves make the rules, what follows from Hazel Blears’ action are two things: One, if she has done nothing wrong and everything is legal and above board, why on earth would she send the Inland Revenue a £13,332 cheque, and why would they accept it? Two, if indeed she has avoided paying what she was legally obliged to pay then that is surely a criminal offence and should be prosecuted as such. If memory serves correctly, Al Capone got a seven- year sentence for tax avoidance.

Blears was one of a host of new MPs that came into Parliament in 1997 on the back of Blair’s election victory. The mantra at that time, emanating from the very top, was that any MP who serves a full term and does not come out as a millionaire is a failure.

Although abuse of the expenses system, no doubt by all the main parties, has always been a factor, the sheer greed and avarice that is now exposed to the general public was crystallised by the philosophy that accompanied the election of Blair’s Labour party in 1997.

These cross-party exposures reveal who the real scroungers and parasites in society are. In comparison, the example of a person working a part-time job to supplement meagre benefit payments and claiming a few pounds more than they may be entitled to, pales into insignificance. Perhaps MPs should be subject to the same interrogation, demeaning treatment and obstacles that are endured by workers who dare to try and claim benefits? Then again, this is not about fairness, but about class.

Background

In November 2008 all MPs were warned to get their expense claims in order because of the changes in ‘transparency’ that would eventually be introduced. They were asked to accomplish this ‘cleaning up’ exercise by July 2009, so that by the time the general public had access to the information, there would be nothing untoward to discover. One can ponder the deceitfulness of this but another question is of more interest.

The MPs expenses scandal was exposed by the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph had hold of this story for some time, yet it chose to publish it in the run-up to the European elections when it must have been fully aware of the damage it would cause to all the main three political parties.
The Daily Telegraph is a right-wing newspaper; historically it has always displayed a sharp ruling class consciousness and has close links to the machinery of the state itself. Why then would it publish at the time it did?

Almost every television and radio debate and almost every serious newspaper article covering the recent revelations give a clue as to why. All intimate that the beneficiaries from the fallout of the scandal are expected to be the extreme right-wing parties. Such a development is no accident.

The fact that the Telegraph did publish the story at this time is a reflection of a split within the ruling class. The Telegraph is expressing the thoughts of the most reactionary section of that class, and is creating the conditions whereby the question can be posed that a strong authoritarian force, capable of sweeping away corruption and sleaze, similar to the cleansing of the Weimar Republic in Germany, is surely worthy of consideration?

It does not explicitly state this of course, it has no need to. And if creating such an atmosphere means sacrificing a few MPs on the way then so be it.

However, why does the Telegraph and the section of the ruling class it represents feel a more authoritarian government is needed merely to sort out a group of grubby, parasitic MPs?
This question cannot be answered by considering the MPs scandal in isolation. It is but one part of an entire process which flows from an understanding by sections of the ruling class who realise that attempting to lay the full burden of the developing economic crisis onto the backs of workers will result in ‘domestic unrest’ and a government, possibly a ‘strong’ national coalition government, would be required to accomplish the task of controlling this unrest and completing the job of pauperising the working class in order to save their profit system.

No Recovery

Recent statements by Chancellor Alistair Darling and Mervyn King of the Bank of England, in relation to economic recovery have been ridiculed by the IMF and World Bank, who are predicting that the UK will be the hardest hit of all developed nations as the crisis gathers pace.
Already within the European Union suggestions are being made that only emergency cases should be treated under the NHS, while all other treatments should be paid for.

Unemployment has now soared to officially 2.2 million, unofficially to 7 million, and will increase further, throwing millions more onto benefits that this government, with its cuts in public expenditure, will not financially cater for. Tellingly, the last time the UK had a national coalition government its first act was to cut the dole.

The ruling class desire for ‘a strong government’ should be seen together with developments in policing, such as the tactic of ‘kettling’ people at perfectly legal demonstrations, the introduction of the shoot to kill policy and the recent creation of the Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU) who’s remit is to spy on and organise surveillance of ‘domestic extremists’ and to address any “threat to public order”.

‘Domestic extremists’ include, as journalist Seamus Milne discovered, “groups such as those involved in the recent Gaza war protests, trade unionists taking part in secondary industrial action and animal rights organisations.”

It must also be remembered that anti-terrorism laws are now in place that will be used, not against terrorists in the generally accepted sense, but against people and groups as described by Milne. Furthermore, at the 30th March G20 summit people were arrested under the Terrorism Act for “possessing material related to political ideology.”

This is the future that sections of the ruling class are preparing.

Will the current wealth – seeking, morally bankrupt set of Labour MPs resist these developments? On the contrary, it was the Labour party that introduced the National Public Order Intelligence Unit in March 1999 from which the CIU operation has originated from. The difference being is that the CIU operates outside any parliamentary oversight and is not held accountable as it will not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Yet many trade unions leaders still financially support the Labour party with significant contributions of their members money, which is the equivalent of saying to the government “here is some more money, please go out and buy a bigger hammer so you can hit our members harder.”

Considering the above developments, it is important to note that the danger of fascism does not originate from any extreme right-wing group, it stems from the state itself, who will use such groups as and when it deems fit. In general the ruling class would prefer to rule via parliamentary democracy but in times of crisis they are perfectly willing to introduce and finance a different type of rule.

It is not the duty of socialists to ignore developments and deny reality, but to analyse them and to prepare and build a Party that can offer an alternative to the nightmare scenario that is currently unfolding brick by reactionary brick.

Ian Johnson is General Secretary of the Socialist Labour Party.

VOTE SLP

May 2009.

SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY TO STAND IN EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

2009-05-08T20:41:00.002+01:00

The SLP has announced that they will be standing a full slate of candidates in the forthcoming European elections being held on 4th June 2009. All nine regions in England plus the Scotland and Wales regions will be contested.

The EU is a capitalist club that makes it easier for the multinational companies to exploit workers throughout its member states. Factories are uprooted from one country to another in pursuit of the cheapest labour, without any social responsibility being accepted towards the devastated communities they are leaving behind.

Moreover, EU directives on privatisation are destroying Britain’s health, education and postal services and now there is no part of the economy safe from the hands of the privateers.

The Socialist Labour Party is totally committed to complete withdrawal from the European Union. However, the SLP recognises that the EU is but one instrument of capitalist rule; therefore what is ultimately needed is a genuine socialist alternative to the vast array of problems that workers and their families are facing today.
The SLP is the only party that is offering such an alternative.

Opposing the European Union is part of the Socialist Labour Party’s internationalist outlook. We want Britain to come out of Europe and into the world, developing and expanding trading links with the rest of the world.

Only by coming out of the EU can we begin to put things right economically and socially.

Vote us in to get us out!

ENDS.

For further information on SLP policies please visit our website:
www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk

or email:
info@socialist-labour-party.org.uk

Socialist Labour contests 2009 European Elections

2009-05-07T21:07:00.001+01:00

The Socialist Labour Party (SLP) will contest all electoral divisions of Scotland, Wales and England in the June 4th 2009 European Elections.

The SLP are the only socialist party ever to have offered every voter of Britain the opportunity to vote for socialism. With the on-going collapse of the free market system this is now more important than ever.

A full list of SLP candidates will appear in due course.

Vote Socialist Labour Party on June 4th 2009 X

'We could surrender - or stand and fight'

2009-03-09T19:29:00.003Z

ARTHUR SCARGILL – The Guardian 7th March 2009

Twenty-five years ago, the Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher declared war on the National Union of Mineworkers. The Tories had been preparing for a showdown with the NUM since before the 1979 general election. They could not forget the victorious miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, the second of which had brought down the Tory government in a general election.

But the NUM's historic battle did not begin in March 1984, as so many pundits claim. The seeds of the dispute had been sown long before. A pit closure plan in 1981 resulted in miners, including miners in Nottinghamshire, taking unofficial strike action (without a ballot) and forcing Thatcher into a U-turn, or in reality a body swerve.

At that time, Britain's coal industry was the most efficient and technologically advanced in the world, a result of a tripartite agreement, the Plan For Coal, signed by a Labour government, the National Coal Board (NCB) and the mining trade unions in 1974, and endorsed by Thatcher in 1981. And yet, shortly after I became national president of the NUM in 1982 I was sent anonymously a copy of a secret plan prepared by NCB chiefs earmarking 95 pits for closure, with the loss of 100,000 miners' jobs. This plan had been prepared on government instructions following the miners' successful unofficial strike in 1981.

I took this document to the union's National Executive Committee (NEC) - its contents were not only denied by government and NCB chiefs, but were disbelieved by militant NUM leaders who had been assured that their pits had long-term futures. However, the exposed revelations struck a chord among our members throughout Britain's coalfields where colliery managers - clearly acting on instructions from above - had already begun unilaterally changing agreed working practices, affecting shift patterns and supplementary payments.

It became clear that the union would have to take action, but of a type that would win maximum support and have a unifying effect. The NEC accepted a report from me recommending that we call a special national delegate conference, and link our opposition to the pit closure plan with a demand that the coal board negotiate the union's wage claim. The NEC agreed, and the special conference was held on 21 October 1983. Delegates from all NUM areas were given a detailed report so that they could vote on what action - if any - should be taken. Following a full debate, they agreed to call a national overtime ban from 1 November - until such time as the NCB withdrew its closure plan and agreed to negotiate an increase in miners' wages with the NUM.
Over the next four months, the overtime ban had an extraordinary impact. It succeeded in reducing coal output by 30%, or 12m tonnes, thus cutting national coal stocks to about the same level as they had been during the miners' unofficial strike in 1981.

Then, on 1 March 1984, acting I believe on national instruction, NCB directors in four areas announced the immediate closure of five pits: Cortonwood and Bullcliffe Wood in Yorkshire, Herrington in Durham, Snowdown in Kent and Polmaise in Scotland.

Coalfield reaction was electrifying. On Saturday 3 March, accompanied by the NUM Yorkshire president, Jack Taylor, I spoke at a packed meeting in South Yorkshire initially organised to discuss various issues that had already brought seven Yorkshire pits out on strike. I knew we had to do everything possible to persuade our members to direct their rage in a united way at the pit closure plan and its threat to butcher our industry.

On Sunday evening Taylor and I attended a Yorkshire Brass Band Festival in Sheffield city hall. By then I had consulted my fellow national officials, the vice-president, Michael McGahey, and the national secretary, Peter Heathfield.

It was essential to present a united response to the NCB and we agreed that, if the coal board planned to force pit closures on an area by area basis, then we must respond at least initially on that same basis. The NUM's rules permitted areas to take official strike action if authorised by our national executive committee in accordance with Rule 41. If the NEC gave Scotland and Yorkshire authorisation under this rule, it could galvanise other areas to seek similar support for action against closures.

During an interval in the concert, I used the back of a programme to draft a strike resolution which I asked Taylor to present the following morning to the Yorkshire area council meeting. I told him that McGahey would be doing the same thing at the same time in Scotland.

On 6 March, at a consultative meeting at NCB London headquarters, the coal board chairman, Ian MacGregor, not only confirmed what we had been expecting, but announced that in addition to the five pits already earmarked for immediate closure, a further 20 would be closed during the coming year, with the loss of more than 20,000 jobs. This, he said, was being done to take four million tonnes of "unwanted" capacity out of the industry, and bring supply into line with demand.

The Scotland and Yorkshire NUM areas did vote to seek endorsement from the NEC for strike action, and at the NEC meeting on 8 March were given authorisation under Rule 41. South Wales and Kent then also asked for authorisation. The NEC agreed, and confirmed that other areas could, if they wished, do the same. We realised that the NCB announcement on 6 March had amounted to a declaration of war. We could either surrender right now, or stand and fight.
A question that has been raised time and time again over the past 25 years is: why did the union not hold a national strike ballot? Those who attack our struggle by vilifying me usually say: "Scargill rejected calls for a ballot."

The real reason that NUM areas such as Nottinghamshire, South Derbyshire and Leicestershire wanted a national strike ballot was that they wanted the strike called off, believing naively that their pits were safe.

Three years earlier, in 1981, there had been no ballot when miners' unofficial strike action - involving Notts miners - had caused Thatcher to retreat from mass closures (nor in 1972 when more than a million workers went on strike in support of the Pentonville Five dockers who had been jailed for defying government anti-union legislation).

McGahey argued that the union should not be "constitutionalised" out of taking action, while the South Wales area president, Emlyn Williams, told the NEC on 12 April 1984: "To hide behind a ballot is an act of cowardice. I tell you this now ... decide what you like about a ballot but our coalfield will be on strike and stay on strike."

However, NUM areas had a right to ask the NEC to convene a special national delegate conference (as we had when calling the overtime ban) to determine whether delegates mandated by their areas should vote for a national individual ballot or reaffirm the decision of the NEC to permit areas such as Scotland, Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent to take strike action in accordance with Rule 41.

Our special conference was held on 19 April. McGahey, Heathfield and I were aware from feedback that a slight majority of areas favoured the demand for a national strike ballot; therefore, we were expecting and had prepared for that course of action with posters, ballot papers and leaflets. A major campaign was ready to go for a "Yes" vote in a national strike ballot.
At the conference, Heathfield told delegates in his opening address: "I hope that we are sincere and honest enough to recognise that a ballot should not be used and exercised as a veto to prevent people in other areas defending their jobs." His succinct reminder of the situation we were in opened up an emotional debate to which speaker after speaker made passionate and fiercely argued contributions.

Replying to that debate, I said: "This battle is certainly about more than the miners' union. It is for the right to work. It is for the right to preserve our pits. It is for the right to preserve this industry ... We can all make speeches, but at the end of the day we have got to stand up and be counted ... We have got to come out and say not only what we feel should be done, but do it because if we don't do that, then we fail."

McGahey, Heathfield and I had done the arithmetic beforehand, and were truly surprised that when the vote was taken, delegates rejected calls for a national strike ballot and decided instead to call on all miners to refuse to cross picket lines - and join the 140,000 already on strike. We later learned that members of one area delegation had been so moved by the arguments put forward in the debate that they'd held an impromptu meeting and switched their vote in support of the area strikes in accordance with Rule 41.

During the strike I was also criticised, indeed attacked - by my own colleagues - for arguing that the NUM's prime picketing targets should be power stations, ports, cement works, steelworks and coking plants. But evidence now available shows my argument was correct.

My passionate conviction that the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire should be selected as a main target was rubbished at the time. Yet, it has now been revealed from official sources that show coal stocks at steel plants - particularly Scunthorpe in Yorkshire, Ravenscraig in Scotland and Llanwern in Wales - were so low that these works could only continue in production for a matter of weeks, with Scunthorpe - where British Steel had already laid off 160 workers due to coal shortages - actually earmarked for closure by 18 June 1984.

The issue of dispensations that would allow provision of coal supplies created divisions among the most militant sections of the NUM. I had argued passionately that there should be no dispensations for power stations, cement works, steelworks or coking plants, whose coal stocks were extremely low.

Many on the union's left - particularly those in the Communist party - argued that the union had a responsibility to ensure that a minimal amount of coal could be delivered in order to keep the giant furnaces and ovens "ticking over". Heathfield and a number of others on the NUM left agreed with me that there should be no dispensations and that if steelworks had to close down, as British Steel's chairman, Bob Haslam, warned was inevitable, then the responsibility lay firmly at the door of the government, not the NUM.

Despite the passionate arguments made by Heathfield and myself, areas did give dispensations. Two months went by before it dawned on Yorkshire, South Wales and Scotland that they had been outmanoeuvred by British Steel, and the leadership of the steelworkers' union, and that British Steel was moving far more coal than the dispensations agreed with NUM areas. Yet there was still time to stop all those giant steelworks, and if the steelworkers' union would not cooperate with the NUM to stop all deliveries of coal to the steelworks then the National Union of Seamen and rail unions Aslef and NUR had already demonstrated that they would stop all deliveries.

The scene was set for the battle of Orgreave.

Orgreave coking plant was a crucial target for mass picketing. I knew that its coal supplies could be cut off as had been the case at the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham in 1972 - a turning point after which that strike was soon settled.

Contrary to popular mythology, Orgreave was closed twice: first on 27 May 1984, when together with dozens of others I was injured on the picket line. Second, on 18 June, when 10,000 pickets faced 8,500 riot police in a scene reminiscent of a battle in England's 17th-century civil war.
So fierce was the conflict on 18 June that dozens of pickets were hospitalised (including me), but the picketing resulted in British Steel's chairman sending a telex closing down Orgreave on a temporary basis - exactly as had been the case at Saltley coke depot in Birmingham 12 years before.

The fundamental difference between Saltley in 1972 and Orgreave in 1984 was that in 1972 following the first closure at Saltley, picketing on my demand was increased the following day - while at Orgreave, on 19 June 1984, the pickets were completely withdrawn by the NUM Yorkshire and Derbyshire areas and other coalfield leaders, despite my desperate urging that picketing be stepped up.

Had picketing at Orgreave been increased the day after 18 June, I have no doubt that Orgreave - and Scunthorpe - would have faced immediate closure, forcing the government to settle the strike.

For 25 years, I have been accused of refusing to negotiate a settlement with the NCB, and of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" - a blatant lie. The NUM settled the strike on five separate occasions in 1984: on 8 June, 8 July, 18 July, 10 September, and 12 October. The first four settlements were sabotaged or withdrawn following the intervention of Thatcher.

The most important settlement terms were agreed between leaders of the pit deputies' union Nacods and the NUM at the offices of the conciliation service Acas on 12 October 1984 and included a demand that the NCB withdraw its pit closure plan, give an undertaking that the five collieries earmarked for immediate closure would be kept open, and guarantee that no pit would be closed unless by joint agreement it was deemed to be exhausted or unsafe.

Nacods members had recorded an 82% ballot vote for strike action, and their leaders made clear to the NCB that unless the Nacods-NUM terms were accepted, the Nacods strike would go ahead.

I was later told by a Tory who had been a minister at the time that when Thatcher was informed of the Nacods-NUM agreement she announced to the cabinet "special committee" that the government had no choice but to settle the strike on the unions' terms.

However, when she learned that Nacods - despite pleas from the TUC and the NUM - had called off their strike and accepted a "modified" colliery review procedure, she immediately withdrew the government's decision to settle. Nacods' inexplicable decision led to the closure of 164 pits and the loss of 160,000 jobs.

The monumental betrayal by Nacods has never been explained in a way that makes sense. Even the TUC recognised that the Nacods settlement was a disaster.

The fact that Nacods leaders ignored pleas from the NUM and TUC not to call off their strike or resile from their agreement with the NUM not only adds mystery but poses the question - whose hand did the moving, and why?

Over the years, I have repeatedly said that we didn't "come close" to total victory in October 1984 - we had it, and at the very point of victory we were betrayed. Only the Nacods leaders know why.

A full account of the strike of 1984/85 is still to be written. However, we have learned more and more about the then Labour party leader, Neil Kinnock's treachery, the betrayals by the TUC and the class collaboration of union leaders such as Eric Hammond (the electricians' EETPU) and John Lyons (Engineers and Managers Association), who instructed their members to cross picket lines and did all they could to defeat the miners.

We have also seen how many who, like Kinnock, bleated constantly about the need for a ballot during the miners' strike didn't call for the British people to have a ballot in 2003 when Tony Blair took the nation into an unlawful war and the occupation of Iraq.

During the past 25 years, many who have attacked the NUM, and me, about the need for a ballot, or argued that we selected the wrong targets have done so to cover their own guilt at failing to give the miners a level of support that would have stopped the Tories' pit closure programme and thus changed the political direction of the nation. Britain in 1984 was already a divided and degraded society - it has become much more so in the 25 years since.

The NUM's struggle remains not only an inspiration for workers but a warning to today's union leaders of their responsibility to their members, and the need to challenge both government and employers over all forms of injustice, inequality and exploitation.

That is the legacy of the NUM's strike of 1984/85, a truly historic fight that gave birth to the magnificent Women Against Pit Closures and the miners' support groups. I have always said that the greatest victory in the strike was the struggle itself, a struggle that inspired millions of people around the world.

• On 12 March, at 7.30pm, Arthur Scargill will be speaking on the lessons of the 1984/85 miners' strike at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, WC1

Ends

Harold Pinter

2008-12-28T21:08:00.001Z

This speech was given at the Committee for Peace in the Balkans Conference at The Conway Hall June 10th 2000.

I'd like to read you an extract from Eve-Ann Prentice's powerful and important book about the NATO action in Serbia, One Woman's War.

"The little old lady looked as if she had three eyes. On closer inspection, it was the effect of the shrapnel which had drilled into her forehead and killed her. One of her shoes had been torn off and the radishes she had just bought at the market lay like splashes of blood near her outstretched hand.

At first, the dead had seemed almost camouflaged among the rubble, splintered trees and broken glass but once you began to notice them, the bodies were everywhere, some covered in table cloths and blankets, others simply lying exposed where they had fallen. There was barely a square inch of wall, tree, car or human being which had not been raked by shrapnel. Houses which had been pretty hours before, with picket fences and window boxes bursting with blooms were now riddled with scars from the strafing. Widows in black leant on their garden gates, whimpering into handkerchiefs, as they surveyed their dead neighbours lying amid the broken glass, gashed trees, smouldering cars and crumpled bicycles. Plastic bags lay strewn near many of the dead, spilling parcels of fruit, eggs and vegetables, fresh from the market but now never to be eaten.

It was Friday 7th May 1999 in the southern city of Nis and NATO had made a mistake. Instead of hitting a military building near the airport about three miles away the bombers had dropped their lethal load in a tangle of back streets close to the city centre. At least thirty-three people were killed and scores more suffered catastrophic injuries; hands, feet and arms shredded or blown away altogether, abdomens and chests ripped open by shards of flying metal.

This had been no "ordinary" shelling, if such a thing exists. The area had been hit by cluster bombs, devices designed to cause a deadly spray of hot metal fragments when they explode. The Yugoslav government had accused the Alliance of using these weapons in other attacks which had cut down civilians but the suggestion had been mostly laughed to scorn in the West."

The bombing of Nis was no 'mistake'. General Wesley K Clark declared, as the NATO bombing began: "We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately - unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community - destroy these forces and their facilities and support". Milosevic's 'forces', as we know, included television stations, schools, hospitals, theatres, old people's homes - and the market-place in Nis. It was in fact a fundamental feature of NATO policy to terrorise the civilian population.

I would ask you to compare those images of the market place in Nis with the photographs of Tony Blair with his new- born baby which were all over the front pages recently. What a nice looking dad and what a pretty baby. Most readers would not have connected the proud father with the man who launched cluster bombs and missiles containing depleted uranium into Serbia. As we know from the effects of depleted uranium used on Iraq, there will be babies born in Serbia in the near future who won't look quite so pretty as little Leo but they won't get their pictures in the papers either.

The United States was determined to wage war against Serbia for one reason and one reason only - to assert its domination over Europe. And it seems very clear that it won't stop there. In showing its contempt for the United Nations and International Law the United States has opened up the way for more "moral outrage", more "humanitarian intervention", more demonstrations of its total indifference to the fate of thousands upon thousands of people, more lies, more bullshit, more casual sadism, more destruction.

And the government of Great Britain follows suit with an eagerness which can only merit our disgust. We are confronted by a brutal, ruthless and malignant machine. This machine must be recognised for what it is and resisted.

HaroldPinter.org

Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies at 78

2008-12-28T21:06:00.001Z

By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer

LONDON: Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said when it announced Pinter's award. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."

The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to Stockholm .

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.
Weakened by cancer and bandaged from a fall on a slippery pavement, Pinter seemed a vulnerable old man when he emerged from his London home to speak about the Nobel Award.
Though he had been looking forward to giving a Nobel lecture "the longest speech I will ever have made" he first canceled plans to attend the awards, then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor's advice.

Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays including "The Quiller Memorandum" (1965) and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1980). He admitted, and said he deeply regretted, voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.
Pinter fulminated against what he saw as the overweening arrogance of American power, and belittled Blair as seeming like a "deluded idiot" in support of Bush's war in Iraq .
In his Nobel lecture, Pinter accused the United States of supporting "every right-wing military dictatorship in the world" after World War II.

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," he said.
The United States , he added, "also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain ."

Most prolific between 1957 and 1965, Pinter relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield.
His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed in order to try to survive.
Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words. Gradually, the layers are peeled back to reveal the characters' nakedness.

The protection promised by the room usually disappears and the language begins to disintegrate.

Pinter once said of language, "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness."
Pinter's influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet and throughout British literature.

"With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced.

"Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension," added British playwright David Hare, who also writes politically charged dramas.

The working-class milieu of plays like "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming" reflected Pinter's early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London 's East End . He began his career in the provinces as an actor.

In his first major play, "The Birthday Party" (1958), intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."

And in "The Caretaker," a manipulative old man threatens the fragile relationship of two brothers while "The Homecoming" explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman.

In "Silence and Landscape," Pinter moved from exploring the dark underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that equally occupy the individual.
In the 1980s, Pinter's only stage plays were one-acts: "A Kind of Alaska " (1982), "One for the Road" (1984) and the 20-minute "Mountain Language" (1988).

During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as "a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility."
In March 2005 Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, "Voices," that was broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday.
"I have written 29 plays and I think that's really enough," Pinter said . "I think the world has had enough of my plays."

Pinter had a son, Daniel, from his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, which ended in divorce in 1980. That year he married the writer Fraser.
"It was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten," Fraser said.

Ends.

International Disabled Persons Day

2008-12-21T14:07:00.003Z

A report from Teresa Rayner.

Wednesday 3d December 2008 was International Disabled Persons Day; how many people would have known that?
I would not have known had I not been involved with the disabled people’s Direct Action Network (DAN).

There were two main events; one involved going on a demonstration to London, a demonstration about the changes made in the new Welfare bill for the sick and disabled, the other was to go to Sheffield to an organised event of No Barriers No Borders, an event in which disabled asylum seekers and other disability groups meet to share food and stories of their plight since leaving their countries. I chose to go to Sheffield, manly to make sure I could get to an event and get back the same day.

The evening was quite well organised, the food was plentiful, all made by the asylum seekers themselves. Many of the people were from Iran, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan, who had fled their countries because of war, torture, imprisonment or worse, to a country they hoped to feel safer in. We listened to the stories being told by the asylum seekers themselves, telling stories of their great struggles of leaving their country of birth as it was a choice of life or death.

Some became disabled while in England, as in the case of one young man called Behzaad. His family had been killed and he fled from Afghanistan, he failed to get asylum here and was denied any support. So he started work in the illegal economy repairing roofs of houses, so he could clothe and feed himself. He fell off the roof and broke his back and was in hospital for six months, and was given a bill for £95,000 for his treatment. After this, because of his status as an asylum seeker, he was refused any more treatment and given an old wheel chair and put in accommodation, which did not meet his access needs. He seemed to go from one disaster to the next as the police came to arrest him at dawn and take him to an immigration Removal centre. However a solicitor has now submitted a fresh claim for him on medical grounds.

There were many stories like Behzaad. Some came to this country with children and one family had two children with sickle cell disease, for which in their own country there is no treatment. One woman fled from Pakistan because of domestic violence by the husband and his family, as her own country offered her no protection, she fled with her two daughters to England. Another disabled woman of 23 from Nigeria was rejected by her mother and left to survive on the streets, and ended up in prisons and was raped. She was brought to England in 2005 and abandoned, she was refused asylum and is still fighting a legal battle for asylum. She tells us she too lives in inaccessible accommodation in a flat and there are many days she does not go out, she worries about danger especially if there was a fire she would not be able to get out.

There were many stories being told about services, such as social services, refusing to help, they claimed because of their status as an asylum seeker. Even if they were granted asylum, this brought a new set of problems and very often left the person feeling abandoned as the money an asylum seeker receives while they wait for asylum was removed and they were never given any information on what to do next. Many were given notice to leave their accommodation, as the accommodation was only for people seeking asylum and they had been granted permission to stay.

Some asylum seekers preferred to tell poems that created a vivid picture of their experiences, some talked about not having a choice, yet they all would prefer ‘solidarity not pity’, and most of all ‘dignity’.

Meanwhile the disabled people who went to demonstrate in London seemed to have had quite an eventful day.
The disabled people’s Direct Action Network protested and blocked the traffic outside Downing Street, to object to welfare reforms proclaimed in the Queens speech.

Instead of celebrating International Disabled Persons day they decided to demonstrate against the government’s ‘Employment Support Allowance’ and the ‘Work Capability Assessment’, which is replacing Incapacity Benefit. They claim that this punitive economic attack will hit out at some of the poorest in society, forcing them into even further poverty and a discriminatory job market, while thousands more are losing their jobs due to the deepening recession. They claim that they are sick and tired of politicians who attack minorities that they see as easy targets for public spending cuts and biased media/press coverage that negatively portrays disabled people as lazy scroungers and benefit cheats. Also lack of meaningful education and training leads to lack of qualifications and job skills.

Work in hostile environments means employers continue to discriminate: i.e. against disabled employees that need part-time and flexi-time work due to their impairments and don’t have mechanisms that allow disabled people to be absent without prior notification, for their impairment/condition.

The demands were for justice in the work place with real penalties for discriminatory employers; a positive approach for the inclusion of disabled people who wish to seek work and a non-punitive system for those who cannot currently work. A Dan activist claims that the action was short and sweet, a symbolic action outside Downing Street showing that even on the day of the Queens speech we can still get close to Parliament and government. The sight of disabled activists demonstrating along Whitehall continues to illicit the support of the public and sets the marker for a future of real rights in Britain for disabled people.

A DAY TO REMEMBER- LONDON DECEMBER 3rd 2008.

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story

2008-12-05T21:50:00.005Z

by Michael Parenti

Global Research, December 4, 2008

Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.

Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.

The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes. A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”

In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.

The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.

None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.

If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.

The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.

The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas

While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.

US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.

The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.

Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.

In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.

One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.

US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.

The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.

In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.

Ends.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHANGE

2008-12-02T17:04:00.002Z

Apparently when the G20 was mentioned to George Bush earlier this year by Kevin Rudd the Australian Prime Minister, Bush had to ask what it was. Unfortunately this is not another joke about the limited intellectual capacity of the outgoing US President but rather it reveals the insignificance of the G20 meeting held in Washington on 15th November. Despite the optimistic statements issued by the participants the underlying fact was that they had no collective answer to the deepening crisis facing their economies.

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had already backtracked from his previous decision to buy up the ‘toxic assets’ of the financial institutions because of the sheer volume of debt involved, and updated forecasts by the IMF now signal that both the US and European economies amongst others, will be in recession throughout 2009.
With this background it is beyond ironic to hear the world leaders proclaim that capitalism is ‘the best possible system of government’, making one wonder what the worst system of government would be like!

Yet such rhetoric is stock in trade for the defenders of capitalism, feeding the general population with statements made purely for public consumption, while the reality is often the complete opposite to what is being said.

The Labour government has told workers for years that the economy could not afford above inflation wage rises, and that there was no money available for the development of health and education, yet the moment the wealthiest layers in society run into self-made problems, this same government suddenly find billions of pounds to bail the financial sector out.
Furthermore, in an attempt to placate the population at large Gordon Brown and his ministers announced that they have asked the mortgage lenders to explore all avenues to ensure that home repossessions only take place as a last resort, knowing full well that this is merely political spin and the reality is quite different.

Recent figures reveal a 40% increase in the number of home repossessions in the last six months alone. Moreover, the main culprit in repossessions is the government-owned Northern Rock, which has been responsible for more than 20% of the total, whilst also recruiting almost five hundred more people to work in its repossessions department. In addition, a recent court ruling, dragging up legislation from the 1920s, allows mortgage lenders to repossess properties even if they are a mere two months behind in missed payments. Does that sound like the action of last resort as promised by Brown?

Yet this financial sector that are now so quick to resort to repossessions, have had, on a worldwide basis over £5 trillion handed over to them to keep them afloat.
In the United States the emphatic victory of Barack Obama signified that the American population wanted a complete break with the policies of the Bush Administration, and far from being a question of race, Obama’s election demonstrated that in the final analysis it is not religion, gender or race that is the decisive factor but the deepening economic crisis and the class struggle it engenders that predominates.

However the hopes and aspirations that working people have invested in Obama will sooner rather than later be shattered as he gathers around him the same characters that have dominated both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Obama, no matter what his subjective intentions may have been, will defend capitalism at the expense of the interests of the millions of workers who put him in office, a situation that will result in increased social and industrial conflict.

In Britain the desperate attempt by the Brown government to control the crisis by cutting interest rates will not only see the collapse of the pound but will also raise the prospect of national bankruptcy, meanwhile doing nothing to prevent the rising levels of unemployment and the gutting of public services. Also, in an attempt to save the system, the Labour government will continue to pursue privatisation and wage cutting policies as they seek to make workers pay for a crisis not of their making and overturn every gain made by the working class over decades of struggle.

In contrast and in opposition to the desires of capitalism, socialists should see this coming period as an opportunity for change. The political void now open must be filled by developing and promoting SLP policies that do represent and give voice to the best interests of the majority of the population.

Ends.

THE CASE FOR AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY

2008-11-04T17:28:00.002Z

On Saturday 1st November 2008 Arthur Scargill gave the following presentation to a Climate Change conference in Newcastle.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS, PROPONENTS OF NUCLEAR POWER AND THE GOVERNMENT ALL REFER TO CLIMATE CHANGE WHEN THE PROBLEM IS GLOBAL WARMING.

THE EARTH HAS WITNESSED CLIMATE CHANGE FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS AND HAS INCLUDED DROUGHTS, AN ICE AGE AND DRAMATIC CHANGES WHICH ARE NATURAL PHENOMENA.

GLOBAL WARMING HAS, OF COURSE, AN EFFECT ON THE CLIMATE BUT AN EFFECT WHICH SHOULD BE VIEWED IN CONTEXT.ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARGUE THAT THE ANSWER TO GLOBAL WARMING IS TO STOP THE USE OF COAL AND RELY INSTEAD ON RENEWABLE ENERGY.

THEY ARE EITHER UNAWARE OR CONVENIENTLY IGNORE THE FACT THAT 92% OF CO2 IN THE UK IS PRODUCED NOT BY COAL BUT BY OIL, GAS AND DEFORESTATION.

WE ARE FACING AN ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CRISIS ON A SCALE SIMILAR TO THE WALL STREET CRASH IN 1929 AND THE MASS UNEMPLOYMENT WHICH AFFECTED THE UK AND EUROPE IN THE NINETEEN THIRTIES.OVER 10 MILLION PEOPLE IN BRITAIN ARE "LIVING" ON OR BELOW THE POVERTY LINE WHILST OVER 1 MILLION CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH FOOD AND ARE CATEGORISED AS "GOING HUNGRY".

OVER 11/2 MILLION PEOPLE ARE ON HOUSING WAITING LISTS AT A TIME WHEN THOUSANDS OF PROPERTIES STAND EMPTY AND THREE-QUARTERS OF A MILLION BUILDING WORKERS ARE UNEMPLOYED.ENERGY AND FOOD COSTS HAVE ROCKETED AND PEOPLE TODAY ARE PAYING OVER 300% MORE FOR ENERGY AND 80% MORE FOR FOOD THAN TWO YEARS AGO.

WE ARE FACING A MONUMENTAL ENERGY CRISIS WITH THE UK'S NATURAL GAS SUPPLIES VIRTUALLY EXHAUSTED, ITS INDIGENOUS OIL SUPPLIES ARE NEARING EXHAUSTION YET WE LIVE ON AN ISLAND WITH OVER ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF COAL FROM WHICH WE CAN EXTRACT ALL THE OIL, GAS, ELECTRICITY AND PETROCHEMICALS THAT WE NEED WITHOUT CAUSING HARM TO THE ENVIRONMENT.

BRITAIN HAS NEVER HAD AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY AND AS A CONSEQUENCE WE ARE NOW FACING THE WORST ENERGY CRISIS IN OUR HISTORY.SINCE THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR,

BOTH LABOUR AND TORY GOVERNMENTS HAVE SOUGHT TO REPLACE BRITAIN'S VAST COAL RESERVES - OVER ONE THOUSAND YEARS' SUPPLY OF DEEP MINE COAL - WITH FALSE PROMISES OF "CHEAP" IMPORTED OIL - "CHEAP SAFE" NUCLEAR ENERGY AND "CHEAP" NATURAL GAS.THESE POLICIES HAVE NOT ONLY COST THE BRITISH PEOPLE BILLIONS OF POUNDS BUT HAVE RESULTED IN THE NEAR-EXTINCTION OF BRITAIN'S DEEP MINE COAL INDUSTRY AND BROUGHT ABOUT MASSIVE ECONOMIC, ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS.

HAVING SEEN THE CLOSURE OF 200 PITS SINCE 1980 AND THE LOSS OF 200,000 JOBS, THE CLOSURE OR NON-OPERATION OF NEARLY 70% OF COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS ON THE FALSE PREMISE THAT THEY WERE UNECONOMIC AND A MAJOR POLLUTER OF CO2, IT WOULD BE REASONABLE TO EXPECT THAT THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN A DRAMATIC FALL IN CO2 EMISSIONS.

IN FACT, CO2 EMISSIONS HAVE INCREASED SINCE 1993. FOLLOWING THE SHORTSIGHTED POLICY OF THE DASH FOR GAS WHICH RESULTED IN FURTHER PIT CLOSURES AND A SWITCH FROM COAL TO GAS-FIRED POWER STATIONS IT WOULD - IF THE ENVIRONMENTALST AND NUCLEAR LOBBY WERE RIGHT - HAVE RESULTED IN A SUBSTANTIAL DECREASE IN CO2 EMISSIONS - THE VERY OPPOSITE IS THE CASE.

IN 1993, TOTAL CO2 EMISSIONS BY SOURCE WERE:-

YEAR 1993

OIL 208.5 MILLION TONNES

COAL AND OTHER SOLID FUELS 206.1 MILLION TONNES

GAS 134.2 MILLION TONNES

NON-FUEL 18.3 MILLION TONNES

TOTAL 567.1 MILLION TONNES

Fig 1

BY 2007, THE POSITION HAD CHANGED SIGNIFICANTLY,

I.E. YEAR 2007

GAS 194 MILLION TONNES

OIL 185 MILLION TONNES

COAL AND OTHER SOLID FUELS 150 MILLION TONNES

NON-FUEL 15 MILLION TONNES

TOTAL 544 MILLION TONNES

Fig 2

THESE FIGURES, HOWEVER, ARE NOT ONLY MISLEADING BUT UNTRUE.

ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE, CO2 EMISIONS ARE UNDERSTATED BY 189 MILLION TONNES, NOT SURPRISING IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS DELIBERATELY OMITTED CO2 EMISSIONS FROM AVIATION, SHIPPING AND DEFORESTATION.

TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE STATISTICS BY THE NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE, A MORE ACCURATE PICTURE EMERGES:-

YEAR 2007

OIL 374 MILLION TONNES

GAS 194 MILLION TONNES

COAL AND OTHER SOLID FUELS 150 MILLION TONNES

NON-FUEL - DEFORESTATION 15 MILLION TONNES

TOTAL 733 MILLION TONNES

Fig 3

IN SIMPLE TERMS, OIL, GAS AND DEFORESTATION NOW PRODUCE 80% OF ALL CO2 EMISSIONS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. FIGURES DON'T LIE BUT LIARS CAN FIGURE, AT LEAST THAT'S THE CONCLUSION ONE MUST COME TO WHEN COMPARING THE NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE CALCULATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT'S INACCURATE STATISTICS AND MISLEADING STATEMENTS.

AT THE PRESENT TIME, RENEWABLE ENERGY PRODUCES ONLY 5% OF BRITAIN'S ENERGY NEEDS YET ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE CONCLUDED THAT THE UK MUST STOP USING COAL - WHICH PRODUCES ONLY 20% CO2 IN THE UK AND 2% OF CO2 EMISSIONS WORLDWIDE.SOME ENVIRONMENTALISTS EVEN SAY IT MAY NOW BE NECESSARY TO ACCEPT NUCLEAR ENERGY, IGNORING THE FACT THAT NUCLEAR ENERGY ONLY GENERATES ELECTRICITY AND IS OF NO USE FOR OTHER INDUSTRIAL OR DOMESTIC USE.

I WAS CHAIRMAN OF ENERGY 2000, AN ORGANISATION ESTABLISHED IN 1977, SUPPORTED BY THE NUM, FRIENDS OF THE EARTH, GREENPEACE AND ALL THE ANTI-NUCLEAR GROUPS.ENERGY 2000 PRESENTED EVIDENCE AT THE WINDSCALE, SIZEWELL AND HINCKLEY POINT PUBLIC ENQUIRIES, PUTTING A POWERFUL CASE AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER.ENERGY 2000 AND ALL THE ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS CAMPAIGNED IN THE 1970s AND 1980s FOR AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY BASED ON UK DEEP MINE CLEAN COAL AND RENEWABLE ENERGIES SUCH AS WIND, WAVE, TIDE, BARRAGE, HYDRO, GEOTHERMAL AND SOLAR POWER TOGETHER WITH INSULATION AND CONSERVATION.

THE DISASTERS AT THREE-MILE ISLAND IN 1979 AND CHERNOBYL IN 1986 WHICH WILL RESULT IN THOUSANDS OF DEATHS OVER A 30 TO 40 YEAR PERIOD, DEMONSTRATED THAT OUR POLICY WAS RIGHT.BASED ON THE EVIDENCE OF DR ROBERT GALE, THE CANCER EXPERT, WHO TREATED VICTIMS IN CHERNOBYL, IT IS PROJECTED THAT THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER ALONE WILL RESULT IN OVER 100,000 DEATHS.

THESE FIGURES ONLY RELATE TO ONE DISASTER AND NOT TO THE CONTINUED RADIATION CONTAMINATION BOTH WITHIN THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY AND IN AND AROUND NUCLEAR PLANTS.EVIDENCE PRESENTED BY EXPERTS SUCH AS Dr ALICE STEWART AND DR ROSIE BERTELL SHOWS AN INCREASED DEATH RATE FROM LEUKAEMIA AND CANCER IN AND AROUND NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS 10% HIGHER THAN IN THE GENERAL POPULATION.ON 13 DECEMBER 1986, DR KENNETH DUNCAN, FORMER HEAD OF THE HEALTH AND SAFETY COMMISSION'S EMPLOYMENT MEDICAL ADVISORY SERVICE AND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL RADIOLOGICAL PROTECTION BOARD ADMITTED THAT IF A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT OCCURRED IN THE UK WITH A 100 PER CENT RELEASE OF CORE CONTENTS, IT COULD RESULT IN UP TO 2 MILLION DEATHS (TUC REPORT, 23 JANUARY 1987).THE CONSTRUCTION, RUNNING COSTS AND DECOMMISSIONING COSTS OF NUCLEAR ENERGY ARE HORRENDOUS - THE CURRENT ESTIMATE FOR DECOMMISSIONING EXISTING NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS IN BRITAIN IS £73 BILLION. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS SELECT COMMITTEE IN 1989 REPORTED THAT THE REAL COST OF AGR AND PWR NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS WOULD BE 400% MORE EXPENSIVE THAN ELECTRICITY FROM A COAL-FIRED POWER STATION.BRITAIN NEEDS AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY, BASED ON INDIGENOUS DEEP MINE COAL AND RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES SUCH AS WIND, WAVE, TIDE, BARRAGE, HYDRO, GEOTHERMAL AND SOLAR POWER, A POLICY FREE FROM UNILATERAL PRICE INCREASES OR THE INTERRUPTION OR ENDING OF SUPPLY.

CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY DOES EXIST AND WE CAN - WITH THE PROPER INVESTMENT - UTILISE UK DEEP MINE COAL IN A WAY WHICH WILL RESULT IN A REDUCTION OF 90% OF CO2 EMISSIONS.

CURRENTLY THE UK'S ENERGY NEEDS ARE MET BY OIL, GAS AND COAL. HOWEVER, THE UK IS ALREADY A NET IMPORTER OF OIL, GAS AND COAL AND BY 2020 IMPORTS OF OIL, UNCONVENTIONAL OILS SUCH AS SHALE OIL, TAR SAND AND GAS WILL - UNLESS THE GOVERNMENT IS STOPPED - ACCOUNT FOR 80% OF THE UK'S ENERGY NEEDS.

THIS POSITION IS UNACCEPTABLE BOTH IN TERMS OF GUARANTEE OF SUPPLY AND THE MASSIVE COSTS TO BRITAIN'S BALANCE OF PAYMENTS WHICH WILL HAVE TO BE MET BY THE CONSUMER WHO ARE CURRENTLY PAYING 300% MORE FOR GAS AND OIL, AT A TIME WHEN OIL COMPANIES SUCH AS BP AND ROYAL DUTCH SHELL ARE RECORDING PROFITS OF £6.4 AND £6.6 BILLION RESPECTIVELY FOR THE THIRD QUARTER OF 2008.

UNLESS THERE IS A DRAMATIC POLICY CHANGE, WE WILL SEE THE UK HAVE AN ENERGY POLICY BASED ON OIL AND GAS IMPORTS AND EXPENSIVE AND HIGHLY DANGEROUS NUCLEAR POWER WHICH USES URANIUM AS A PRIMARY FUEL, A FINITE ENERGY SOURCE WHICH WILL BE EXHAUSTED WITHIN 50 YEARS.DR KENNETH DUNCAN CONFIRMED TO THE TUC IN 1986 THAT LUNG CANCER RATES AMONG URANIUM MINERS WAS 3 TO 5 TIMES HIGHER THAN IN THE GENERAL POPULATION AND IF URANIUM MINERS IN NAMIBIA WERE INCLUDED, IT WAS MUCH HIGHER.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND ECO-WARRIORS HAVE BEEN HIGHLY VISIBLE IN THEIR OPPOSITION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW COAL-FIRED POWER STATION AT KINGSNORTH AND THE DRAX POWER STATION IN WEST YORKSHIRE.YET THEY HAVE BEEN CONSPICUOUS BY THEIR ABSENCE IN THE CAMPAIGN TO STOP OPEN-CAST COALMINING WHICH PRODUCES 54% OF THE UK'S INDIGENOUS COAL AND ACCOUNTS FOR NOT ONLY CO2 EMISSIONS AT SOURCE BUT FOR MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF METHANE, A GAS 23 TIMES MORE POTENT AND DAMAGING TO GLOBAL WARMING THAN CO2.THERE HAS BEEN A SYSTEMATIC CAMPAIGN AGAINST INDIGENOUS DEEP MINE COAL PRODUCTION SINCE THE MINERS INFLICTED MASSIVE DEFEAT ON THE TORY GOVERNMENT IN 1972 AND 1974, A POLICY WHICH HAS SEEN THE CLOSURE OF OVER 200 PITS.THE UK CURRENTLY USES NEARLY 63 MILLION TONNES OF COAL PER YEAR, OF WHICH 44 MILLION TONNES ARE IMPORTED AND 9 MILLION TONNES ARE PRODUCED BY HIGHLY POLLUTING OPEN-CAST SITES.

IN OTHER WORDS, 85% OF BRITAIN'S COAL SUPPLY EMANATES FROM IMPORTS OR OPEN-CAST SITES WHILST ONLY 15% IS PRODUCED IN BRITISH DEEP MINES.THE REASON FOR THIS POLICY IS CLEAR FROM THE SECRET CABINET MINUTE LEAKED ON 23 OCTOBER 1979 WHICH STATED - "A NUCLEAR PROGRAMME WOULD HAVE THE ADVANTAGE OF REMOVING A SUBSTANTIAL PORTION OF ELECTRICITY FROM DISRUPTION BY INDUSTRIAL ACTION OF COAL MINERS AND TRANSPORT WORKERS"THIS EXPLAINS WHY THE TORY GOVERNMENT WAS DETERMINED TO CLOSE BRITAIN'S DEEP MINE COAL INDUSTRY.

IT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT HAS REFUSED TO HONOUR ITS UNDERTAKING TO THE NUM TO RE-OPEN PITS CLOSED BETWEEN 1984 AND 1997 AND DEVELOP NEW MINES AND COALFIELDS IN LINE WITH THE 1974 PLAN FOR COAL.THE PLAN FOR COAL WAS DESIGNED TO PROTECT BRITAIN FROM AN ENERGY CRISIS. IT WAS A PLAN WHICH WOULD HAVE AMELIORATED THE IMPACT OF THE CRISIS WHICH IS PLUNGING THE UK INTO ECONOMIC CHAOS.

WE HAVE SEEN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMBINED CYCLE GAS TURBINE (CCGT) TECHNOLOGY IN GAS-FIRED POWER STATIONS, YET THERE HAS BEEN NO REAL ATTEMPT TO INTRODUCE AN INTEGRATED GASIFICATION COMBINED CYCLE (IGCC) IN COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS.IN ADDITION, WHILST GAS AND NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS ARE RUN ON BASE LOAD, COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS HAVE BEEN USED ON PEAK TIME. THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE UK'S 18 COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS COULD ALL BE FITTED WITH CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY AND WHILST THE CRITICS CLAIM THAT THIS TECHNOLOGY IS NOT YET FULLY DEVELOPED, THE GOVERNMENT IN 2003 REPORTED THAT A SMALL SCALE CARBON CAPTURE SCHEME WAS SUCCESSFULLY OPERATING IN THE USA WHICH REMOVED 90% OF CO2 EMISSIONS.

WE HAVE SEEN THIS YEAR THE DEVELOPMENT AT THE ENEL'S TORRE POWER STATION IN ITALY A NEW "CLEAN" COAL-FIRED POWER STATION - WITHOUT CARBON CAPTURE - WHICH HAS REDUCED CO2 EMISSIONS BY 20%!ENEL'S TORRE STATION IS A 660 MW POWER STATION, PREVIOUSLY OIL-FIRED, WHICH PRODUCED 2,485,980 TONNES OF CO2, 456,608 TONNES MORE THAN THE UK GAS-FIRED POWER STATION AT BALLYLUMFORD C, A 616 MW STATION WHICH IN 2007 EMITTED 2,029,372 TONNES OF CO2.THE ENEL'S TORRE NEW COAL-FIRED POWER STATION IS NOW PRODUCING 1,988,784 TONNES OF CO2 OR 40,588 TONNES LESS THAN THE 2,029.372 TONNES AT THE GAS-FIRED POWER STATION AT BALLYLUMFORD C.THE TECHNOLOGY IN ITALY WAS DEVELOPED WITHIN THREE YEARS, DEMONSTRATING THAT IT IS POSSIBLE - EVEN WITHOUT CARBON CAPTURE - FOR MODERN COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS TO REDUCE CO2 EMISSIONS TO BELOW THE LEVEL OF A COMBINED GAS CYCLE POWER STATION.

CARBON CAPTURE WOULD RESULT IN THE UK'S EXISTING COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS REDUCING ANNUAL CO2 EMISSIONS TO 10,872,720 TONNES PER YEAR, A 90% REDUCTION.UNTIL THE 1970s BRITAIN PRODUCED ALL ITS GAS FROM UK DEEP MINE COAL AND CAN PRODUCE ALL THE OIL, GAS AND PETROCHEMICALS WE NEED AND THIS INDIGENOUS SOURCE HAS RESERVES OF WELL OVER A THOUSAND YEARS.AN ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT POLICY FOR THE UKTHE UK NEEDS AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY WHICH WILL PRODUCE 250 MILLION TONNES OF INDIGENOUS DEEP MINE CLEAN COAL PER YEAR - COAL - FROM WHICH COULD BE EXTRACTED ALL THE ELECTRICITY, OIL, GAS AND PETROCHEMICALS THAT THE PEOPLE OF OUR NATION NEED.ALL EXISTING AND NEW COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS SHOULD BE FITTED WITH CLEAN COAL TECHNOLOGY INCLUDING CARBON CAPTURE WHICH WOULD REMOVE 90% OF CO2, AT THE SAME TIME WE SHOULD BE DEVELOPING A MASSIVE RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICY BASED ON WIND, WAVE, TIDE, BARRAGE, HYDRO, GEOTHERMAL, SOLAR POWER, INSULATION AND CONSERVATION.WE MUST END THE IMPORT OF COAL, CURRENTLY 43 MILLION TONNES, WHICH IS PRODUCED BY SUBSIDIES, "SLAVE LABOUR" AND CHILD LABOUR, AND END THE IMPORT OF SHALE OIL, TAR SAND AND OTHER SO-CALLED "UNCONVENTIONAL OILS" WHICH ARE THE DIRTIEST FUELS ON THE PLANET YET ARE BEING USED AT POWER STATIONS SUCH AS DRAX TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY.

WE MUST END OPEN-CAST MINING WHICH IS NOT ONLY A BLIGHT ON THE LANDSCAPE BUT PRODUCES ONE-THIRD MORE CO2 THAN DEEP MINE COAL.WE MUST END IMPORTS OF GAS AND INSTEAD PRODUCE OUR OWN GAS - AS WE DID UNTIL THE 1970s - FROM UK INDIGENOUS DEEP MINE COAL.WE MUST STOP IMPORTING OIL AND INSTEAD PRODUCE OUR OWN OIL FROM UK DEEP MINE COAL.

WE NEED AN END TO ALL NUCLEAR POWER ELECTRICITY GENERATION, THE MOST DANGEROUS AND UNECONOMIC METHOD OF PRODUCING ELECTRICITY.THE DEATHS AND DISEASE CONNECTED WITH NUCLEAR ENERGY ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION INCLUDING URANIUM MINING, RADIATION AND DISASTERS SUCH AS WINDSCALE, THREE MILE ISLAND AND CHERNOBYL SHOULD IN THEMSELVES BE SUFFICIENT TO CONVINCE ANYONE THAT THIS NUCLEAR MADNESS SHOULD BE PHASED OUT IMMEDIATELY.WE NEED TO END DEFORESTATION - WHICH IS THE CAUSE OF 20% OF CO2 EMISSIONS WORLD-WIDE AND ACCOUNTS FOR 15% OF CO2 IN THE UK - AND END BIO-FUEL DEVELOPMENT - WHICH NOT ONLY PRODUCES SUBSTANTIAL CO2 EMISSIONS BUT CAUSES MASS STARVATION AND HIGHER FOOD PRICES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.WE NEED AN ENVIRONMENT POLICY WHICH WILL REDUCE EMISSIONS OF CO2, METHANE, CHLORO FLUORO CARBONS (CFCs), NITROGEN OXIDE (NOX), NITROUS OXIDE (N2O), OZONE (O3), SULPHUR DIOXIDE (SO2) AND STOP DEFORESTATION.

WE NEED TO REMOVE FROM OUR ROADS THE JUGGERNAUTS AND AS MANY VEHICLES AS POSSIBLE AND INSTEAD CONSTRUCT A MODERN ELECTRIC RAIL SYSTEM TOGETHER WITH TRAMS IN OUR TOWNS AND CITIES WHICH WOULD REDUCE CO2 AND OTHER GAS EMISSIONS BY BETWEEN 15% AND 20%.CONCLUSIONTHE IMPLEMENTATION OF THESE MEASURES TOGETHER WITH AN INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY BASED ON CLEAN COAL TECHNOLOGY AND RENEWABLE ENERGY CAN PLAY A LEADING PART IN HELPING REDUCE RISING SEA LEVELS.

WE MUST BEGIN TO DESALINATE SEA WATER ON A MASS SCALE AND PROVIDE CLEAN WATER TO THOSE PARTS OF THE WORLD WHICH ARE CURRENTLY BEING SUBJECTED TO DROUGHTS WHICH HAVE TURNED THEIR LAND INTO DUST-BOWLS, RESULTING IN THOUSANDS OF DEATHS.THE USE OF SEA WATER IN THIS WAY WILL REDUCE THE RISE IN SEA LEVELS DRAMATICALLY AND MAKE THE DESERTS BLOOM AND PROVIDE MILLIONS OF HUMAN BEINGS WITH THE BASIC NECESSITIES OF LIFE.

WE NEED A WORLD WHERE PEOPLE HAVE ENOUGH FOOD, CLOTHING, HOUSING AND ENERGY TO ENSURE THAT THEIR LIVES AND THOSE OF THEIR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN ARE EQUAL TO THE STANDARD THAT WE IN THE WEST HAVE ENJOYED FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS.

IF WE DO THAT, THEN WE CAN NOT ONLY CLAIM TO HAVE PRODUCED A SENSIBLE INTEGRATED ENERGY POLICY BUT ALSO AN ENVIRONMENT POLICY WHICH WILL HELP TRANSFORM THE PLANET ON WHICH WE LIVE.

ARTHUR SCARGILL

Letter from America

2008-11-02T16:44:00.003Z

The following piece is from US comrade R. Alpert

The other day the US Army carried out a “raid” in Syria, which raid resulted in the deaths of at least seven people. The United States now feels that it has the “right” to attack any country at any time for any reason. I would add that this attack drew scant notice from the media –democratic or republican. The heated discussion of the day was the cost of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. Even the collapse of the financial system was pushed off the front page.

How did we arrive at what I can only call an economy and culture of madness?

I do not pretend to be an economist (a dubious “expertise” in my view in any case) and the language in which experts attempt to portray the current financial collapse seems deliberately mystifying. Forgive me if I ignore them.

The current financial and cultural crises seem long overdue. Since the 1980’s the economy of the west has been driven by American consumerism. That consumerism—made possible by the enormous social capital generated by World War two is over. Dead. The wonder is it took so long.
Socialists (and I mean “Socialist” as it is understood by grown ups rather than American politicians) have always understood that Capital values profit over survival. The point seems so obvious as to be trivial; however, it seems to have been genuinely lost on experts like Greenspan (who confessed that his whole ideological and economic world view had been mistaken). Socialists have also always understood that capital must expand to survive. I have often reflected that I could be quite rich if I made it my business to rob all the houses in my neighborhood.

The FED (which Greenspan ran) had been reducing interest rates for some time. I think it had reduced them to about 1.5%. The result was the intended and pernicious increased availability (so it seemed) of money. I should point out that this had been going on for years. For example: there was a time when you had to go to a bank and write a check to get cash. ATM machines assured the constant availability of Cash (as did Credit Cards). However in the face of the FED’s reduction of interest rates Capital, in the quest for greater returns did a monstrously stupid thing—it looked unto mortgages which had a return of say 5% and saw in them salvation. What had hitherto been controlled thievery became a wild west free for all. Banks and Mortgage Lenders granted loans without making sure that people could repay them. Adjustable Mortgages became common. We call this lunacy “deregulation”. Since the real standard of living among American’s had been declining for some time, it was not surprising that people could not pay their mortgages (or their credit card bills for that matter)—lenders began to go broke, banks started to fail and the crises became international. The temptation is to blame Bush and his junta but much as I hate to say it that is not quite fair. The rules, or firewalls, such as they were, had begun to be destroyed by Reagan and Thatcher. Without them Bush Cheney Greenspan and the rest of the crew would not have emerged as Capital’s hit men.

There was surprisingly little resistance to Reagan. He was a “crusader” in the worst American tradition. He and his Republican and Democratic cronies began to destroy New Deal arrangements with astonishing rapidity. “Free Trade”—the unfettered flow of capital both monetary and human, effectively destroyed what little Trade Union resistance existed. Reagan’s tax cut caused a massive upward redistribution of wealth.

Thatcher was another matter. I remember following with impotent fury what was without doubt the greatest and most heroic working class struggle in the second half of the twentieth century—the great miner’s strike of 1984-5. Thatcher’s defeat of the miners not only destroyed a great democratic firewall to the unfettered flow of capital but also destroyed the Labour party itself. Britain was turned into a one party state—just like the US.
I believe that had the miners been victorious, there would have been real consequences for not only British capital but for US Imperialism itself.

There was however one great firewall still remaining—the Soviet Union and the Socialist world. Whatever their defects, the Socialist community remained a massive affront to Capital—22 million Soviet lives are testimony to the monstrous historical attempt to remove this enormous impediment to the “crusade for democracy”. There is an important lesson here. Capital does not have to “win” a war against a Socialist country. The enormous damage Fascism wrecked on the Soviet Union caused distortions in its political economy—distortions that made the tragedy of 1989-90 possible. The same thing happened in Vietnam.

This is all to say that by the Clinton years Capital had a free hand. A free hand for free trade and free destruction. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union only countries such as El Salvador or Vietnam had the happiness of feeling the effects of democratic crusade. After 1990 however, Europe itself was no longer immune. Bill Clinton presided over the destruction of Serbia.

Not only that. Capital’s free hand is also reflected in the massive amounts of privatization that occurred under Clinton’s regime. This privatization MUST be understood as linked with the massive introduction of technology into the political and cultural economy. One example: Cable television was a corner stone of what I like to call the “cell phone” culture that had existed in embryo previously but became horrifically incarnate under Clinton’s rule. Cable television—that is the privatization of television allowed Murdoch and others to construct a propaganda apparatus that may even bring a chuckle to Herr Goebbels down there in the 9th circle of Hell. The introduction of technology-- Cat scans, MRI’s into medicine not only raised the cost of Medical care in the US but also lowered the quality of it. In my youth a visit to a Doctor began with a detailed history lasting 30-45 minutes. These days 10 minutes seems to be the norm. Economic and cultural arrangements are intertwined. Suffice to say that the cultural pathologies that sprung up in sports, education and personal relationships were as bizarre as they were inevitable.

Postscript

US capital has plundered (and continues to plunder) the “third world” It effectively kidnaps and lynches leaders in Europe who refuse as we say “to get with the program” and effectively has reduced countries in Europe to third world status. What I had not realized was that it had no compunction about doing the same thing to the US itself. The problem seems to be that the costs of an economy of theft ironically outweigh its gains.

I recently went to a talk in a wealthy part of Boston given by a liberal economist. He argued that Obama was the new Roosevelt. Obama, he claimed, would “regulate”. Obama our savior. I was surprised to hear one woman ask him “But who are the regulators?”--There was applause. Even the wealthy whose stocks have lost so much value somehow sensed that all of these ”experts” came out of the same stew pot—she was saying Obama’s regulation was like taking a shot of malaria for pneumonia.

Obama’s election seems to be a done deal. Conservatives are jumping ship. This desertion suggests to me that the “right-minded right” feels Obama is someone they can do business with. On the other hand, Obama has been making timid noises about leveling—or building wealth from the bottom up. Could it be that Capital has come to its senses?
Nah! The headline the other day was that Boston was having all of its new trains built—in South Korea.

We shall see.

U.S. Journalists & War Crime Guilt

2008-10-22T19:06:00.000+01:00

by Peter Dyer

15th October 2008

October 16 is an anniversary that should hold considerable interest for American journalists who have written in support of ”Operation Iraqi Freedom” – the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Sixty-two years ago, on Oct. 16, 1946, Julius Streicher was hanged.
Streicher was one of a group of 10 Germans executed that day following the judgment of the first Nuremberg Trial – a 40-week trial of 22 of the most prominent Nazis.
Each was tried for two or more of the four crimes defined in the Nuremberg Charter: crimes against peace (aggression), war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy. All who were sentenced to death were major German government officials or military leaders. Except for Streicher.

Julius Streicher was a journalist. Editor of the vehemently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Streicher was convicted of, in the words of the judgment, “incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitut(ing) … a crime against humanity.”

Presenting the case against Streicher, British prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel M.C. Griffith-Jones said: “My Lord, it may be that this defendant is less directly involved in the physical commission of the crimes against Jews. ... The submission of the Prosecution is that his crime is no less the worse … that he made these things possible – made these crimes possible which could never have happened had it not been for him and for those like him. He led the propaganda and the education of the German people in those ways.”

The critical role of propaganda was affirmed at Nuremberg not only by the prosecution and in the judgment but also in the testimony of the most prominent Nazi defendant, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering: “Modern and total war develops, as I see it, along three lines: the war of weapons on land, at sea and in the air; economic war, which has become an integral part of every modern war; and, third, propaganda war, which is also an essential part of this warfare.”

Two months after the Nuremberg hangings, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 59(I), declaring:
“Freedom of information requires as an indispensable element the willingness and capacity to employ its privileges without abuse. It requires as a basic discipline the moral obligation to seek the facts without prejudice and to spread knowledge without malicious intent.”

The next year another General Assembly Resolution was adopted: Res. 110 which “condemns all forms of propaganda, in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.”

Although UN General Assembly Resolutions are not legally binding, Resolutions 59 and 110 carry considerable moral weight. This is because, like the United Nations itself, they are an expression of the catastrophic brutality and suffering of two world wars and the universal desire to avoid future slaughter.

Propaganda Crimes
Most jurisdictions have yet to recognize propaganda for war as a crime. However several journalists have recently been convicted of incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Because there is stiff resistance, especially from the United States, the effort to criminalize war propaganda faces an uphill battle.
However in legal terms it seems relatively straightforward: if incitement to genocide is a crime, then incitement to aggression, another Nuremberg crime, could and should be as well.
After all, aggression – starting an unprovoked war – is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” in the words of the judgment at Nuremberg. Criminal or not, much of the world now sees incitement to war as morally indefensible.
In this light and in light of Goering’s three-part recipe for war (weapons, economic war and propaganda) it is instructive to look at the role which American journalists and war propagandists have recently played in bringing about and sustaining war.

The Bush administration began to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public soon after 9/11.
In order to coordinate this effort President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, established the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in the summer of 2002 expressly for the purpose of marketing the invasion of Iraq.
Among the members of WHIG were media figures/propagandists Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin.
WHIG was remarkable not only for its recklessness with the truth but for the candor with which it acknowledged it was running an advertising campaign. A Sept. 7, 2002, New York Times article entitled TRACES OF TERROR: THE STRATEGY; Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy on Iraq reported: “White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein….
'' ‘From a marketing point of view,’ said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, ‘you don't introduce new products in August.’ ''

It was as if the “product” – the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state – was a consumer good, like a car or a TV show. The sales pitch was the manufactured “imminent threat” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In other words, the business of WHIG was incitement to aggressive war primarily through the propaganda of fear. Along those lines WHIG’s most prominent member, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, invoked the specter of an Iraqi-generated nuclear holocaust in a Sept. 8, 2002, CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer: “We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance – into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to – high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs. ... The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The smoking gun/mushroom cloud images were among the most memorable of all the White House war propaganda. They were generated just a few days earlier in a WHIG meeting by speechwriter Michael Gerson.

The existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was central to the Bush administration’s campaign for war. Other important elements were Saddam Hussein’s ties with Al Qaeda and the strongly implied association of Iraq with the tragedies of 9/11. All were false. In propaganda, though, selling the product trumps truth.

Unquestioning Submission
The role played by American mainstream media during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was marked by widespread unquestioning submission to the Bush administration and abandonment of the most fundamental journalistic responsibility to the public.
This responsibility is embodied not only in Resolution 59 but in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics as well, which states: “Journalists should test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error.” The failure of influential American journalists, such as the New York Times’ Judith Miller, to test the accuracy of information played a critical role in the Bush administration’s successful effort to incite the American public to attack a country which was not threatening us. Though she was far from alone in selling the case for war, Miller -- through her seemingly uncritical reliance on dodgy informants -- was probably responsible to a larger degree than any other American journalist for spreading the fear of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

As such she and other influential journalists who failed in this way bear a share of moral, if not legal, responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees and all the other carnage, devastation and human suffering of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Some prominent American media figures, however, went considerably further than simple failure to check sources. Some actively and passionately encouraged Americans to commit and/or approve of war crimes, before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Prominent among these was Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly who – regarding both Afghanistan and Iraq – advocated such crimes forbidden by the Geneva Convention as collective punishment of civilians (Gen. Con. IV, Art. 33); attacking civilian targets (Protocol I, Art. 51); destroying water supplies (Protocol I Art. 54 Sec. 2) and even starvation (Protocol I, Art. 54 Sec. 1).
Sept. 17, 2001: "The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble: the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads" in the event of a refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden to the U.S. Later, he added: “This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. … We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.” On March 26, 2003, a few days after the invasion of Iraq began, O’Reilly said: “There is a school of thought that says we should have given the citizens of Baghdad 48 hours to get out of Dodge by dropping leaflets and going with the AM radios and all that. Forty-eight hours, you've got to get out of there, and flatten the place.” [See Peter Hart's “O'Reilly's War: Any rationale—or none—will do” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, May/June 2003]

Collective Punishment
Another tremendously influential journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner and former executive editor of the New York Times, the late A.M. Rosenthal, also advocated attacking civilian targets and collective punishment in regard to waging war against Muslim nations in the Middle East.
In a Sept. 14, 2001, column, “How the U.S. Can Win the War”, Rosenthal wrote that the U.S. should give Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Sudan three days to consider an ultimatum demanding they turn over documents and information related to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations. During these three days, “the residents of the countries would be urged 24 hours a day by the U.S. to flee the capital and major cities, because they would be bombed to the ground beginning the fourth day."

Right-wing media figure Ann Coulter, on the Sean Hannity Show on July 21, 2006, called for another war and more punishment of civilians, this time in Iran:
”Well, I keep hearing people say we can't find the nuclear material, and you can bury it in caves. How about we just, you know, carpet-bomb them so they can't build a transistor radio? And then it doesn't matter if they have the nuclear material.”

This pattern of the major U.S. news figures advocating aggressive wars even predated 9/11. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman published a strident call for war crimes including collective punishment of Serbs and the destruction of their water supplies over the Kosovo crisis: “But if NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [New York Times, April 23, 1999]

These casual -- even joking -- comments about inflicting war on relatively weak countries came from American journalists and media figures at the very top of their profession. Each was addressing an audience of millions. It is difficult to overstate their influence.

Over the past decade alone, the massive destruction and carnage wreaked by American pursuit of “the supreme international crime” of aggression has been enabled by negligent, reckless and/or malicious use of this influence. Sadly, the words of Nuremberg Prosecutor Griffith-Jones concerning the propaganda of German journalist Julius Streicher hold considerable meaning today for some of the most prominent journalists in the country which, 60 years ago, provided the guiding light at Nuremberg:
Streicher “made these things possible – made these crimes possible which could never have happened had it not been for him and for those like him.”

In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 127 in which “the General Assembly … invites the Governments of States Members … to study such measures as might with advantage, be taken on the national plane to combat, within the limits of constitutional procedures, the diffusion of false or distorted reports likely to injure friendly relations between States.”

Unfortunately, 60 years later, little progress has been made. War propaganda is still legal and very much alive – flourishing, in fact, as demonstrated by periodic calls for one more invasion of a country which has never threatened the U.S.: Iran.

As matters stand today, with the United States still the world's preeminent military power, the American propagandists who enabled Operation Iraqi Freedom and other wars of aggression have little need to worry about their legal responsibilities under the Nuremberg principles. A strong case can be made, though, that they have blood on their hands.

Peter Dyer is a freelance journalist based in New Zealand.

(consortiumnews.com).

SCARGILL CALLS FOR A SOCIALIST ANSWER TO THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

2008-10-20T19:31:00.001+01:00

A packed meeting in St Helens Merseyside last Wednesday 15th October, jointly hosted by the Socialist Labour Party and the GMB union, heard SLP leader Arthur Scargill make the case for a socialist answer to the financial crisis currently rocking the capitalist world.

Speakers from the GMB had given an up to date report on the fight to keep the Remploy factories open and to reopen the factories that had already been closed by the Labour government. Scargill linked this shameful government action to the attacks on pensions, health and education, and the rise in unemployment and outlined the role of globalisation and the European Union in this process.

Scargill pointed out that the Remploy workers were being made redundant from secure and meaningful employment and told to look for work in the mainstream job market at precisely the same time as unemployment figures had hit a sixteen year high.

Turning to illustrate the attacks on pension rights he demanded that pensioners should be paid the same as the average national wage, having earned the right to retire without the fear of living in poverty.

To applause the SLP leader called for the public ownership of all the major banking and financial institutions and the rebuilding of Britain’s manufacturing industries.

In a lively question and answer session that followed, Scargill made clear that the SLP would oppose any tendency which tried to divert workers into the dead end demand to ‘reclaim the Labour party’, pointing out that the Labour party, as admitted even by Tony Benn, was never a socialist party, but a social democratic party with a few socialists in it.

After the meeting many trade unionists took SLP literature and copies of the book ‘The Enemy Within’ were also sold.

Ends.

Banking crisis gives added capital to Karl Marx’s writings

2008-10-20T19:27:00.002+01:00

From The Times
October 20, 2008

Roger Boyes in Berlin

Bankers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bonuses, houses in Esher, holidays in the Caribbean and your Jermyn Street shirts. The upside is that you have the time, at last, to read the complete works of Karl Marx.

The prophet of revolutionaries everywhere, the scourge of capitalism, is enjoying a comeback.

In Germany Das Kapital, which for the past decade has been used mainly as a doorstop, is flying off the shelves as the newly disenfranchised business class tries to work out the root of the present crisis.
“Marx is fashionable again,” declares Jörn Schütrumpf, head of the Berlin publishing house Dietz, which brings out the works of Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Sales have trebled – albeit from a pretty low level – since 2005 and have soared since the summer.
“We have a new generation of readers who are rattled by the financial crisis and have to recognise that neo-liberalism has turned out to be a false dream,” said Mr Schütrumpf.
Visitors to Karl Marx’s birthplace in Trier have soared – 40,000 so far this year – with many coming from China, eastern Germany, Cuba and Bolivia.
“I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say: ‘The man was right!’,” says Beatrix Bouvier, chief curator of the museum. Alexander Kluge, the film director, is preparing to make a blockbuster film out of Das Kapital. Little wonder, since Marx comes highly recommended. President Sarkozy of France has been seen flicking through the book, while the Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, recently admitted: “Certain parts of Marx’s thinking are really not so bad.” The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave him a decent review last month: “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves.” Even the Pope has put in a good word for the old atheist – praising his “great analytical skill”.

Marx’s new relevance relates mainly to his warning about the creation of an exploitative capitalism that ends up destroying itself: “An over-expansion of credit can enable the capitalist system to sell temporarily more goods than the sum of real incomes created in current production, plus past savings, could buy,” said Ernest Mandel, the Marxist scholar, quoting his guru, “but in the long run, debts must be paid”. Since these debts cannot be automatically paid through expanded output and income, capitalism is destined for a “Krach” - Marx’s word for a crash.

Marx set out his thoughts not only in Das Kapital but in articles such as “The Financial Crisis in Europe” which was written for the New York Daily Tribune in 1857, and in the Communist Manifesto, which was written with Engels.

In the manifesto, published in 1848, he lists the ten essential steps to communism. Step five was: “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state. . .”

The Future Will Not Be Nuclear

2008-10-16T15:38:00.003+01:00

(Prospect Magazine September 2008)

The government is pinning its hopes on a nuclear renaissance to meet Britain’s climate change goals. Planning procedures are being eased and hidden subsidies offered. But the policy is based on a misunderstanding of nuclear power’s lousy economics, and will fail

Tom Burke

Gordon Brown does not dither about nuclear power. His commitment to it is emphatic, advancing since the start of the year from a policy of simply replacing Britain’s existing nuclear capacity to one of doubling it, and now to there being no upper limit to its share of electricity generation. Brown has undertaken a radical reform of the nuclear regulatory and planning processes, aimed at clearing the path for new reactors. It is therefore particularly poignant that this is a policy doomed to fail.

Energy prices are rising, the climate is changing and power stations are closing—so we need more nuclear power. So runs the overwhelming volume of argument in the media. But what is missing is any critical examination of the case that underpins these dire warnings from ministers and utility industry nabobs about the lights going out. The lights are not going to go out. The government’s nuclear policy will fail. And all that will really matter is that we will have lost precious time in switching to a more climate-friendly method of electricity generation.We live, these days, in what Eric Hobsbawm calls a “permanent present.” Even recent history is quickly forgotten. Somewhere in my personal archive are the minutes of a cabinet meeting held in October 1979, which arrived on my desk at Friends of the Earth in a proverbial brown envelope. They recorded the decision of Margaret Thatcher’s newly elected government to build ten nuclear reactors. The arguments were familiar. Oil prices were rising, An energy gap was imminent. Without a crash programme of nuclear reactors we would freeze in the dark. Sixteen years later, just one reactor had been built, at Sizewell in Suffolk. It cost more than double the original estimate. No one froze in the dark.

The story of British nuclear power

There is nothing in the history of nuclear power in Britain to inspire confidence. Most of our 19 reactors, which together have the capacity to generate 12,000 megawatts (MW), are of a design unique to Britain. These Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) were in 1974 described by Arthur Hawkins, chairman of the then-nationalised industry that placed the orders, as “a catastrophe.” Today, four are not working, reducing from 20 to 15 per cent the share of electricity that is produced by nuclear.A popular mythology has developed that blames the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in Ukraine for the demise of nuclear power in Britain. Lately, the planning system has been added to this mythology. In fact, the only obstacle in the way of nuclear power for the last 20 years has been the unwillingness of electricity generators to take the risk. By the time of Chernobyl, in 1986, no nuclear power station had been ordered in Britain for eight years and in the US for 12. And the public inquiry that considered the application to build Sizewell B began in 1983 and took two years—only six months longer than the government now expects its accelerated planning procedures to take. The government then took two further years to give the go-ahead. Sizewell B opened in 1995, having taken a further eight years to build.
What actually killed nuclear power in Britain was Thatcher’s decision to privatise the Central Electricity Generating Board—the previously nationalised generation utility. The City took one look at the books and told the government that the nuclear power stations were unsellable. They were promptly withdrawn from sale. The later privatisation of most of Britain’s nuclear power stations was only possible because the burden of the decommissioning and waste management costs—now standing at over £70bn—was transferred to the taxpayer. This was a good example of a practice that has been much in the news lately in relation to the banking industry: privatising profits and socialising losses. So much for market discipline. It is an irony that the government’s preferred plan for a nuclear renaissance involves renationalising British Energy as a French state-controlled utility.

Thatcher was as convinced about nuclear power as Brown. She was defeated by the lousy economics. Nuclear power has few attractions for private sector investors, especially in a competitive electricity market. All long-term investment in future electricity generation involves risks and uncertainties (including the price that will be put on carbon emissions). But nuclear power’s risk profile is the worst. To be economic, nuclear power stations need to be very large (at least 1,000MW) and built in a series, ideally four or six at a time, probably on the site of existing stations. They are very capital intensive at both the start and end of their lives and, because of the initial costs, much more sensitive to the cost of capital, which can add 40 per cent or more to construction costs. They take a long time to build, and, when built, have to run continuously into a market where the wholesale electricity price can change constantly. The operators have to make adequate provision for the (currently unquantifiable) costs of waste disposal.

Coal-fired stations take perhaps three to five years to build, cost a lot less per unit of generation capacity and have no back-end liabilities to speak of. They are economic to build singly and therefore each new one is less at risk of failing to sell the power it produces. Gas-fired stations can be built in smaller units much more quickly, and so are even easier to match to shifting demand. Wind turbines can be built in very small tranches, even faster than gas.
Very high, uncertain and rising capital costs on a project that will produce no revenues for a decade or more are not a compelling proposition at the best of times. Add a host of hard-to-quantify sociopolitical risks, and it is not difficult to see why nuclear power programmes have always relied on large and sustained public subsidies.

Why is nuclear power so expensive?

There are only two honest answers to the question of how much it costs to build a nuclear power station. These are “I don’t know” and “I’ll tell you when I’ve built it.” Everything else is a guess. These may come in official volumes stuffed full of impressive-looking data, but they are still guesses. Some numbers will illustrate the point. Between 1966 and 1967, reactor costs in the US exceeded estimates by an average 209 per cent. Between 1968 and 1969 they went up 294 per cent. Between 1970 and 1971 they went up 348 per cent. 1972 to 1973 was a good year, they only went up 318 per cent. But by 1974 to 1975 they were back up to 381 per cent. In 1976 they only went up 169 per cent. But by then the American utilities had given up. They have not ordered a nuclear reactor since 1974. We did little better. The cost of building Sizewell B went up “only” from £1.7bn to £3.7bn during construction.The government’s commitment to new nuclear power stations is based on just such guesses. The cost of a reactor is normally quantified by what it costs to build each kilowatt (kW) of its capacity to generate electricity. To find the cost, you multiply this by the reactor’s size—measured in thousands of kW, or megawatts (MW). To this must be added the cost of financing the expenditure. In its January white paper on nuclear energy, the government’s worst-case analysis assumed that the construction cost would be £1,625/kW, giving a total cost (based on a reactor size of 2,200MW) of £3.6bn. But in May, the German utility company E.ON estimated the cost at just over £3,000/kW, making the overall cost of a new reactor close to £6.7bn. Other recent guesses range from $4,000/kW (£2,162) early in 2007 to $10,000/kW in January 2008 (£5,000). This certainly looks like “I don’t know” to me.

Nuclear enthusiasts argue that everything is different now. Lessons have been learned, designs have been standardised and new reactors can be built on time and to budget. But the fact that none of the three designs under consideration in Britain is operating anywhere in the world might give pause for thought.Recent events in Finland provide further grounds for caution. There, French company Areva is building the first example of the reactor design most favoured for Britain, the so-called EPR. It has not been a success. The 1,200MW reactor is more than £1bn over its original £2.5bn budget and two years late just two years after construction began. If this is the best Finnish contractors can manage, the thought of what those who brought you the Scottish parliament or Wembley stadium might accomplish is chilling.

This is not just, or even mainly, about incompetence. Nuclear costs are rising disproportionately. This escalation—14 per cent a year after inflation, according to one estimate—has many causes. Nuclear power stations are intensive in metal and concrete, and their construction requires specialist skills. So they have been hit harder than other forms of power generation by the surge in engineering costs. The nuclear supply chain has atrophied in the quarter century since there were last large programmes in the OECD countries. In the US there are now only 80 nuclear-qualified suppliers of key components, compared to 400 a decade ago.

And there is only one global provider—the Japan Steel Works (JSW)—of the heavy forging capacity needed for reactor pressure vessels. JSW is already hard-pressed by demand for new refinery equipment and can only supply five new reactor vessels a year, although it wishes to double capacity to ten vessels. But the need to fund this investment is itself contributing to rising prices, which have increased by 12 per cent in six months, and JSW now requires a 30 per cent down payment on an order. It takes six years from the date of the order to get other key components, including reactor coolant pumps and control and instrumentation equipment
The human resources needed to resuscitate the nuclear industry are in even shorter supply. Before you can even apply for permission to build a nuclear power station, you need approval for the design you plan on using. This can take several years. Yet inspectors and engineers are leaving Britain’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), some to retirement and others to more lucrative employment with contractors hoping to come to the nuclear party. The NII now has only 16 people to carry out the detailed safety approval of new reactors, a task estimated to need at least 40. What this means is that if you wanted to have a reactor up and running in Britain by 2020, you would need to have sought approval some time ago. Generous pay rises, relocation from Merseyside and a new management structure are all proposed to relieve this bottleneck. But these reforms will need time to become anchored if we are to avoid an unacceptable choice between speed and safety.

The government has pledged that there will be no subsidies for new nuclear construction. But this was never credible, and it is already possible to detect signs of retreat. In 2006 the government bravely promised to “make sure that the full costs of new nuclear waste are paid by the market.” By 2008 this had mutated into the more nuanced: “The government will [set] a fixed unit price [for] waste disposal at the time when approvals for the station are given.” This effectively caps the costs of nuclear waste disposal to the operator and transfers the risk of cost overruns on to the taxpayer. It is hard to argue that this is not a subsidy.

Furthermore, as Stephen Thomas from Greenwich University has pointed out, if you take E.ON’s estimate of the cost of a new reactor of £3,000/kW, then the operating cost of that reactor is likely to be about £80 to generate a kW of electricity for an hour—a measurement known as a kilowatt hour (kWh). The current wholesale electricity price, which is causing ministers such headaches, is about £40/kWh. We already know what happens to nuclear operators when their operating costs exceed the price at which they can sell electricity. In 2002 British Energy lost money hand over fist and found itself technically insolvent. But the company did not go bust. In a prequel to Northern Rock, the government bailed it out to the tune of some £4bn, taking a large stake in the business. (British Energy is now profitable, thanks to rises in fossil fuel prices.)

This precedent helps to explain why utilities companies are looking at nuclear power. They know that once Britain has started down this road, there will be no going back, as other investment will be suppressed. The “no subsidies” rule will be a distant memory. The utilities companies will be in a strong position to extract from taxpayer and consumer alike what they need to keep going.

Closing the generation gap

The idea that the world is on the dawn of a new nuclear age is no less of a fantasy now than it was in the early 1970s. Even the nuclear-supporting International Energy Agency’s projections have little more nuclear power in operation in 2030 than there is now. That is because most of our present reactor fleet was built in a rush in the 1970s. Even with extensions, these are coming to the end of their lives. Much is made of the 32 reactors now under construction around the world, mostly in Asia. But 11 of them have been under construction for more than 20 years. Just to maintain the current number of reactors by 2025, we would have to build 250 more reactors than are currently under construction—or 15 a year between now and 2025. The build rate since 2000, almost all in Asia, has been one a year. Increasing this is certainly possible, but to do so by 15 times despite shortages of materials and manpower—and during a credit crunch—seems fanciful.

Britain is a very long way from facing a choice of building more nuclear or freezing in the dark. There is a real problem—three problems to be precise—with energy security, but none can be solved by nuclear power. The most urgent is the threat of interruptions to our oil supply, which could bring Britain to a halt. But our oil for transport cannot be replaced by nuclear electricity. Preventing instability in the middle east and reducing oil dependence by more efficient transport and logistics are the solutions here.

Much has been made of the threat of becoming overdependent on imported gas, particularly from Russia. Leaving aside that Russia is more dependent on our revenues than we are on its gas, half of our gas is used for heating domestic space and water, and cannot be replaced without a big transformation of our infrastructure. More is used for industrial processes, leaving under a third for electricity generation. But much of that is used to generate electricity at peak times because gas turbines are easy to switch on and off to meet short-term demand spikes. Nuclear power stations must be run continuously to be economic.
Ministers now often invoke the “generation gap” that will emerge as some 22,000MW of existing coal and nuclear capacity is closed between now and 2020, much by 2015. If this is not replaced by new nuclear power, runs the argument, then carbon-intensive gas or coal will have to be used at the expense of the climate. The British head of EDF, Vincent de Rivas, promises that he can deliver new nuclear electricity to the grid by 2017. But the government’s own nuclear consultation is more realistic. It assumes that were an order placed today under its accelerated regulatory procedures, it would still be eight years before construction started. For a wholly new design, construction would take a further five years, at least. The government has yet to explain how a power station that won’t open before 2021 can meet a “generation gap” it expects to appear by 2015.

Of course, no government will let the lights go out. So this generation gap is more a rhetorical device than a genuine threat. The government is now committed to producing at least 35 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. That may fill some of the purported gap. Energy efficiency will fill more. If nuclear cannot fill the remainder—perhaps 2,500MW—then coal will do it.

Some doubt whether the renewables target is achievable. In fact, it is more likely to be met than Brown’s hopes for nuclear. Last year the world added about 2,000MW of additional nuclear capacity through improving the performance of existing reactors. Photovoltaic solar energy alone, one of the least economically attractive of the renewables, added 2,300MW. Wind power, which on many estimates already delivers electricity more cheaply than nuclear, added eight times as much.

Nuclear power is a low-carbon source of electricity, and will therefore avoid whatever tax is levied on carbon emissions. But it won’t help Britain meet its climate change targets. The goal is to keep the eventual rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius—the threshold of dangerous climate change. This means that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2020 and then decline steeply. But if building the 15 reactors a year needed to replace the world’s current capacity is going to be impossible—as it is—it is difficult to see how it could play a bigger role in reducing global carbon emissions.

The top climate priority is to very quickly make coal use carbon-neutral by deploying carbon capture and storage technologies. This is mainly for geopolitical reasons. The International Energy Agency forecasts 14,000MW of new coal-fired power stations by 2030. China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of 2,000MW a week. It also has the world’s most ambitious nuclear power programme, aiming to build 40 nuclear power stations by 2030. This latter effort would still provide only 4 per cent of China’s electricity. Three quarters will come from coal. If this happens without the Chinese using carbon capture and storage, the government, and the world, will not achieve its climate change objectives. We will be saying hello to a four degree jump in temperatures and goodbye to prosperity and security for 60m Britons.
If we want others to make their coal burning carbon-neutral, we must do so ourselves. Actions speak louder than words. In the next three years, Britain will spend £2.8bn a year on cleaning up its nuclear legacy. We will spend nothing on deploying carbon capture and storage—the world’s most important technology for ensuring climate security.

No one should doubt the good intentions of those who are arguing for a switch of scarce capital, materials and skills into nuclear power in Britain. It is not their intentions that are in question, but their analysis. We have been here before, with equally serious people arguing that there was no alternative to a nuclear future. In 1975 the UK Atomic Energy Authority told the royal commission on environmental pollution that by 2000 Britain would have 104 nuclear reactors. This did not happen not because the nuclear industry lacked support. Then, as now, government, business leaders, the unions and the media were all onside. It failed because economic reality intruded. It will do so again—but this time the consequence of going down the nuclear cul-de-sac will be much more serious.

Tom Burke is environmental policy adviser to Rio Tinto. He is a fellow of the Energy Institute and co-founder of E3G. He is writing in a personal capacity

Coal isn’t the climate enemy. It’s part of the solution

2008-10-16T15:23:00.005+01:00

We must draw on existing resources as part of an integrated energy policy, not flirt with nuclear, the most dangerous option.

Link to this audio

Coal power is far safer, says former National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill in reply to a pro-nuclear article by green campaigner George Monbiot .
Has George Monbiot sold out on his environmental credentials or is he suffering from amnesia? In his article on these pages last Tuesday he states that he has now reached the point where he no longer cares whether or not the answer to climate change is nuclear - let it happen, he says.

Has he not read the evidence presented by environmentalists such as Tony Benn and me at the Windscale, Sizewell and Hinckley Point public inquiries? Is he unaware that nuclear-power generated electricity is the most expensive form of energy - 400% more expensive than coal - or that it received £6bn in subsidies, with £70bn to be paid by taxpayers in decommissioning costs? Is he unaware that there is no known way of disposing of nuclear waste, which will contaminate the planet for thousands of years? Has he forgotten the nuclear disasters at Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl?

We are facing an economic and political crisis on a scale similar to the Wall Street crash in 1929, the mass unemployment which affected the UK and Europe in the 1930s and the energy crisis in the early 70s.

We are facing a monumental energy crisis, yet we live on an island with more than 1,000 years of coal reserves from which we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment. Britain - despite its massive indigenous deep-mine coal reserves - has never had an integrated energy policy based on coal and renewables, and as a consequence we are now facing the worst energy crisis in our history.

Since the end of the second world war, both Labour and Tory governments have sought to replace Britain’s vast coal reserves with a false promise of “cheap” imported oil, “cheap, safe” nuclear energy and “cheap” natural gas - policies that have not only cost the British people billions of pounds, but resulted in the near-extinction of Britain’s deep-mine coal industry, the virtual exhaustion of North Sea gas and oil, and massive economic costs and environmental problems associated with nuclear power.

After the closure of 192 pits since 1980, the loss of 170,000 jobs and the closure or non-operation of nearly 70% of coal-fired power stations on the false premise that they were uneconomic and the worst polluter of carbon dioxide, it is reasonable to expect that there would have been a dramatic fall in CO2 emissions. But in fact CO2 emissions have actually increased - not that surprising, since more than 80% of CO2 emissions are produced by oil and gas from power stations, road transport, industry, shipping and domestic use. That fact alone should cause Monbiot to rethink.
Britain needs an integrated energy policy that will produce 250m tonnes of indigenous deep-mine clean coal per year - from which could be extracted all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that our people need.
All existing and new coal-fired power stations should be fitted with clean coal technology - including carbon capture that would remove all CO2 - and at the same time we should be developing a massive renewable energy policy based on wind, wave, tide, barrage, hydro, geothermal, solar power, together with insulation, conservation and reforestation.

We must end the import of coal, (currently 43m tonnes a year) which is produced by subsidies, “slave labour” and child labour, and end the import of shale oil, tar sands and other so-called unconventional oils, which are the dirtiest fuels on the planet but are being used to produce electricity.
We still do not know - because of the security and secrecy laws - the full extent of the disaster at Windscale (Sellafield) in 1957 or Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, but we do know that the incidence of cancer and leukaemia - particularly among children - is 10% higher in or around nuclear power stations, and we know from experts such as Robert Gale - who treated the victims at Chernobyl in 1986 - that more than 100,000 will die over a 30-year period.

We need an end to all nuclear-powered electricity generation, the most dangerous and uneconomic method of producing electricity. We need an end to deforestation, which is the cause of 20% of CO2 emissions worldwide, and an end to biofuel development - which not only produces substantial CO2 emissions but is causing mass starvation and higher food prices throughout the world.
Only by the introduction of a real integrated energy policy based on clean coal technology and renewable energies, can we begin to meet the needs of people in the UK and throughout the world.

I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.

· Arthur Scargill is the leader of the Socialist Labour party. He was president of the National Union of Mineworkers 1982-2002.

· He is now lifelong Honorary President of the NUM.

Article is from the Guardian newspaper of 8/8/8

NEW LABOUR AND THE RISE OF FINANCE CAPITAL.

2008-10-15T15:06:00.002+01:00

For background information, in view of the ‘credit crisis’ developments in the capitalist economy, we are reissuing an article from 2001 by Ian Johnson which traces the rise of finance capital in the 20th Century.

When we talk about finance capital we are talking about the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions and their representatives, in short, we are talking about ‘the City’.

This section of society does not manufacture anything, it does not build or create anything, yet it is now the most dominant sector in the U.K. Its chief objective is the movement of money in search of the biggest profit margin in the quickest possible time.

In the early part of the 20th century the financial sector was subjected to government controls and confined its activities to the sterling area of the Commonwealth, indeed, even through the latter part of the 1940s the stock market and merchant banking was at best static, and at worst transactions were actually in decline. In the 1950s the financial sector tried to break free from government controls but achieved only partial success. It was not until the late 1960s that the City really began to expand with the development of London as an off‑shore base for American money fleeing the low interest rates in the United States.

FINANCIAL INSTABILITY

This was followed in 1971 by the Tory Government removing controls on credit growth which meant that market forces, namely interest rates, would now control the growth of credit in the system. This led to an end to limits on lending and meant that banking would have greater control over British industry and the economy as a whole. This coincided with the ending of the post‑war Bretton Woods agreement which had backed paper money with real value by linking it to the gold standard at the rate of 35 dollars equalling an ounce of gold. Now however, paper money was being printed and was not backed by any real value whatsoever.

Between 1979 and 1982 Margaret Thatcher's Tory Government removed all remaining controls from the financial sector and left it virtually unregulated and unchallenged.

Thatcher abolished restrictions on bank lending and hire purchase transactions and lifted all controls over building society lending, thus starting them off on the road to becoming banks and creating the basis for the great credit explosion in the late 1980s.
The Tory Government crucially abolished all exchange controls with the immediate effect that capital previously invested in the U.K. began going abroad in search of greater and quicker profits. There has been hardly any investment in U.K. manufacturing since exchange controls were abolished.

The dominance of finance capital became obvious in the 1980s when manufacturing output fell by 25%, when house building plummeted and thousands slept on the street, yet the City boomed. The banks made so much money in the '80s that even the Tories eventually levied a national 'windfall tax', though this was compensated for by tax allowances on bad overseas loans.
The Tories and the financial sector were responsible for the squandering of North Sea oil revenue during this period, with not one penny invested in U.K. manufacturing. The City wanted to use it to recreate their earlier role of financiers of the world, and the Tories believed that North Sea oil had made sterling a petro‑currency which signalled the days of manufacturing were over and that Britain was on a path to becoming a post‑industrial service economy.

THE GREAT RIP OFF

The looting of the British economy for the benefit of the few reached its most obscene proportions with the privatisation process of state assets which was first elaborated in the Tory election manifesto of 1983 and which resulted in the following years with the privatisation of coal, steel, gas, electricity, water, railways, telecommunications, shipbuilding and also took part of the oil and road haulage industries. This is not to mention the devastation of council housing that took place in the same period.

The sell‑off of state assets was overseen by City merchant banks who acted as 'advisors' and received literally hundreds of millions of pounds in fees for this 'service'. This period will rightly go down in history as one of the great rip‑offs of all time.

Alongside this privatisation came the reform of the National Health Service, schools and universities, prisons, the police force and justice departments and their regulating authorities, with the plan being to remove them from the control of democratically elected local authorities and place them under the control of unelected quangos and Next Step Agencies. By such means the market mechanisms of compulsory competitive tendering, performance related and profit related pay and other such devices, were introduced into all public services.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
Of course none of the above would have been possible without an attack on the traditional defensive organisations of the working class ‑ the trade unions. The destruction of the trade union movement was a clear objective of the Thatcher regime and resulted in confrontations with virtually all sections of workers. Indeed, the destruction of manufacturing and the move to a service based industry made it imperative for the ruling class to introduce anti‑trade union laws to shackle workers and reduce their ability to fight back.
That they were partially successful is a reflection not on the fighting capacity of the working class but on its social democratic leaders.

With a few honourable exceptions these politicians and trade union leaders functioned as policemen for the capitalist state against their own members. These careerists and opportunists are tied to capitalism, their status and significant salaries are dependent upon it, and forced into a situation where they have to choose, they will always come down on the side of the present system.

The introduction of new employment law effectively weakened the trade unions and created a more individualist labour market, moreover a labour market that would be open to the whims of a free market economy, modelled on the American labour market with its high levels of mobility, downward flexibility of wages and low employer costs.

As a result of these policies there has been an increase in part‑time and contract work and an ending of any traditional career with its accompanying security. Furthermore, many low‑skilled workers now earn less than the minimum needed to support a family, resulting in the diseases associated with poverty, TB, rickets and others, returning.
At the same time the restrictions on welfare entitlements, particularly with unemployment benefits such as the Job Seekers Allowance introduced in 1996, are designed to compel recipients to accept work at market‑driven rates.

NEW LABOUR

It was the finance sector that Blair's New Labour courted for over a year prior to the 1997 general election. They had to convince the financiers that they were the Party for them, and that they would continue to create the framework where they could operate freely. New Labour people threw so many banquets for these financial parasites that the City's nickname for the Labour Party is, 'the prawn cocktail party.'

Members of the then Shadow Cabinet began touring the dining rooms of the City of London assuring their hosts that Labour had no intention of bringing back exchange controls and had no intention of doing anything they would not approve of.

Stuart Bell MP went to New York on a trip paid for by Kleinwort Benson Securities to reassure Wall Street that the 'financial markets will be safe in the hands of a future Labour government.' (Sunday Telegraph 17th Dec. 1995). Consequently, by the beginning of 1996, the financial pages of the newspapers were full of articles in praise of Labour's policies. Thus the stage was set for New Labour to not only continue Tory policies but to take them farther than even the most right wing Tory dared to imagine.

The Labour Party had concluded that the only way to get elected was to accept the agenda of the Americans and the City, to be pro Nato, pro EEC and pro non regulation of the City.

Due to the massive exportation of British capital, which began during the Thatcher years, Britain now has the largest overseas investment after America, and this will dictate that they continue to support American political and military hegemony as the best way to protect those interests. Indeed, all the key Labour personnel are linked to the United States, with the intent to preserve the so‑called Anglo‑American special relationship, to compensate for British capitalism's long term decline.

Ian Johnson.

Reflections on the Economic Meltdown by an Ordinary Joe.

2008-10-15T15:01:00.001+01:00

$700 Billion, possibly double that, of US public funds given over to bailing out corrupt, failed, usurial fat cats. Unimaginable sums, trillions of dollars! So runs the US regime’s plan to rescue the financial markets. It has been described as a financial lifeboat. However, as a salvage plan, it makes the Titanic safety procedures look positively trustworthy and sound.

I learned a new phrase recently – Credit Default Swaps (CDS). CDS trading is the epitome of parasitic capitalism and is an illustration of why the big international investment banks are up to their ears in the financial muck. A CDS is a credit derivative that whose value derives from the credit risk on an underlying bond, loan or other financial asset. A derivative is a “financial instrument” whose value changes in response to the changes in underlying variables such as inflation, exchange rates, stock/share prices, interest rates etc. The more one looks into the subject the more it becomes apparent that the management of financial trading is intentionally complex with a nefarious nature akin to a mafia run “numbers” game. CDS trading is the most widely traded credit derivative “product” and was valued by the Bank for International Settlements at $62.2 Trillion at the end of 2007 (up from $28.9 Trillion in December 2006). Other commentators have recently valued all derivative “worth” as high as $480 Trillion. This is said to be ten (10) times global GDP!

These mind bending figures illustrate just how feeble and flimsy George W. Bush’s “lifeboat” is. His (?) gamble is that by nationalising the relatively very small bad housing/mortgage debt this will “free” up banks to release credit averting a much wider impact and crash in the wider economy. It’s very much a gamble and the odds are long. In fact it’s a rank outsider.You wouldn’t back it if it was a horse! One way or another we are moving into very difficult times where the working class will be expected to shoulder a burden unknown in modern times.

Arthur Scargill was first to point out the nature and depth of this economic crisis (you can see and hear him for yourself on a series of videos available on You Tube). As Arthur pointed out, we are heading for an economic disaster of a scale as bad as or worse than the 1930’s.

We are heading toward interesting and simultaneously dangerous and opportune times for revolutionary socialists. Capitalism, as we’ve known it for decades, is in a terminal state. Social Democratic parties have no answers and are in decline everywhere while the fascist right is a growing threat across Europe. Only a party with socialist solutions can offer working people a vision and a possibility of a better world. Here in this country Socialist Labour has the policies, and also the organisation able to take us forward to socialism.

There is much work to be done.

24th September 2008

FIGHTING ANTI-UNION LAWS - TRADE UNIONS HAVE A CHOICE

2008-10-15T14:02:00.001+01:00

(This article is based on a speech made by Arthur Scargill to the National Executive Committee of the Prison Officers’ Association on 17 October, 2007)

In Britain, the trade union Movement has long struggled against a malaise that can only be described as a ‘collaborationist tendency’. This tendency is most obvious in the Movement’s failure to deal with Britain’s oppressive anti-trade union laws.

Despite the sharpening economic and political crisis within our society, collusion has now reached a point where the Trades Union Congress and many union leaderships, not seen as fighting heart and soul for workers’ rights, are increasingly considered irrelevant by the British people.

The oppressive nature of Britain’s anti-union laws depends on this collusion. Therefore, any serious discussion about challenging the legislation must also examine forms of serious resistance to it.

An analysis that places itself within the boundaries of these laws and does not consider a strategy for confronting them is futile.

Let’s start by looking at our own past. Contrast the British trade union Movement’s reactions today with the way organised workers confronted anti-union laws and anti-union employers in the 1970s and 80s.

Study the great campaign against the Tories’ Industrial Relations Act in 1971; the miners’ strike of 1972, followed by the dockers’ strike, the imprisonment and then the triumphant release, through workers’ direct action, of the Pentonville Five, and the building workers’ strike of the same period. In 1974 came another miners’ strike – which led to the defeat of a Tory Government.

The determination of workers that created conditions for opposing the 1971 Industrial Relations Act fuelled, in turn, the outburst of subsequent action. And, since we’re discussing the law, remember that in the summer of 1972, it was mass unofficial action which forced the State to free the Pentonville Five.

The miners’ strike earlier that year had been a turning point, sparking support from thousands of other workers. This terrified not only the Tory Government of the day but scared the living daylights out of right-wing leaders within the Labour Party, the TUC and a number of trade unions.

In 1972, just as today, leading figures in our Movement were warning: ‘Don’t break the law!’. It’s an old theme, used many times against workers in the past such as in the 1921 miners’ strike, the General Strike of 1926 and other major disputes.

I certainly heard that warning in the miners’ strike of 1972, when I was deeply involved in mass picketing, especially at Birmingham’s Saltley Gates, a historic battle which proved what workers’ solidarity could do.

It is often forgotten (perhaps no longer widely known) that national leaders of major trade unions, including the engineers’ AUEW and the transport workers’ TGWU, refused to sanction their members’ taking secondary action in support of the NUM at Saltley.

However, AUEW and TGWU members in the West Midlands – having listened to the miners’ plea for solidarity - did with the backing of regional leaderships take action. So did workers in other unions, and by supporting the NUM at Saltley achieved a victory that rocked the entire British Establishment.

Two years later, the 1974 miners’ strike led to the downfall of Edward Heath’s Tory Government, a victory for working people that should have seen Britain’s Labour Movement focussing firmly on Socialist aims.

That didn’t happen. Instead we had the Social Contract, in which a Labour Government held down workers’ wages, with five years of unprincipled compromise by the TUC and union leaderships paving the way for the Tories’ return in 1979.

This betrayal didn’t come out of the blue. Even amidst the industrial victories of the early 70s there had been a shadow of things to come. In the aftermath of the historic building workers’ strike of 1972, our Movement had failed to prevent the jailing of the Shrewsbury Three on trumped-up charges of ‘conspiracy’.

Then, during the years of the Labour Government, the Grunwick workers, battling for basic rights and recognition in 1977/78, were also abandoned by their own union and by the TUC.

Shrewsbury and Grunwick taught many of us (and should have taught us all) two lessons. First, through their courage and class commitment, the workers in both struggles provided an example that inspires us still. Second, their fate offered clear evidence that workers in struggle can only be protected by a trade union fightback.

By abandoning the Shrewsbury Three and the Grunwick workers, elements within the British trade union movement were, alongside their collusion over the Social Contract, laying further track for Margaret Thatcher’s advance.

The struggles of the 70s alarmed the Tories to such an extent that well before they won the 1979 General Election they had planned a programme of draconian anti-union laws – specifically aimed at preventing another Saltley or any similar action taking place on a national scale.

Yet even after the Tories returned to power in 1979, events continued to prove that oppressive legislation – backed by the courts - isn’t enough on its own to keep workers down. Oppression depends to a very great extent on submission.

As anti-union legislation became more oppressive through the 80s and into the 90s, the TUC and trade union leaders increasingly refrained from giving, or refused to give, effective assistance to workers in struggle. Instead of spear-heading resistance to these vicious laws, the TUC argued that the only course of action was to wait and work for the election of a Labour Government which, it claimed, would repeal the legislation.

Of course, New Labour did nothing of the sort – and since 1997 the trade union Movement has continued to submit to even further legal measures brought in by the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown axis. Over the past decade, the TUC not only opposed calls from the NUM and Bakers’ Union to defy anti-union laws, but has actually advised unions on compliance.

Nevertheless, fairly recent history reveals that for trade unionists there is an alternative to this collusion.

FIGHTING BACK

In 1981, the NUM’s (then) Right-wing national leadership was forced to support unofficial strike action against pit closures – without a ballot – because our ferocious coalfield campaigning was too strong to resist. Faced with wildfire strike action, the Thatcher Government – taken unawares – had to make what the press labelled a ‘U-turn’ and, for the time being, stop its pit closure programme.

The key industrial disputes over the years since occurred because trade unionists were prepared to fight for basic rights against employers who had the full backing of the State and the courts. Had these disputes, in turn, had full and effective backing from the TUC and the trade union Movement, Britain today would be a better place in which to live.

Among these struggles, all of which are important, were the miners’ strike of 1984/85 and the two epic battles for trade union rights and recognition by Britain’s printworkers: in 1983 at Warrington against would-be newspaper magnate Eddie Shah, and, from January, 1986, the year-long fight against Rupert Murdoch at Wapping.

In the historic miners’ strike of 1984/85, one of the greatest clashes ever seen between workers and the State occurred at British Steel’s coke plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in the Summer of 1984.

The police (together with members of the armed forces in police uniform) used paramilitary tactics; armed with shields, batons, dogs and horses, they fought to prevent a repetition of Saltley in 1972. Some 10,000 pickets faced 8,200 paramilitary-style police under orders that Orgreave should be open to produce and transport coke, no matter what the cost.

Yet in spite of this organised State force, the miners’ pickets, supported by trades councils and rank-and-file members of other unions, forced Orgreave’s management to suspend operations on 18 June, 1984 – just as they had done in Birmingham on 6 February, 1972, prior to finally closing Saltley four days later, on 10 February.

However (unlike the Tories), the Labour and trade union Movement including sadly elements within the NUM Area leaderships had not taken to heart the true lessons of Saltley.

Although Orgreave was closed by pickets on 18 June, those pickets were called off by NUM Area leaders the following day, thus allowing British Steel to recommence operations.

That this could happen was due to the NUM’s federal structure – ours was not and is not one Union but a federation of autonomous organisations - which helps to explain other events during that strike.

Afterwards, critics within and outside the Labour Movement argued that the battle of Orgreave highlighted the ‘failure’ of mass picketing. They were completely wrong.

What occurred at Orgreave was a failure to mass picket – calling people off after an initial breakthrough, instead of intensifying pressure until the plant’s operations were brought to a conclusive halt.

Responsibility for this also rests with leaderships in the wider trade union Movement which held back their own members from coming to the assistance of the miners as workers in Birmingham had done in February, 1972.

Lack of support from others can lead to a paralysing fear of isolation in the hearts of those in struggle, and can have profound consequences for any dispute.

THINKING BEHND THE LAW

Fear is a tool wielded against trade unions today by Britain’s Labour Government which like the Tories supports the Free Market and globalisation. Using the so-called ‘free’ movement of capital, company operations and human labour, while implementing further privatisation for maximum profit – all this depends on high unemployment and low wages. These conditions require submissive workers. The purpose of anti-union legislation is to sustain these conditions.

The ‘employment’ laws introduced since the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 – and implemented by Tories and Labour ever since – are in part based on the Taft-Hartley Act introduced in the United States in 1948. This iniquitous Act was a key component in Cold War politics.

Its main elements were (1) the banning of mass picketing in industrial disputes; (2) the banning of secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes; (3) making trade unions legally liable for any strikes by their members not within the bounds of a written contract, and (4) giving the government the right to seek injunctions preventing strikes deemed to be against the ‘national interest’ – an all-embracing concept which effectively gave the government of the United States the right to ban strike action.

Even more stringent reforms were called for by a Right-wing pressure group known as ‘The Right to Work’. Its equivalent in Britain was ‘The Freedom Association’.

Many trade unionists will remember or be aware of the role played by the Freedom Association in the Grunwick dispute of 1977/78. It actively supported the owner of a North London film processing plant against his employees who sought decent working conditions and wanted their rights to trade union membership and recognition.

Without effective, practical support from the trade union Movement, the Grunwick workers could not prevail. There is a terrible irony in the fact that, at that time, giving effective solidarity would not have meant unions ‘breaking the law’.

Section 13 of the 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act provided protection in line with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. That protection was subsequently lost. Those who were already drafting anti-union laws for the next Tory Government took heart from the way the hierarchy of the trade union Movement abandoned the women and men at Grunwick.

Today, if a trade union ‘induces’ workers to take industrial action in breach of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act, 1992, those involved are immediately in breach of their contract of employment and in breach of the law.

NO RIGHT TO STRIKE IN BRITAIN

In Britain, there is no ‘right to strike’. Strike action can only be taken here provided members of a trade union accept and comply with the web of restrictions laid down by anti-union laws.

A strike can only be called provided a trade union holds a postal ballot, and that can only take place within constraints which resemble an obstacle course unparalleled in the Western world.

A union balloting its members must make clear on the ballot paper that if members vote in favour of strike action they may be in breach of their contract of employment – i.e., they do not have a right to strike.

In the event that workers do vote in favour of strike action, that action is only legally effective for eight weeks – the legislation then requires a union to hold a further ballot.

Alongside this, the legislation contains two important clauses which further undermine a trade union no matter how compliant it is prepared to be:

The law makes clear that any worker can refuse to belong to a trade union.

The law will protect from disciplinary action union members who continue to work during a strike – even though that strike has been called in full compliance with legislation.

A VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

The anti-union legislation introduced by the Tories after 1979, maintained and expanded since 1997 by the Labour Government, is in direct conflict with the United Nations Charter, and a clear violation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98.

The UN Charter and ILO Conventions make clear that trade union rights are human rights and must not be subject to outside interference from government. Trade unions have the right to draw up their own constitutions and rule books, free from interference.

The British Government is indeed a signatory to both the UN Charter and ILO Conventions, yet, like the Tories, Labour ignores international law – just as it did when invading Iraq.

The British Government is determined to prevent workers from organising, taking industrial action in support of their own wages and conditions or taking solidarity action to support other workers.

AN EMPLOYER’S CHARTER

On the other hand, a British employer – or employer with a British base — is free to close down a plant, factory, or office, as we’ve seen increasingly over recent years with a widespread transfer of operations to Poland, Burma, India or China. Thousands of workers in Britain have thus lost their jobs, yet no action can be taken against bosses whose hunger for greater profit robs workers, their families, communities and regional economies.

I’ve already described the forces deployed to keep open the Orgreave plant in South Yorkshire during the miners’ strike of 1984/85. A few years after the strike, British Steel announced that Orgreave was to be closed. Upon hearing the news, I immediately telephoned the police, asking them to come straightaway and stop those who were forcing the plant to shut. To my surprise, I was told it had nothing to do with the forces of law and order.

I reminded South Yorkshire Police that this reaction contrasted sharply with the deployment of over 8,000 riot police in the summer of 1984 when the NUM was seeking to only temporarily close the plant. Now that British Steel intended to shut it for good, there was not one single police officer to be seen.

Employers’ impunity is clearly very different from the consequences facing a trade union which takes action to prevent closures and job losses.

As I know from personal experience, such a union and its officials can be taken to court; its assets can be frozen by an order of sequestration – and, as happened without precedent to the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984, its entire operation can be put into the hands of a Receiver.

The NUM was taken to court through a variety of legal routes, when the legislation was not as comprehensive as it later became. The State set out to destroy us if possible; the NUM’s response should have been used by the entire trade union Movement as a template for industrial relations strategy.

SEQUESTRATION

The threat of sequestration has become a handy tool for courts in ruling that a trade union is acting contrary to ‘employment’ legislation. The possible appointment of a sequestrator terrifies most trade union leaders, primarily because sequestration means that a union’s assets will be frozen, no expenses will be available, officials’ cars will be taken away and any accommodation including a union’s offices can be occupied by the sequestrator.

However, I can tell you from experience that provided a trade union is prepared to confront the law while dealing with the consequences of so doing, sequestration can be rendered ineffectual.

There is nothing, for example, to prevent third parties paying all the bills of a trade union during a period of sequestration. And at the end of a dispute, when a sequestrator has been discharged, there is nothing to prevent that trade union making donations to all organisations, including other unions, which have paid bills on its behalf.

It has been done.

RECEIVERSHIP

Receivership is something else – far more vicious than sequestration. Ironically, the appointment of a receiver to take over an independent trade union was not possible prior to 1974, when lawyers drawing up employment legislation for the newly-elected Labour Government omitted, in error, provision for immunity from receivership for trade unions.

Only once have the courts appointed a receiver to take over a trade union: in November, 1984, in the miners’ strike. The NUM had already been put in sequestration, but for the British State that wasn’t enough.

Receivership is about more than freezing assets. It is about taking control of an organisation. It is a replacement. In the case of the NUM, the Receiver’s purpose was to become to all intents and purposes ‘the union’.

PRINCIPLES OF RESISTANCE

The principles behind the NUM’s strategies in 1984/85 were articulated in a paper written (in December, 1988) by leading trade union barrister John Hendy QC, who referred to this quote from the great lawyer and human rights campaigner, D. N. Pritt QC:

‘The state of the law in a capitalist society is a reflection of the ability of the working class to organise against it. The law reflects the balance, at any moment of time, between the power of capitalism and the organised power of labour’.

John Hendy QC went on to write (and it is worth quoting him at some length): ‘It follows therefore that only resistance can hold the line against further depredations and only pressure can advance and improve the position. Concessions and capitulation will only encourage further legal and ideological attack. Indeed, mere lack of resistance encourages further attack’.

He wrote: ‘The law itself may be difficult to understand but the fact of its unfairness and injustice is not so difficult to explain and understand….It is necessary to draw on our own rich history of resistance to unjust laws. The Cambridge tailors in 1725; the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1824; the freeing of the Betteshanger miners’ leaders imprisoned after the prosecution of 1,000 for going on strike in 1941; the freeing of the Pentonville Dockers in 1972; the struggle against the Industrial Relations Act from 1970 – 1974 and the ability of the National Union of Mineworkers to continue their strike unabated for one year in 1984-5, in spite of being sequestrated, being in receivership, having some 40 injunctions against them and over 10,000 of their members prosecuted – all those are powerful examples without even looking overseas.

‘….Unquestioning acceptance of the “rule of law” and the subject of compliance with unjust laws need to be debated within the Movement and for this debate, history and jurisprudence must play their part.

‘…Sir Thomas More was executed for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy…[while] the Nuremburg Trials accepted that there were higher principles which men are under a duty to conform to than the law.’

PRINCIPLES IN ACTION

In October 1984, the NUM was found guilty of contempt of court, as was its President. The only way to purge ones contempt is to beg the court to accept an apology, throw oneself upon the court’s mercy – and pay the fine.

As NUM President, I refused to apologise, nor would I pay any court-imposed fine, although some mystery figure paid it without my authority on my behalf. No mystery figure, though, could by proxy purge my ‘contempt’, and I remain in contempt to this day.

More important, the National Union of Mineworkers managed to endure the imposition of a receiver from November 1984 until July 1986.

Today, over 20 years later, I have nothing but contempt for all who construct and seek to enforce anti-trade union legislation; I have nothing but contempt for court orders that seek to impose unjust laws upon trade unions.

I am one trade union leader who defied the law and continued to defy it until the day I retired as President of the NUM.

STRUGGLE DEMANDS SOLIDARITY

I must stress that, under attack from sequestration and receivership, the NUM had vital support from a number of trade unions. However, I believe that our struggle, waged on behalf of not only the miners but all workers, demanded that support.

We should have had it from the TUC. Imagine what would have happened in our great strike or in any other key trade union battle of the past 25 years if all trade unions together with the TUC had been prepared first to adopt policies of non-compliance with unjust laws – and then to defy those laws if the State threatened to use them.

Any British trade union leader taking such a stance would be following in the footsteps of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and all the brave men and women whose courage in the face of oppressive legislation should inspire us to act.

The State and its laws can indeed sequester your car, your office, your home – but they cannot sequestrate your mind or your faith: that is your power and their weakness.

Such power, however, is inter-dependent on collective action. And what are trade unionists and their unions to do today, given that the TUC complies with laws that prohibit effective action?

AN ALTERNATIVE ORGANISATION

In order to challenge the ongoing destruction of jobs, basic and manufacturing industry; in order to challenge low wages and poor conditions; in order to establish or re-establish decent standards of health and safety – and for many other reasons, I suggest that we need to establish an alternative to the TUC.

We need a national trade union centre capable of defiance and willing to defy unjust laws that have been crafted to cripple trade unions; a centre prepared to give assistance – including industrial action - when necessary to workers in dispute.

To be effective, such an alternative centre would have to be firmly committed to Socialist policies, calling unequivocally for the abolition of capitalism which oppresses workers around the world and here at home.

Exploitation, poverty and ignorance can only be eradicated through common and social ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Of course, serious discussion about such an alternative requires a fundamental shift within Britain’s trade unions. One way to begin this shift is for unions to affiliate to the Socialist Labour Party: unequivocally Socialist, unequivocally committed to fighting against anti-union laws.

Refusal to comply with repressive, unjust anti-union laws that violate the UN Charter is in the best traditions of the British trade union Movement. On the other hand, compliance with and submission to these laws inevitably lead to defeat and despair.

Trade unionism was built out of workers’ demands for decent wages and conditions, and out of an anger against exploitation that springs from the needs of the human spirit. I, for one, would rather defy oppression and be proud, than comply with it and be ashamed. Trade unions have a choice.

Ends