Chris Bambery | ukwatch.net

Crisis and revolt

JamieSW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:56:32 +0000

One year on from Gordon Brown becoming prime minister, we have passed a tipping point. At some time in recent weeks a number of events have added up to create a shift in the political situation in this country.

Since late last year Gordon Brown’s government has been in a tailspin that it cannot pull out of.

But what was a crisis for New Labour has become a much wider one, with growing numbers of people questioning what were once regarded as economic and political certainties.

The central issues are very basic ones – the cornerstones of life, such as food and fuel. People know that prices for these necessities are surging way ahead of the official inflation figure of 3.3 percent.

There is a growing realisation that these hikes hit working class people hardest, including pensioners, those out of work and the very low paid.

They all spend proportionally more of their income on fuel and food than the rich.

Chancellor Alistair Darling, the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King and newspaper editorials are all telling us to tighten our belts and accept below-inflation pay “increases”.

But despite the growing global recession there is no sign of anyone accepting below-inflation pay increases in the City of London’s boardrooms.

Instead, the rich continue to flaunt the wealth they’ve accrued under New Labour and the Tories at summer social events, such as last week’s Royal Ascot race meeting.

When asked about the impact of a global recession on Britain, Darling dismissed the question saying the country had weathered such things in the 1980s and 1990s.

What he failed to mention was that these were times of historically low levels of working class resistance as strike figures fell.

Today if you read the financial pages there is a sense of panic about the economic downturn, reminiscent of fear accompanying the 1973 crash, which followed a surge in the oil price and collapse in profits.

Then the global ruling class faced an insurgent working class and a wave of national liberation struggles that peaked with the Vietnamese victory over the US in 1975. Rulers were terrified that a recession would pour petrol on the flames.

Today newspapers such as the Financial Times are charting the growing number of food riots spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

They are nervous about an economic downturn combining with the failure of George Bush’s “war on terror” to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. This threatens to destabilise key Western allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt.

Finally, they see “strong” right wing governments, whose recent elections they acclaimed, crumbling in the face of working class resistance.

Such has been the case with the government of Kostas Karamanlis in Greece and that of the South Korean president Lee Myung-bak.

Confrontation

But the world’s rulers’ biggest disappointment is with Nicolas Sarkozy, who was hailed by some as the new Margaret Thatcher on his election last year as France’s president. Sarkozy has backed away from some major showdowns in the face of strikes and mass demonstrations.

Thirty five years ago the international ruling class decided they had to be seen to make concessions to workers in order to be able to return to the attack at a later date.

In Britain and elsewhere they turned to centre left governments, like that of Labour’s Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, to broker a deal with the trade unions. These governments promised the unions would be consulted over economic matters and that they might even be allowed a say in political decision making.

In return union leaders agreed to limit pay increases, dissuade workers from striking, accept cuts in welfare spending and the rationalisation of “uneconomic” industries.

In the 1970s mass struggles followed a long post-war boom which had brought increased living standards, better housing, and free education and healthcare.

The recession seemed a blip, so the proposition that short term sacrifices would be followed by a return to better days had some credibility – especially when it was sold by the Labour left and trade union leaders.

Once the Labour government in Britain and the Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the US had contained and defused working class insurgency, they were replaced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Since the end of the 1970s the boot has been firmly on the foot of the employers.

Yet that has left a legacy of class bitterness which has grown in recent years as working class, and even some middle class people, find themselves priced out of their cities and towns.

Few think life is going to get better, let alone return to the days of council housing available for those in need and free education for all.

The government has imposed public sector pay limits at levels way below inflation rates and is urging private sector employers to follow suit. This is an enormous gamble which can easily go badly wrong.

The victory of the Shell tanker drivers, the show of strength by Grangemouth refinery workers and the 24 April strike by 450,000 teachers, lecturers and civil service workers means that the idea that working class people have no power has taken a huge knock.

Even if people don’t feel confident enough to walk out of the door, they like the idea of striking.

Constituted

On a lesser scale the decision of the police to baton anti-war protesters banned from marching against George Bush’s visit to Britain showed what their real role is – to protect the state and private property.

This brings us back to the tipping point. The first half of this decade saw massive protests against neoliberalism and then war.

The millions of people who took part in these protests virtually all worked, were training to work, or were retired from work. But the idea that they constituted a working class that had the power to collectively change society seemed remote.

Many people who would never previously have considered joining a union or who believed themselves middle class are facing a new reality.

This is accompanied by a popular rejection of the political, social and economic template championed by our rulers.

The Irish referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty brought that home. Working class people formed the bulk of the successful no vote, rejecting what the Irish establishment told them to do.

When New Labour’s Jacqui Smith urged us to back 42-day detention without charge she said, “Trust me, as a minister and as a home secretary.” But she seemed blissfully unaware that the response would come back, just as in a pantomime, “Oh no we won’t.”

A similar sense of rejection must greet the continued claims by politicians and journalists that the occupation forces are winning in Afghanistan, even as British and US casualties mount.

Following the mass prison breakout in Kandahar last week, defence secretary Des Browne delivered this gem:

“The Taliban are losing in Afghanistan. I know it may not appear like that at the moment, but we are enjoying a degree of success.”

Fundamental

Socialists, anti-capitalists and those in the anti-war movement have to face a fundamental change in the political situation. But the enormity of what’s going on can seem to dwarf us, leading to a danger of passivity.

Economic crises lead people to question the capitalist system we live under. It can lead people to resist. Yet there are other forces looking to prosper from the situation.

For weeks the Daily Mail and Daily Express have carried front pages on price increases that could have been printed by Socialist Worker. But they were accompanied by a campaign blaming immigrants for our woes.

Further right the fascists of the BNP seize on false stories that expectant Polish mothers are blocking British mums from maternity beds. It is more likely that British babies are being delivered by Polish doctors or Nigerian midwives.

It is vital we follow last Saturday’s demonstration with a sustained drive to push the Nazis back into their sewer.

The lesson of the Stop the War Coalition is that the left can play a central role in initiating mass movements that pull in broad layers of society. The global “war on terror” continues to be a cancer at the heart of the system.

Yet while we continue to build opposition to the war, we must also look for other opportunities to spread resistance.

The 24 April strike is a harbinger of what might lie ahead on the pay front. Bus workers, London Underground workers and others must be looking at the Shell drivers’ success with relish.

Others, like health workers in the Unison union who accepted a below-inflation three-year pay deal, will become aware that they are going to suffer badly unless something is done.

Other issues can also lead to resistance suddenly surging up. We are seeing the return of bread riots around the world. Even in Britain the potential is there for anger over prices to reach breaking point.

Housing is the great issue rarely addressed in British politics. There has been a successful campaign to defend council housing, but now we are seeing evictions and flats built by speculators lying empty.

Young people are forced to stay with their parents and overcrowding blights the lives of young families. And this year will see the lowest numbers of houses built in Britain since 1945.

The job facing socialists is to act as detonators for mass resistance against the plans of our rulers.

We need to create a network of activists across Britain who can do that and explain to smaller numbers, in more in-depth discussion, what the alternative is to capitalism – socialism.

Those who have struck and marched represent a huge force that is capable of galvanising the majority of the British population for radical and ultimately revolutionary change.

That’s the possibility. But failure to address what is possible can lead to a high price being paid by us all.

Coalition Against Our Welfare State

jo — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 14:19:45 +0000

The Labour Party once stood for providing free education and equal access to state schooling. It once stood for low cost public housing as an escape route from the slums that scarred our towns and cities.

Above all, the creation of the National Health Service (NHS) was held up as Labours finest gift to its working class supporters. But today traditional Labour voters are wondering what became of these proud ideals.

This week we saw Tony Blair prepared to rely on Tory votes to push through an education bill that threatens to further undermine comprehensive education by setting up schools in competition with each other.

If Blair wins thanks to Tory votes, it points to the possibility of a grand coalition a pact between centre left and centre right parties, such as the current German govenment.

Inheritors

New Tory leader David Camerons election strategy is based on presenting the Tories as the true inheritors of Blairs mantle. That is why he is pitching the party as a continuation rather than a break with the New Labour project.

All three establishment parties insist that the market is the only possible mechanism for delivering goods and services. If things go wrong, it is never the fault of the market instead they blame teachers, nurses, trade unions or feckless parents.

New Labour boasts it has doubled spending on health. But most of this new money passes straight into the hands of the private sector, which is itself increasingly dominated by huge US health corporations.

We are moving towards the US model of healthcare. The US spends more money per head on healthcare than any other country. But because of the built in irrationality of the private system, the richest country in the world finds itself unable to deliver healthcare for vast swathes of its population.

Blair recently admitted that globalisation is a creator of insecurity. But globalisation is not some kind of natural event that Blair passively observes it is a a project that he actively promotes.

The US and Britain arent just united over the Iraq war over the past 30 years both governments have pioneered and presided over deregulation, privatisation and the hollowing out of our democratic structures.

Here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher picked up on the first steps made in this direction by the Labour government of Jim Callaghan in the late 1970s. New Labour has extended this neo-liberal agenda since coming to power in 1997.

Neo-liberalism has meant the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich on a massive scale, alongside the opening up of public services to the private sector.

Yet the popular mood is drastically out of step with this neo-liberal consensus. Our rulers might have decided free education and public healthcare are things of the past, but those who rely on the NHS and state education do not share those conclusions.

Surveys consistently show that a majority of people believe the gap between rich and poor is too great and that more should be spent on welfare.

That holds true of Labour Party members too. A recent poll showed that grassroots Labour members were overwhelmingly opposed to Blairs education reforms.

Some 80 percent oppose business sponsors being able to influence what is taught in schools, while 72 percent regard fair access to education as more important than parental choice.

Trust

The consensus among working people is essentially Old Labour. They elected Blair in the hope that he would deliver some change. But those hopes have come crashing up against the reality of the last nine years.

They look on aghast at a world where the husband of a government minister can trouser huge sums of money slipped his way by Silvio Berlusconi.

They read of peerages being dished out to millionaire New Labour donors and wonder why all of this is acceptable on planet New Labour.

A recent Rowntree Trust inquiry reported that 56 percent of people believe they have no say over government. The numbers turning out to vote at elections are falling.

But the same report blames this, not on apathy, but on disillusion with the three main parties. They contrasts this disillusion to the vibrant popular engagement with the Stop the War Coalition and last years Make Poverty History events.

Added to this is the steady decline in Labour membership, which has slipped under 200,000. Last month the Scottish Labour Party conference heard that the party north of the border has lost a fifth of its membership in four years.

Labour councillors were once known in the areas they represented. As a mass membership party, Labour was rooted in communities, trade unions and tenants organisations.

That hasnt all vanished.There are still many people who cling to the wreckage, hoping that the Blair nightmare will pass, persuading themselves against all rational evidence that a Gordon Brown premiership will somehow be different.

Nevertheless, the intricate links between the Labour Party, local campaigners and trade union activists are now at their weakest for decades.

One event dominates Blairs time in office the war in Iraq. More people now oppose the war than at any time previously.

And those who marched and campaigned against war are becoming more radicalised, as they identify the war on terror as the military wing of a global neo-liberal offensive.

This radicalisation forms the backdrop to the growing number of votes against selling off council homes, to the local demonstrations against health cuts that are taking place across the country, and to the anger over education reform.

But this radicalisation comes into conflict with a cross-party consensus and finds little voice in the parliamentary arena.

This week the anti-war movement is protesting to ensure that neither Blair nor Brown will escape their responsibility for Iraq. But we also need to punish Blair in the May local elections by providing traditional Labour voters with a political home that chimes with their beliefs.

Respect can be their voice, as well as that of new voters who have no other political home. But all of that is connected to stoking a growing rebellion against the neo-liberal madness which piles misery upon misery for millions.

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The Road to Respectability

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 23:01:36 +0000

Last weeks announcement that the IRA has ordered an end to its military operations was greeted by a predictable display of hypocrisy from Tony Blair.

All of a sudden a prime minister who has led Britain into an illegal and bloody war in Iraq was sounding as if he was the worlds number one pacifist.

Meanwhile the British army is busy deploying the counter-insurgency techniques it crafted on the streets of Derry into those of occupied Iraq.

Blair presented his role as that of a neutral peace maker who had sorted out two warring tribes. In this he was faithfully echoed by the vast majority of the British media.

But who runs Northern Ireland and who created this state back in 1921? The answer, of course, is the British governmentwhich is not and never has been a neutral party in the Northern Ireland conflict.

War weary

There is much war weariness in Northern Ireland and the vast majority of people there welcome peace. But there is also a growing suspicion that the political process now being played out will bring little change to the lives of everyday people in Belfast and Derry.

Sinn Feins leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been able to carry the Republican movement with them without there being any major split no mean feat given that movements history of internecine splits.

But their ability to deliver peace has not rested solely on the internal discipline of the Republican movement. Above all it stemmed from widespread recognition that the IRA could not achieve a military victory over Britain.

The other side of this was the slow recognition in London that no amount of repression could defeat the IRAthough John Majors British government nevertheless had to be dragged to the peace table by the US and the Irish Republic.

Adams and McGuinness began the break with militarism by promoting a twin track policy that complemented the IRAs military campaign with Sinn Fein contesting elections in both Irish states.

Over time success meant the electoral thrust gained predominance. Sinn Fein won the lions share of the Catholic vote in the north and is now powerful enough in the Irish Republic to become a member of a future coalition government.

Demographic projections suggest the Catholic population of Northern Ireland is set to become the majority over the coming years. This means Adams and McGuinness can point to a possible peaceful road to Irish reunification.

But the price is that the Republicans need to earn their promotion into the ranks of the establishment. Maintaining close links with the White House is crucial even if the incumbent is George Bush.

That is why the Republicans had to implement privatisation and other neo-liberal measures when they were briefly given ministerial posts in Northern Ireland.

The IRAs announcement of an end to military operations will probably mean Sinn Fein entering a new administration with arch-bigot Ian Paisley. But there is another element to this shift from the Armalite to Armani suits.

The Provisionals were not terrorists, in that they were predominantly waging a campaign focused on British occupation forces. But neither were they socialist revolutionaries.

That meant they could stray into actions which were not in any way anti-imperialist, such as carrying out sectarian counter-killings or blowing up working class pubs in Birmingham.

Above all, they saw themselves as being the agents of liberation for the Irish a dedicated minority acting on behalf of the people.

For most of their history that meant seeing freedom coming through the military campaign of the IRA but it could also embrace conventional diplomacy and conventional electoral politics.

That is why Irish politics is littered with parties who broke with Republicanism, ditched the gun, made peace with imperialism and became pillars of the establishment.

Sectarian

Ordinary people in Northern Ireland have welcomed peace, but the formal political process Sinn Fein has entered into enshrines sectarian division.

Schools remain divided on religious grounds, abortion is not available. Meanwhile the British government is running down spending on education and welfare. Northern Ireland remains a political slum in which working people, Catholic and Protestant, pay the price for sectarian divide and rule.

The Sinn Fein leaderships ability to carry the Republican movement with them makes it all that more vital that the forces in Ireland committed to eradicating neo-liberalism, bigotry, poverty and repression come together and pose an alternative. Thankfully that work is already underway.

Britains State of War in Northern Ireland

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:51:04 +0000

To mark St Patricks Day last week, George Bush welcomed the sisters and partner of Robert McCartney to the White House. Robert was the Belfast man murdered outside a bar in January after falling foul of a group of people, including members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

It is hard to imagine George Bush inviting the family of the Afghan taxi driver Dilawar to the White House to discuss their campaign for justice. Dilawar died in December 2002 in the prison attached to the giant US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan.

A US armed forces report revealed to Human Rights Watch last week said he had been chained, beaten, thrown against a table and had water poured down his throat until he suffocated.

The McCartney familys legitimate search for justice has been hijacked by those in charge of torture at Bagram, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Both the US and British governments have seized on the murder of Robert McCartney to attack the Irish republican party Sinn Fein and its leader Gerry Adams.

They are demanding that Sinn Fein denounce the IRA as a criminal conspiracy, even though Adams has gone out of his way to support the McCartney family. These demands are not about concern for justice or hatred of violence, but the latest chapter in a sustained campaign aimed at forcing more concessions from the republicans.

By the late 1980s, after two decades of guerilla war in Northern Ireland, both the British government and the republicans had come to the conclusion that military victory was impossible. Both sides began exploring a compromise solution.

In 1921, when the Northern Irish state was created, it was a key industrial region of the UK. Its shipyards and engineering plants exported their goods across the British Empire.

The Ulster Unionist Party, which ruled the region from 1921 to 1972, was the blood brother of the Conservatives. It had used its links to the royal family, business and the military to ensure that this prosperous region was not incorporated into an independent Irish state.

Today Northern Irelands economy has shrunk, while that of the Irish Republic has stormed forward. Northern Ireland is reliant on British state subsidies. The Ulster Unionist Party has splintered and become an embarrassment to the British ruling class.

Concessions

By the early 1980s Sinn Fein had become a crucial political force, on its way to becoming the second biggest party in the region. Electoral politics was steadily replacing military struggle as the priority for republicans.

The two key republican leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, believed that republicans could build an alliance with the governments of the US and the Irish Republic to put pressure on the British state.

The asset Adams and McGuinness played to win concessions was their ability to deliver an IRA ceasefire. They agreed to drop the armed struggle and accept the legitimacy of both the northern and southern Irish states.

In return they were promised Sinn Fein participation in governing Northern Ireland, cross border institutions which might lay the basis for Irish unity, and a guarantee that the British state would not prevent Irish unity if a majority in both states voted for it.

The IRAs guns have been silent since 1997. No one believes that the armed struggle will recommence. Peace, if not the political process which followed, is popular in Northern Ireland.

But the British side has not accepted the terms of the initial agreement. Within weeks of the ceasefire it was demanding that the IRA disarm. The British, and the Irish and US governments, were not prepared to accept promises that the IRAs arsenal would be left to rust.

For the republicans, giving over their weapons was tantamount to a surrender, rather than a compromise settlement. Now, in the wake of the McCartney murder and the £26.5 million Belfast bank raid, there are demands that the IRA should disband.

We have to remind ourselves why the IRA came into existence. The story our rulers would like us to believe is that violence was introduced into Northern Ireland by the terrorists of the IRA.

But from the states birth the police were armed, reinforced by a Unionist militia and given special security laws. The Catholic population of Northern Ireland was systematically discriminated against and the electoral system was fixed to allow the Unionists permanent control. Northern Ireland was a political slum characterised by repression, sectarianism and, as a consequence, poverty.

In 1969 the IRA did not exist in any meaningful sense. It was effectively reborn that year when peaceful marches for civil rights were batoned off the streets. Police and Unionist mobs laid siege to Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast, burning homes and shooting civilians dead.

Ordinary people began to look to other means to protect their community. When British troops were introduced they interned hundreds of political opponents of the Unionists without trial. British soldiers gunned down 13 civil rights demonstrators in Derry in January 1972. The IRA began a military campaign against what it regarded as an occupation force.

For people in Short Strand, where Robert McCartney lived, the IRA were the people who had defended the area from Unionist paramilitaries.

The policy of successive British governments for much of the 1970s and 1980s was to try and isolate Northern Ireland from the rest of the world and deal with it as a security situation. But a hunger strike by political prisoners destroyed this policy.

Groundswell

A Labour government in the mid-1970s had withdrawn political recognition from republican prisoners and said they should be treated in the same way as criminal prisoners.

When the hunger strike began in 1981 Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher let ten prisoners die before it was called off. The huge groundswell of support the strike touched off in Catholic areas showed that repression was never going to defeat the republicans. Sinn Fein began to contest and win elections.

Sinn Fein is now a real political force in the north and south. The ruling class is not content for it to remain a semi-constitutional party linked to the IRA.

One of the key ways a capitalist state operates is that there is one army, one police and one law. The message to Gerry Adams is if you want office then you need to break with the IRA.

Socialists have all sorts of differences with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. These have increased as Sinn Fein has tried to prove it can participate in ruling Northern Ireland, implementing cuts and privatisation.

But we defended the right of people in Belfast and Derry to resist, and we supported the hunger strikers. We will certainly not be signing up to the politicians chorus.

That stand is all the more important when the chorus is led by Bush and Blair, the criminals who preside over occupied Iraq.

Chris Bambery | ukwatch.net

Crisis and revolt

Coalition Against Our Welfare State

The Road to Respectability

Britains State of War in Northern Ireland

Britains State of War in Northern Ireland