ISSUE 350! GIVE THE TORIES THE BOOT!

Issue 350 � 25 June 2021

GIVE THE TORIESTHE BOOT!

ISSUE350!

Bold measures are required to deal with the coronavirus crisis. Only a clear socialist programme can offer

a way forward.

We must have no faith in the Tories or their hangers on, whose worship of the market has brought the country to its knees.

■No trust or confidence in the Tories and their big business backers!

■ Instead of attacking the left, Labour must provide genuine opposition to this shambolic Tory government. Support workers in the fight to put lives before profits!

The bosses and their craven political representatives have shown that they will always prioritise profits over lives. We demand socialist measures to protect workers, and put health before wealth.

■For a fully publicly-owned and free health service, under workers’ control and management. Reverse all privatisation and outsourcing. All private health services must be nationalised without compensation, and integrated into the NHS.

■For a properly funded test and trace system, fully under public control. Boot out parasitic outsourcing com-panies like SERCO, and give power to healthcare workers, councils, and local communities in order to provide mass testing.

■Nationalise the pharmaceutical companies – without compensation – in order to ensure that vaccines are developed rapidly and made available to all for free.

■Reverse the austerity inflicted upon public services. Launch a fully-fund-ed training programme for doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical staff, with decent pay and hours, to increase staffing levels across the board. New hospitals must be urgently built.

■Non-essential workplaces should be shut down until it is genuinely safe to reopen. The decision to

reopen should be in the hands of workplace committees and the trade unions. And it must be based on the implementation of health and safety measures and a safe working environment. The costs for this must be paid by the bosses.

■For safe work or full pay. Any lockdown or restrictions must be ac-companied by measures to provide for workers affected by closures. This means 100% wage support for those furloughed, as well as full sick pay to those required to isolate.

■To fight job cuts and the threat of mass unemployment following the lockdown, work should be shared out without any loss of pay, in order to lower the hours of the working day.

■Scrap tuition fees and rents, and replace these with free education and full maintenance grants for all. Move university courses online. And put staff in control in schools and universities.

■Ban evictions and cancel housing debts. Give local authorities the power to cap rents at affordable lev-els. Requisition rooms at hotels and hostels for those sleeping on the streets. And bring empty properties and the assets of the big landlords and management companies under public control.

■Many small businesses are faced with bankruptcy, with banks resist-ing any extensions of credit. Many are squeezed not only by the banks, but by the big monopolies. By na-tionalising the banks we can supply these small businesses with the lifeline of guaranteed low-interest credit and loans.

■The financial resources required to fight the crisis must not come from increased taxes or more austerity, but through the nationalisation of the banks and finance houses. Rather than a ‘wealth tax’, we call for the expropriation of the monopolies.

■ Instead of building up the national

debt through government borrow-ing, the money needed should be obtained entirely from expropriating the accumulated profits of big busi-ness.

■If the bosses say they can’t afford to pay for workers’ wages, we say: open up the books! Let the working class and the labour movement see the accounts! If firms plead bank-ruptcy, they should not be bailed out, but nationalised under workers’ control.

■No to austerity! The working class must not pay for this crisis!

It is clear that the market has failed and capitalism is in a deep crisis. The anarchy of capitalism prevents the planning of society’s resources, in Britain and internationally.

■We therefore stand for the nation-alisation of the 100 biggest monop-olies, banks, utilities, landlords and so on – under workers’ control and management – and without com-pensation. On this basis, the econ-omy can be democratically planned in the interests of the majority, and not for the super profits of a few.

■A Socialist Federation of Britain should be linked to a Socialist Unit-ed States of Europe and a World Socialist Federation, in order to plan resources internationally for the benefit of all. This would put an end to barbarism of capitalism and allow humanity to begin solving the urgent issues of climate change, disease, and poverty that face society and our planet.

Like what you read?JOIN US TODAY!

[email protected]

socialist-appeal

socialist.net

WHO ARE WE? and WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

SOCIALIST APPEALLeft Publications LTD

Editor: Rob [email protected]

Content/Layout:Khaled Malachi and Victoria Walder

[email protected] 350, June 2021

Next issue date:July 2021

Queries:[email protected]

What We Stand For socialist.net Issue 3502

mailto:contact%40socialist.net?subject=

https://www.facebook.com/SocialistAppeal/

https://www.socialist.net/

CONTENTS

Join us today!

30-31 Unison NEC interviews

32-33 Unite elections

33 PCS conference report

26 Review: The 8th

27 Wellred books

28 Letters

29 Tell the Truth

21-22 G7 summit

23-24 Israel

25 Illusions in Biden

4 Marxism on the march

17-20 80 years since Operation Barbarossa

5 Save our NHS!

6 NHS privatisation

7 Climate and greenwashing

8 Capitalism and food

Britain and Environment

Labour Party and Editorial

Theory

International

Letters, Reviews and History

Trade Unions

13-14 Starmer out!

14 Bakers’ union survey

15-16 Editorial

9-10 Crisis in the DUP

11-12 Police corruption

16 Grenfell vigil

marxist.com 25 June 20214

Back to Contents

Britain

MARXISM ON THE MARCHSocialist Appeal

As the capitalist system staggers from crisis to crisis, the Marxists have been going from strength to

strength. We have the ideas to explain what’s going on, and the strategy to change it. That’s why Marxism is on the march.

OrganiseThis month, scores of people have been signing up to get organised with Socialist Appeal. From college students to Labour Party members; and from university students to trade unionists: workers and activists have been joining the fight for socialism.

If you’re not yet organising with us then get in touch today. Help us set up a Marxist society in your school or univer-sity. Help us build the Marxist tendency inside the labour movement. And help us to build the forces of Marxism, in Britain and internationally.

There’s never been a more important time to fight.

DonateSocialist Appeal recently moved to a new, expanded office, with room for more growth to come.

Donations from our supporters to cov-er the costs of the move have been crucial to taking this important step forward. We offer our huge thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

We still have some costs to cover and we need every penny we can get to get the office up and running as lockdown looks set to end.

Furthermore, we are looking to fill our new office with more full-time staff, so that we can run bigger campaigns; develop our paper; produce more books, articles, videos and podcasts; and sup-port the work of Marxist activists across the country.

So if you can donate, please do. Your money will have a direct impact in building the next staging post on the road to revolution!

Next month we’re looking forward to the World Congress of the International Marxist Tendency. We’ll be raising money to help build the forces of Marx-ism in countries from Brazil to Pakistan, from Nigeria to Indonesia – because socialism is international or it’s nothing.

Finance is the sinews of war. And there’s class war raging all over the world. It’s the hundreds and thousands of donations from working-class people that we need to fight for Marxist ideas in every country. If you can donate to our international collection, please do!

SubscribeFinally, with this issue of the paper, we’re celebrating 350 issues of Socialist Appeal. This is a huge milestone.

Publication of the Socialist Appeal stretches back to the early 1990s. The Marx-ists have come a long way since then. And our ideas have never been more relevant.

Starting as a monthly publication, Socialist Appeal is now printed fort-nightly. And with your help, we’d like to increase this frequently to weekly – and eventually to daily!

This is on top of the incredible an-alysis and educational material that we offer every day on our website, www.so-cialist.net; on our Marxist Voice podcast and Socialist Appeal YouTube channel; and via various social media platforms – from Facebook and Twitter, through to Instagram and Tik Tok.

Due to the pandemic, we also took an important step forward in producing Socialist Appeal in a digital format, with a stunning layout and an array of inter-active features.

If you’re reading this, then that means you’re already a subscriber.

But you can support us further by encouraging your friends, family, and comrades to take out a subscription also.

Most importantly, get in touch if you’d like to receive a bundle of papers to sell in your workplace, local Labour Party, trade union branch, university, or community.

And contact us to join other Socialist Appeal supporters and sellers in your area – to help spread the ideas of Marx-ism amongst workers and youth.

The Marxists are surging forward on all fronts. Join, donate and subscribe. Now is the time to enroll yourself in the fight to change the world. ■

socialist.net Issue 3505

Back to Contents

Britain

SAVE OUR NHS!K I C K O U T T H E P R O F I T E E R S !James Kilby

The NHS was created 73 years ago by a Labour government to provide high quality healthcare to all – not just the

rich. For the first time ever, millions of work-ing class people could finally get access to a proper doctor and treatment.

Healthcare was no longer to be a com-modity available to only those who could pay. This also meant removing the ability of the ruling class to profit from what was otherwise a multimillion pound industry. For this reason, the Tories – and the whole establishment – furiously resisted the creation of the NHS.

CrisisNow, decades later, the NHS is in a severe crisis. The Tory government’s criminal decisions to delay lockdown measures put the NHS under incred-ible pressure. The system was nearly completely overwhelmed, with hospitals running out of oxygen, and patients stuck in ambulances for lack of beds.

None of this was inevitable. The NHS has been under attack for decades – by both Tory and ‘New Labour’ governments. Over 158,000 beds – 50% of the total capacity – have been cut from the NHS over the past 30 years.

Working conditions and pay have been whittled down over the years, resulting in a chronic shortage of staff. One-in-ten nursing positions are vacant. Many more are considering leaving the profession following the insulting 1% pay rise from the Tories.

Despite the NHS being created to remove the market from healthcare, the profiteers have found their way in through the back door. ‘Clinical commis-sioning’, ‘PFI’, and outsourcing have allowed the bankers and billionaires to profit hand-somely from our health.

This process was set in motion under the Blairite ‘New Labour’

governments, but accelerated since un-der the Tories. In 2010, the NHS spent £4.1bn on private sector contracts. By 2019, this had more than doubled to £9.2bn. Now an estimated 25% of NHS spending goes to the private sector.

Then there are the billions of pounds of money leached out of the system by the Big Pharma companies – often for medicines that were developed with funding from the public purse!

ProfiteeringThe logic of the market is to maximise profits. Despite all claims to the contra-ry, this means cutting costs, reducing

the quality of services, and attacking the conditions of staff.

Although the Tories claim to ‘protect the NHS’, in reality they stand for protecting the ability of the rich to profit from public funds.

For example, during the pandemic, instead of requisitioning beds from the private sector, over £400m a month was handed over from the NHS to private healthcare providers to allow access to their hospitals.

These so-called ‘public private partner-ships’ are set to continue for years, due to the massive backlog of operations that were put on hold due to COVID. Already over five million people are waiting for treatment.

This backlog is expected to take up to to five years to clear. In the absence of a mass recruitment drive, this means putting an already exhausted workforce under incredible pressure.

Save our NHSWhilst fat-cat shareholders are licking their lips at this prospect for profits, the rest of us are left to suffer. More than enough wealth exists in society to properly fund decent healthcare for all - but it’s in the wrong

hands. It’s time for us to mobilise and say: enough is enough!

Healthcare workers are on the frontline of the struggle to save the NHS. But ultimately this is a task for the entire labour movement, on the basis of bold socialist policies. The NHS will never be safe under capitalism. We say:

Fully fund the NHS – through the nationalisation of the banks, finance

houses, and top 100 monopolies.

Kick out the profiteers – reverse outsourcing and privatisation, na-tionalise Big Pharma, and bring all healthcare services under public ownership and workers’ control.

Invest in staff – for a union-led mass recruitment drive of doctors, nurses, and other

healthcare professionals, with a proper pay rise, and guaranteed decent and safe working conditions. ■


Back to Contents

Britain

Dido Harding angling to be NHS chief

Joana Soares

Ealing Central and Acton CLP

The NHS is experiencing the worst crisis in its 73 year history. The latest threat comes from the fact that Tory

Baroness Dido Harding has thrown her hat in the ring to become the next chief execu-tive of the NHS.

Harding comes from the big business establishment, having been a boss at numerous large companies, including Talk-Talk and Sainsburys. Her latest CV entry is none other than running the government’s calamitous Test and Trace system.

IneptDespite Test and Trace costing the tax-payer a whopping £37bn, the programme is thought to have had a minimal impact on the transmission of the virus. Even the former head of the Treasury declared it the “most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time”. We’ll never know how many lives could have been saved with a more effective system.

Details of the operations behind the Test and Trace project only make Dido Harding’s promotion attempt all the more surreal.

For starters, there was the scandal behind appointing a baroness – who lacked any healthcare qualifications – to manage a pivotal project at the height of Britain’s biggest public health emergency in over a century.

ChummyWhat Harding lacked in healthcare expe-rience, however, was made up for by her close connections with the upper echelons of the Tory Party. Not only is Harding married to Tory MP John Penrose, but she was made a baroness by her university pal David Cameron.

Harding also happens to be close friends with health secretary Matt Hancock, through their shared love of horse racing. Indeed, the infamous Jockey Club, of which Harding is a board member, has made donations totaling £350,000 to none other than Hancock.

Under Harding’s direction, the Test and Trace programme was a disaster. Costs spiralled due to the hiring of hundreds of ‘management consultants’ – including many from her former employer McKinsey.

Such consultants charged eye-water-ing daily fees of £1,100 on average, with some even paid up to £6,624 for a day’s work. According to Harding, however, such fees were “very competitive”. Yet despite having all these ‘experts’ on the payroll, the programme failed to trace anything close to sufficient numbers of people to make an impact.

On top of this, private sector outsourcers such as Serco were handed hundreds of millions of pounds of public money, only to deliver a failed service.

PrivatisationNone of this bodes well should Harding be awarded the NHS top job.

Rather than kicking out the profiteers from our public healthcare system, the doors would likely be thrown open even wider for them to continue to profit at the expense of our health.

Promoting Harding would be the next logical step for the Tories, who over the past decade have introduced privatisation into the NHS by the backdoor.

Given that Harding’s husband is closely involved with the 1828 think tank, which campaigns for the NHS to be moved to a ‘social insurance’ model, Harding would be an obvious choice for those in the

establishment who want to further open up the NHS to the market.

Fight for socialismShould Harding be rewarded with the top job, it will be one more insult to NHS work-ers, who have been treated with nothing but contempt by the Tories.

After a strenuous year of fighting against a deadly virus; dealing with PPE shortages and an incompetent government; and only being offered an insulting pay rise of 1%, NHS workers will find themselves on the frontline against further privatisations.

The very fact that Harding – with all her top Tory connections – has put herself forward, is a warning sign to NHS workers to prepare for battle.

With the left now in the process of taking control of Unison, Britain’s largest union, which represents nurses and other NHS staff, healthcare workers seeking to chal-lenge management and the Tories should receive greater support from their union.

Ultimately however, the defence of the NHS is a task for the whole labour move-ment. Better pay for health workers, better service for patients, and quicker waiting times are not a utopia.

But they can only be realised through the struggle for socialism. ■

workers must prepare for battle!

Rather than kicking out the profiteers from our public healthcare system, the doors would likely be thrown open even wider for them to continue to profit at the expense of our health.


Back to Contents

Environment

Why capitalism can’t solve the climate crisis

Greenwashing and sustainable investment

Helena Nicholson

At the G7 summit earlier this month, Western leaders launched the Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership:

a project to funnel private capital into climate, health, digital technology, and gender equali-ty projects in developing countries.

In reality, projects such as B3W are ex-tremely cynical. Behind the superficial facade of environmental concern, and buzzwords about ‘ethics’ and ‘empowerment’, lie all the same old big business interests and imperi-alist exploits. Meanwhile, corporations and capitalist governments are doing absolutely nothing to genuinely avert the climate crisis. After all, it is precisely their system – capital-ism – that is responsible for the environmen-tal catastrophe facing our planet.

Imperialist interestsThis latest example falls under the umbrella of ‘greenwashing’: an increasingly prevalent phenomenon, whereby the main climate cul-prits focus huge amounts of time and money on presenting themselves as environmental-ly friendly, rather than actually stopping their exploitative and destructive activities.

In the case of the B3W, the ulterior mo-tive of the G7 is clear. US imperialism and its allies are seeking to create a counterweight to the Chinese ‘Belt and Road’ initiative; to protect Western imperialism’s interests against China’s expanding sphere of influ-ence – all whilst making it look like they are doing something about climate change.

In fact, between January 2020 and March 2021, G7 countries invested $189 billion into fossil fuels – billions more than they invested into alternative energy sources.

The commitment to “build back better” is a shallow lie; it is nothing more than a smokescreen for their continued support for the criminal behaviour of the bankers, boss-es, and billionaires who are responsible for the vast majority of emissions, and who profit from environmental vandalism.

‘Ethical’ investmentOn a larger scale, in the last year we have witnessed the meteoric rise of so-called ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) funds: investment vehicles that promote themselves as ethical, sustainable, socially responsible, and value-driven.

These funds have experienced rapid growth. A record $1.7tn is now held in ESG

funds, representing an increase of 50% compared to a year ago.Jumping on the bandwagon, asset managers have rebrand-ed their portfolios as ESG funds in order to attract more investment. Of course, this has not been accompanied by actual sustainabil-ity improvements in the firms represented in these funds.

The inherent short-sightedness of the profit-driven capitalist system has led us to a situation where the best option for the capitalist class – when faced with the poten-tially apocalyptic consequences of their own actions – is to craft a green edifice to hide behind, whilst accelerating their investment in polluting industries in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of their competitors.Greenwashing plays a pernicious role in the renewables industry too – serving to camouflage the exploitative operations of the profit-driven companies in this sector.

The rise of the ESG bubble, for exam-ple, has led to a surge in demand for raw materials, such as those needed to produce electric car batteries.

Lithium is one of these minerals, mined by multinationals such as SQM and Albe-marle in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Their mining practices, however, are causing the depletion of freshwater resources; water and soil contamination; and human rights abuses. In short, under

capitalism, even renewables are unsus-tainable.

Whilst they may appear more ‘ethical’, therefore, renewables under capitalism are tainted with the same brutality and exploitation as fossil fuels.

Socialist alternativeThis will always be the case, as long as the means of production remain in private hands, run according to the profit motive and the anarchy of capitalism.

Socialist economic planning is the only way to ensure a just transition to low-car-bon energy and sustainable production.

Left to the market, any move to green alternatives will never be rapid enough; the manufacture of renewable technologies will be scarred by brutally exploitative and destructive practices; and workers in ob-solete, polluting industries will be thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment.

If we want to actually “build back better”, we need to fundamentally transform the economy along socialist lines: replacing the chaos of capitalism with a rational, sustain-able, and democratic plan of production, based on public ownership of the major monopolies, under workers’ control.

Only then can we genuinely tackle the climate catastrophe and save our planet for future generations. ■

If we want to actually “build back better”, we need to fundamentally transform the economy along socialist lines.


Back to Contents

Environment

James Stanbury

Leeds Marxists

The world’s biggest food company, Nestle, recently admitted that over 60% of its products are unhealthy.

Food insecurity is endemic - according to the UN, some 821 million people were ‘chronically undernourished’ in 2019. Yet at the same time as millions go hungry, enough food was produced worldwide to feed over 10 billion people - one and a half times the world’s population.

Overproduction and waste is business as usual under capitalism. ‘Excess’ fruit is destroyed, misshapen produce discarded, and wealthy consumers over-indulged. UK supermarkets throw away 190 million meals’ worth of food each year.

23.5 million Americans - overwhelm-ingly the poorest - live in food deserts with no healthy fresh food within walking distance of their homes. Ultra-processed food fuels obesity, offering convenience and availability to the time-strapped and overworked poor.

Extreme exploitation is rife in the supply chains. In the USA - the world’s largest food exporter - roughly half of the million farmhands are undocumented. In-deed fruit pickers and meatpackers face terrible conditions all over the world.

Environmental destruction at all stages is immense. Bottling plants go to drought-struck regions and empty aquifers, while the Amazon is felled and turned to cattle ranching or monocrop-ping. With all this and more, agriculture accounts for 18.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Logic of the marketThese failures are not necessary evils; each of them are rooted in production for profit.

Scarcity for millions, whilst enormous amounts of food are destroyed, is the natural result of making food a commodity - sold only for a profit. This means that the most basic means of subsistence are tied to income on one end, and market fluctuations on the other.

Destroying ‘excess’ produce avoids the capitalists selling below cost - and helps drive up prices through artificial scarcity. Yet the phenomenon of mass hunger, side by side with enormous piles of unsold food, is the inevitable outcome of a system that drives wages down to their bare minimum, and condemns hundreds of millions to unemployment.

Wasteful production geared towards the most wealthy flows from the logic of the market. The connoisseur of finely marbled beef wagyu has more purchasing power than the many hungry poor who could have been fed by all the land needed for its production.

The market’s meals are prepared by the market’s laws. This means too salty, too sweet, too little satiation. It means sponsoring studies to shift the blame for obesity away from diet, and advertising unhealthy food directly to children. As ad-mitted by Nestle, it means ultra-processed and unhealthy food; more ‘value added’, and therefore more profit extracted.

Brutal exploitation makes for wide profit margins. Whether they are Ethiopian coffee farmers being fleeced by a multinational, or immigrant meatpackers fearing a raid from immigration control, profit in the food

industry is built on the worst exploitation and the most brutal coercion.

Anything which does not appear on the capitalists’ balance sheets, however, is ignored. For example, yields going up with more fertiliser means more profits. But run-off causing algae blooms when it reaches the sea is ignored.

The socialist alternativeIt is within our power to meet the food needs of every single person on the earth, with health and sustainability in mind. But to do so means removing the profit motive from the realm of food production.

Farmers and agricultural scientists have sustainable farming techniques. But only by expropriating the giant agricultural companies would society have the ability to apply them in practice.

In transportation and processing, the reliance on fossil fuels needs to be cut. But this is something only possible on a planned basis, allowing for cheap and abundant green energy to be properly utilised.

Finally for distribution, we have a model for providing necessities; the NHS. Foodbanks and mutual aid kitchens do this already, with extremely limited resources. A National Food Service would turn the in-frastructure of supermarket and restaurant chains to running community canteens and stores, giving everyone access to free and good quality food.

The fact that millions go hungry in a system of plenty is testament to the bank-ruptcy of capitalism. Only by the working class planning production for need and not profit, can we end this barbarism, and produce healthy food in harmony with the planet. ■

Capitalism and food

hunger amidst plenty


Back to Contents

North of Ireland

Ben Curry

In the course of scarcely a month, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has begun imploding in spectacular fashion.

Arlene Foster – the DUP leader and First Minister at Stormont who survived the RHI scandal, the collapse of Stormont in 2017, and the introduction of Northern Ireland Protocol earlier this year – has finally and unceremoniously been booted out. The straw that broke the camel’s back? Her opposition to gay conversion therapy.

After a stormy inauguration that saw bitter exchanges, walk-outs and resigna-tions aplenty, her replacement, the Young Earth creationist Edwin Poots, has now also been ejected. At just three weeks in the job, his tenure as DUP leader has been the shortest yet. Had you blinked, you would have missed it. But, as one person commented, he can at least brag that he was DUP leader for three times longer than it took God to create the Earth.

Now the so-called ‘moderate’ Jeffrey Donaldson has been crowned leader. This will prove a poisoned chalice as the crisis is far from abating. Things will only get worse for the beleaguered party. The DUP’s crisis could prove to be an

existential one, reflecting the deep ma-laise of unionism that has dragged out for decades, but which has now reached a turning point.

The knives are outThe knives had been out for Foster for some time. Her replacement, the funda-mentalist Edwin Poots, fully encapsulates the party’s poisonous reactionary ‘tradi-tion’ of misogyny, homophobia, racism and sectarianism.

Since the start of the year, he has been among the more vocal Unionists calling for any and all means to be used to bring down the NI Protocol, prior to the outbreak of a series of violent sectarian riots in April.

Faced with Poots, the media has been very efficient in airbrushing the records of Foster and her allies. They are being repainted as supposed ‘reforming moderates’. Make no mistake, there is no difference of principles between the DUP’s ‘moderates’ and ‘hardliners’.

The coup against Foster immediately brought all the simmering tensions inside the DUP to the point of civil war. For all the diplomatic talk about “healing the rift” in the party, the DUP is now mortally divided.

Before Poots could even get com-fortable, he also found himself being defenestrated. The problem was, having ejected Foster, he wanted his man in the post of First Minister. But this meant an agreement with Sinn Féin, who insisted that Poots guarantee that Irish language legislation will be introduced. Poots could not stomach such a demand, which was roundly rejected by the DUP hardliners who had elevated him to power.

In stepped the British government to give him an apparent escape route from the situation. They offered to pass the legislation through Westminster. The hardliners weren’t to be fooled by this. The DUP hardliners were in uproar. Three weeks after he took the post, Poots found himself ousted along with his First Minister.

Where next?The new leadership contest has handed the so-called ‘moderate’ Donaldson the party leadership unopposed. But frankly, he is going to face the same dilemma. Does he accept Irish language legisla-tion? Does he refuse, inviting Sinn Féin to collapse the Stormont Assembly? Or

(continues on next page)

The implosion of the DUP and the dead end of Unionism


Back to Contents

EditorialNorth of Ireland

does he collapse the Assembly himself by refusing to nominate a First Minister?

If he opts for the first option, he may be in with a chance of surpassing Poots as the shortest-serving DUP leader in history. The latter two options would trigger new NI Assembly elections, which would almost certainly see the DUP rel-egated from the position of first party at Stormont, and perhaps even relegated to third or fourth!

Here we get to the crux of the civil war inside the DUP. The party is hurtling off a cliff. Unionism is split three ways (four if you include the officially unaligned but de facto soft-unionist Alliance party). Trans-lated into an election outcome, this could give Sinn Féin the First Minister post – a historic outcome.

Besides the substantial number of ca-reers at risk, some in the party are looking at the future of Unionism and can see only an abyss. Demographic changes and dis-illusionment in Protestant communities are undermining the Unionist vote, and fracturing it among many parties. And the Northern Ireland Protocol is pointing – as they see it – towards a United Ireland.

Some in the DUP are therefore draw-ing the conclusion that they have to go back to the days of “no surrender”, re-fusing to cede an inch to the nationalists, and throwing everything, including the kitchen sink and UDA petrol bombs, at stopping the NI Protocol.

Unable to offer anything to work-ing-class Protestants, the DUP has been forced to heighten its sectarian demagogy over time. As it has done so, its base has become narrower and narrower.

A party steeped in reactionIn many ways, the DUP epitomises the impasse of Unionism. It was formed 50 years ago by the fundamentalist preacher, Rev. Ian Paisley, in the context of growing unrest among Catholics over the denial of their basic civil rights. Paisley came from outside the Unionist establishment, and his antics were completely beyond their control.

The sectarian violence that Paisley and his fundamentalist followers whipped up helped destabilise the region, creating a nightmare for the ruling class. The Unionist bourgeoisie and British imperi-alism, both of whom sought to whip up Protestant sectarianism when it suited them, have been at a loss to control this Frankenstein’s monster of their own crea-tion and to prevent the DUP’s rise.

In government, the DUP attracted its share of defectors, including Arlene Foster and Jeffrey Donaldson. The only difference between the ‘hardliners’ and the ‘moderate’ newcomers is that the

former perhaps believe the sectarian and fundamentalist creed of the party, where-as the latter, no less sectarian, are happy mouthing the words to the same hymns, whilst it’s their careers that ultimately come first. The party concentrates within itself the distilled essence of reactionary Protestant sectarianism.

Working-class ProtestantsThere is a yawning abyss between the Unionism of the DUP reactionaries and the working-class Protestant commu-nities that they purport to represent. Working-class Protestants in the North of Ireland have been led down a blind alley by British imperialism and the political exploiters of their communities.

Working-class Protestants have been abandoned to the scrapheap by their bosses. Their co-religionist political ‘representatives’ have climbed onto their backs only to enrich themselves. The British ruling class nurtured the idea of loyalty to the union, whilst showing loyal-ty only to their own profit margins. Behind the Union Flag, working-class Protes-tants have been led up a blind alley and abandoned – and they know it.

With living standards sliding, it is no wonder that, deprived of every material comfort, many hold onto the one immate-rial thing that cannot be taken from them – indeed the only thing that imperialism and Unionism has left them: the flag, the crown, and annual bonfires and marches that hark back to a mythical past.

The reason then that so many work-ers do not let go of these cold, immaterial comforts is that they are offered nothing of substance with which to replace them. The influence of Unionism over Protes-tant workers will not die of its own accord. It will only do so once a clear way out of the social crisis is offered – a way out that can only come through a revolution-ary programme to overthrow capitalism. But to achieve this, a revolutionary party, equipped with a clear class-based

programme and comprising the advanced layer of workers in all communities, must be built.

Some on the left are lamentably inclined to write off working-class Prot-estants as one reactionary mass. This is false to the core, a fact amply attested to by history. Were it true, a Socialist United Ireland would be off the agenda indefinitely. The sentiments among working-class Protestants have nothing in common and are at direct odds with the Unionism of the DUP and of the other parties. Working-class Protestants, and particularly the youth, have no interest in the status quo and the careers so dear to the ‘moderates’, nor in the Biblical literalism and fundamentalist insanity of the ‘hardliners’.

There exists a burning class anger, as there does among all workers. How-ever, in some of the most depressed working-class Protestant communities, this anger has become distorted beyond all recognition and directed into a force aimed at the very people who have suf-fered the same neglect and exploitation, and who represent the only real poten-tial allies of working-class Protestants: namely, working-class Catholics.

The perspective in the coming months is potentially a very dangerous one. In the coming weeks, loyalists are likely to throw everything they’ve got at creating chaos across the region in the course of the marching season.

By contrast, imagine what could be achieved by a labour movement prepared to mobilise every single worker to isolate the loyalist paramilitaries; to politically expose the reactionary politicians; and to fight tooth and nail for class demands – mobilising workers around a common programme.

That, however, would require a revo-lutionary leadership of the working class to be built in opposition to the ‘meek and mild’ reformists at the head of the labour movement today. ■

(continues from previous page)


Back to Contents

Britain

From the police to the prime ministerInstitutional corruption and raw gangsterismBen Gliniecki

The stench of corruption coming from the British establishment is overwhelming.

The Metropolitan Police has been accused of ‘institutional corruption’ in an official report commissioned by the government. What it reveals is that the police, the media and politicians are swimming together in a river of filth. We need to wash the whole lot away.

Police corruptionThese latest revelations demonstrate the raw, unapologetic gangsterism of the British establishment.

In 1987, a private investigator called Daniel Morgan planned to sell a story to the newspapers about police corruption. He had a heated argument with a senior police officer in a South London pub. The next evening, Morgan was murdered with an axe in the pub car park.

There were five investigations into the murder. None resulted in convictions. Evidence was destroyed or concealed by police officers. Threats from police result-ed in key witnesses leaving the country.

One officer connected to Morgan end-ed up shot in the chest (the official verdict was suicide). Officers following up lines

of enquiry relating to police corruption were taken off the case. Trial witnesses were coached, others were intimidated. The litany of textbook corruption goes on and on.

The report points out that this is not just a historic question. This inquiry into Morgan’s murder was commissioned by Theresa May in 2013. It was supposed to last 12 months. Instead it has taken eight years, largely because of the refusal of the Met Police to cooperate.

Some documents were only finally handed over in March 2021. For the last eight years, the police have thrown up every barrier conceivable between the inquiry and police records. The senior officer liaising with the inquiry – and the one who has obstructed its work – is the commissioner of the Met Police: Dame Cressida Dick.

The most senior police officer running the Met has been directly covering up for corrupt police officers for the last eight years. We’re therefore entitled to ask: How much other corruption and wrong-doing by the police is she covering up at the moment?

Media criminalityDaniel Morgan was one of two people who ran a private investigation firm called

Southern Investigations. They carried out work for the Murdoch media empire, especially the now disgraced News of the World.

The Morgan case shows how the capitalist media and the police are linked.

Through intermediaries like Southern Investigations, the media buys informa-tion from corrupt police officers about ongoing investigations. The inquiry’s report paints a picture of investigators, police, journalists, and criminals all drink-ing together down the pub and swapping information for money.

This cozy relationship wasn’t just an individual matter. Early 1987 saw brutal attacks by riot police on striking print workers facing off against Murdoch in Wapping. Institutionally, as well as individually, the police and the capitalist media lean on one another.

It’s not surprising that during one of the investigations into Morgan’s murder, the chief investigating officer was placed under surveillance by the News of the World. When the phone hacking scandal broke in 2011, it emerged that Met chiefs knew this officer, and that his wife had been targeted by the media, but declined to tell them.



Back to Contents

Britain

Every time an opportunity has aris-en for this investigating officer to give evidence to a court or inquiry about Morgan’s murder, he has been arrested or placed under investigation by the Met, preventing his testimony.

Tory involvementA loyal stooge of the Murdoch media empire was Andy Coulson. Coulson was editor of the News of the World from 2003 to 2007, having worked in the Murdoch press almost uninterrupted since 1988. In 2007, he became Tory Prime Minister Da-vid Cameron’s director of communications.

A man steeped in the culture of corrup-tion and gaining information by dodgy means was a perfect fit for a Tory government.

The Cameron government was very cozy with the Murdoch empire, including socialising with top executives. This was a continuation of the approach of Blair and Thatcher towards Murdoch. The capitalist media and politicians lean on one another.

Under enormous pressure, the Met charged Coulson and he was eventually convicted in 2014 of conspiracy to hack phones.

This came 13 years after the Met began accumulating vast quantities of evidence about phone hacking and other wrongdoing by Murdoch journalists. That evidence sat unexamined in police trash bags for over a decade. Sentenced to 18 months in prison, the Tory government let Coulson out after less than five.

In the wake of the phone hacking scan-dal, the Leveson Inquiry of 2011 and 2012 revealed just how closely intertwined the tops of the police, media, and government really are. It made some toothless recom-mendations about press regulation, but even these were wholly ignored by the Tory government.

There was supposed to be a second part to the Leveson Inquiry, one which would investigate criminality in the media and cor-ruption in the police. This had to be delayed until criminal investigations relating to the News of the World were concluded.

These investigations lasted just long enough for the Tories to include scrap-ping the second part of the Inquiry in their 2017 election manifesto. The rest of the Inquiry has now been binned.

The Met’s top police officer, Cressida Dick, has been exposed for shielding corrupt officers. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson says she has his full confidence. Home Secretary Priti Patel agrees. And, scandalously, so does Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who has failed to call for Dick’s resignation.

Establishment politicians are lining up to defend the institutional corruption of the police force.

Conspiracy or class?The sordid relationship between the police, media, and government has once again been brought into the spotlight by this report. This could provoke suspicions of a shadowy network of conspiracy that runs the British establishment.

The report even makes explicit reference to freemasonry. Many of the criminals, journalists, and police officers surrounding the Morgan case were all freemasons and watched each other’s back.

But conspiracy between a few individ-uals, where it exists, is just a symptom of the shared class interests of all the figures who populate the British establishment.

Fundamentally Cressida Dick, Priti Patel, and Rupert Murdoch all have a shared interest in preserving private property, making money, and maintain-ing their power to do so. They are the representatives of a tiny minority of rich and powerful people – the capitalist class – whose existence depends on the continued exploitation and oppression of the rest of us.

Where individual representatives of the capitalist class come into direct con-tact with one another, whether through freemasonry or anything else, then conspiracy and all kinds of criminality can ripple outwards. But this is the symptom, not the cause.

For those of us disgusted by what happened to Daniel Morgan, the solution is not to root out a few bad apples but to take on the capitalist class and the capitalist system as a whole.

Toothless government inquiries, or individual investigative reporters, aren’t capable of this. It is a task for those of us united by our common exploitation and oppression by the bosses: the working class.

This report is the latest event in a se-ries exposing the British establishment for the crooks and gangsters they are.

Dominic Cummings’ recent revelations exposed criminal Tory incompetence that has cost thousands of lives in this pandem-ic. This comes on top of the eye-watering corruption between Tory ministers and their friends, who have been given pandemic-re-lated contracts.

A rotting carcassNot long ago, the BBC was revealed to have lied and produced false bank statements to trick Princess Diana into an interview that undermined the monarchy. The monarchy, meanwhile, is being battered from all sides: from Prince Andrew’s ties to paedophilic banker Jeffery Epstein; to accusations of racism from Meghan and Harry.

Turning back to the police: They adopt-ed a brutal attitude towards the Sarah Everard protests earlier this year, after an innocent woman was murdered by a serving police officer. The anger towards the police has been compounded by the Kill the Bill demonstrations against giving more powers to the police.

The institutional racism of the police means that almost a third of all young black men in London were stopped-and-searched during the lockdown. This adds fuel to the anger ignited during the Black Lives Matter movement. And in April, a serving London police officer was convicted of belonging to a neo-Nazi terrorist group.

Every pillar of the British establishment is being undermined – from the politicians, to the police, to the media, to the monarchy.

The anti-establishment anger building up beneath the surface in society must, in one way or another, find an expression. When it does, the old establishment institu-tions will find that they have no authority with which to stop it.

Organised around a clear socialist programme, the mass movements that are coming will sweep the rotting carcass of the state and the capitalist class – in-cluding all of its politicians, media, and police – into the dustbin of history, where it belongs. ■



Back to Contents

Editorial


what we say a government of liars and cheats...Give the Tories the boot!

Editorial

You couldn’t make it up – well, unless you were a Tory minister. After all, Bo-ris Johnson’s government is made up

of liars and cheats, representing the most backward and obtuse sections of the British ruling class.

Their idle boasts about Brexit-loving ‘Global Britain’, and the return of the so-called buccaneering spirit, is so much hot air in the face of a sharp decline for British capitalism.

Despite their blissful ignorance, British capitalism faces not a renaissance in the coming period, but absolute ruin.

Astonishingly, these buffoons are trumpeting a trade deal with Australia that threatens to undermine swathes of British farming.

So what, they say, if the Australian government allows the use of banned hormones and pesticides? As long as they have their ‘glorious’ deal, to hell with the consequences.

Now that ‘we’ are freed from the ‘shack-les of the EU’, all they can crow about is their new trade deals with Iceland and Liechtenstein!

As the saying goes: those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. And these people are crazy.

Cabinet of charlatansBoris Johnson has never been regarded as a serious figure, but as a clown. His supposed popularity is a myth. He is, in the words of his former political advisor Dominic Cummings, “a gaffe machine clueless about policy”.

John Bercow, who recently jumped ship from the Tories, described the Prime Min-ister as “someone who has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth in a leap year”.

But Johnson is only the figurehead of a government of half-wits, liars and imbeciles.

Even he described his health minister, Matt Hancock, as “totally f***ing hopeless”. While no doubt true, the description is rich coming from a lazy fool who is clearly out of his depth.

Amongst the others in his incompetent cabinet is Priti Patel, the home secretary, who – while dabbling in racism – likes to throw her weight around and terrorise Whitehall officials.

Then we have Liz Truss, the internation-al trade secretary, who thinks that Britain

should be turned into a Singapore-on-sea. The rest are of the same order.

Open splitsEven many of these cabinet ministers have been sidelined by a clique in Number 10. This has led to complaints.

Many years ago, Leon Trotsky pointed out that the British ruling class always takes extreme care to avoid the appearance of division in public.

They are conscious that a ‘third party’ – namely the working class – is observing their every move. Sensing splits, workers could easily draw their own conclusions about the upper class.

These days all caution is thrown to the wind. Ministers are constantly involved in public brawls and open clashes.

The embarrassing public submissions of Dominic Cummings have certainly raised the temperature.

Explosive situationThe Tory Party these days has changed beyond recognition. They are dominated by Little Englanders. This gang has never


Back to Contents

Editorial

been so short-sighted. In its ‘populist’ mode, it has appealed to the mob. Bercow says he regards today’s Conservative Par-ty as “reactionary, populist, nationalistic, and sometimes even xenophobic”.

Johnson has always put political ambi-tions above everything. When asked about the concerns of big business and their opposition to Brexit, the Tory leader replied: “F*** business!”

The Tories have gone their own way. But this is a dangerous path. The combus-tible cocktail they have created could easily blow up in their faces.

Blustering alongDespite their incompetence and corruption, the Tories are riding high in the opinion polls at the moment.

But this is more a reflection of the pa-thetic opposition under ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer.Starmer has simply trailed after Johnson.

And why support the imitation when you can have the real deal?

The Tories’ loss of the solid Chesham and Amersham seat to the Lib Dems re-flected a growing disillusionment with the Johnson government.

But it is also a vote of no confidence in Starmer’s Labour opposition, which lost its deposit in the recent by-election.Neverthe-less, Johnson and the government bluster along regardless.

They are like the Bourbon kings before the French revolution, who learned nothing and forgot nothing.

Kicking the canYes, the Tories are mad. But there is a meth-od in their madness, which is a reflection of the degeneration of British capitalism. They are content to kick the can down the road. But events will soon catch up with them.

Hospital waiting times, for instance, have rocketed, with a massive backlog. The

furlough scheme is winding down, and will come to an end in September, resulting in bankruptcies and large-scale redundancies.

Eventually the bill has to be paid for the massive economic bailout during the pandemic, which has sent the budget deficit leap into the £400 billion stratosphere. And it will be the working class who will be asked to pay.

Dustbin of historyThis government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich has nothing to offer the working class. Instead of reforms, we are in a period of counter-reforms and cuts. The situation is preparing a massive social explosion.

Our task is not only to get rid of this reactionary Tory government, but the rotten system it represents. We are not interested in tinkering with the system.

Instead, capitalism and the whole cap-italist establishment should be thrown into the dustbin of history, where they belong. ■


Grenfell Vigil JUSTICE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARYNico Baldion

Momentum HFKC

On 14 June, supporters of So-cialist Appeal joined thousands of protesters in London for the

silent vigil demanding justice for the victims of the Grenfell tower fire, mark-ing the four-year anniversary of that terrible night.

As the solemn procession began to gather, I spoke with a chartered surveyor who for years prior to the fire had been warning of a potential fire at Grenfell. Since the fire he has faced litigation from the Building Research Establishment for libel.

His crime? Making the factual state-ment on the radio that the BRE, “knew of the risk, or ought to have reasonably known of risks of an ACM cladding fire, and if they knew and didn’t say, or didn’t know, or couldn’t say, then they are not fit to be advisors to the government.”

The case was dropped as evidence emerged during the inquiry regarding the BRE’s close relationship with the deceitful cladding manufacturers, who were involved in manipulating fire tests.

From day one the Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organi-sation has used every means at their disposal to silence Grenfell residents

and experts who raised fire safety con-cerns.

The march concluded in the shadow of the tower where so many innocent lives were lost.

Militant speeches followed with their anger directed against the Tories, building contractors, cladding manufacturers, the local council, the TMO, and the police.

There was a sense from many present at the vigil that the march should not be only a mourning ritual. There must be a struggle for justice.

Speakers pointed out and ap-plauded the actions of Palestine Action, who shut down an Arconic factory - the manufacturer of the flammable cladding at Grenfell and also parts of the military aircraft used on the assaults on Gaza.

It’s an outrage that these companies

remain active, producing profits for the criminal bosses.

Whilst all the while doing their ut-most to lobby the government to avoid justice and prevent regulation of their industry.

They should be expropriated, and their resources placed under democrat-ic workers’ control and management.

It’s the task of the labour movement to make that happen. It’s the task of the labour movement to achieve real justice.

As Lowkey pointed out in his speech, “The government should worry about the justice we give to them. We find them guilty of facilitating social murder… we find the government and the companies guilty of lethal negli-gence.” ■

Image: Steve Eason, flickr.com


Back to Contents

Labour Party


Dylan Cope

Sheffield Hallam CLP

Summer is finally here. But Starmer must be feeling hot under the collar for a different reason. Under

his leadership, the party is lurching from crisis to crisis.

Following the disastrous defeat in Hartlepool, the Chesham and Amersham by-election saw Labour receive just 622 votes. Although always unlikely to win this Tory-turned-Liberal seat, this is the worst that the party has ever performed in a by-election!

Now, further pain is expected in Batley and Spen. Held by Labour for 24 years, Labour only narrowly held onto the constituency in 2019. This time, the Tories are expected to take the seat.

Support from the local Muslim community, who usually back Labour, is falling. George Gallo-way, also running in Batley and Spen, is capitalising on this.

But this is not just a local phenom-enon. Nationally, this same picture of declining support amongst Muslims is repeated. In one recent poll, 37% of British Muslims said that their view of Labour had become more unfavourable in the past 12 months.

The question of Palestine, and the shameful response from Starmer to-wards the recent bombing of Gaza, is cited as a reason for this.

Similarly, there is a perceived failure by the leadership to speak out against Islamophobia, with a majority saying they did not trust the party to effectively tackle it.

In short, Labour is losing trust from one of its key bases of support.

YouthAt the same time, youth support for La-bour is rapidly dropping under Starmer. From the height of the so-called ‘youth-quake’ under Corbyn, a recent poll by YouGov of 18 to 24 year-olds paints a dismal picture.

Support for Labour amongst this demographic has fallen from 56%

in 2019 to just 21% – most

likely shifting to the Green Party, who have seen a parallel jump of 23 percent-age points.

Young people’s turn away from Labour under Starmer is a damning indictment of his leadership.

WorkersUnder Starmer, Labour is also seeing growing discontent from the organised working class. A recent survey by the bakers’ union revealed that 55% of its members would not vote Labour if an election was held tomorrow.

When asked if they would be more likely to vote Labour if the party changed its leader, however, 60% said yes.

Starmer’s antics of cosying up to big business donors is leading to a break-down of trust amongst trade unionists. If the leadership continues down this road, union disaffiliations could ensue.

Of course, this is precisely what the Blairite right wing are hoping for: to break the link between the party and the unions, and make Labour a ‘safe pair of hands’ for capitalism.

ExpulsionsInstead of addressing this haemor-rhaging of support, the leadership’s main concern is continuing its war on left-wing members. Several CLPs have been bureaucratically shut down. Many members – including Howard Beckett – remain suspended after months in limbo. And recently, two supporters of Socialist Appeal were expelled (‘auto-excluded’) as part of this wider purge.

The first is Alex Falconer: vice chair of Truro & Falmouth CLP; a 2019 Labour conference delegate; and a Labour member since 2017.

The second is Josh Cole-Hossain of Norwich South CLP: a member since 2017; a prominent activist in the city,

Labour hemorrhages support

Starmer must g0!


Back to Contents

Labour Party


Ian Hodson

President of BFAWU

The actions of the Labour Party leadership over the last year – es-pecially their slavish acceptance

of the Tories’ disastrous handling over COVID-19, and their efforts to reopen the economy and endanger lives – has left our members feeling angry and betrayed. That is the conclusion of the consultation about Labour amongst our membership.

What were the results of our survey?

Interestingly, a majority of our mem-bers (56%) believed there should be a political link between BFAWU and Labour. But a small majority (53%) felt we should disaffiliate from today’s Labour Party, while 47% felt we should remain affiliated.

The figures indicated that our members have little confidence in the current Labour leader. Asked if they would be more likely to vote for Labour if the party changed its leader, 60% said Yes.

It is clear not only from this recent survey,

but also from conversations with our members, that Labour has lost the support of many ordinary working-class people.

Members from former mining towns, for example, said that they felt their loyalty had been taken for granted by the La-bour Party.

While some looked for political alterna-tives, a growing number said they simply wouldn’t vote.

Incredibly, since the 2019 election, our survey showed that a mere 7% of our members now believed that the Labour Party represents their aims or aspira-

tions.

It is disappointing that neither Starmer nor anyone from his office have attempted to engage with our union.

As a further slap in the face, we saw reports

that Lord Mandel-son was advising the Labour lead-er. The ‘Prince of Darkness’ has made his views clear: that the party

should distance itself from the

trade union move-ment. This now seems to be the

current thinking in the Starmer Labour leadership.

To many in today’s Labour Party, it may seem that our membership is irrelevant, given that BFAWU is a small trade union. Instead, Starmer and co. prefer to chase rich donors; to tacitly support attacks on trade union freedoms and the ‘Spy Cops’ Bill; to wrap themselves up in the Union Jack, rather than defending workers’ priorities.

Promises to end inequality, build more homes, and bring back our national assets – such as water, rail, and energy – into public ownership seem to have been forgotten.

This report highlights the breakdown of trust between the Labour Party and our members. Clearly, this feeling is not going to be addressed by the constant sidelining of the trade unions by the Labour leadership.

Without its trade union base, the Labour Party would become the new Liberal Party – a reserve team for the establish-ment.

The party needs to return to its work-ing-class, socialist principles. If we want a real Labour government, with mass support from working people, we need to return to these values.

Only then can we start delivering on the hopes and aspirations of the communi-ties our members work in.

BAKERS’ UNION SURVEY SHOWS LABOUR NEEDS TO CHANGE

involved in the BLM and Palestine solidar-ity movements; and a prospective candi-date to be a CLP delegate to this year’s Labour conference.

These comrades have been told by the Labour bureaucracy that their sup-port for Socialist Appeal is incompatible with Labour Party membership.

Meanwhile, ex-Tories such as John Bercow are welcomed into the party with open arms!

This hypocrisy speaks volumes.Rather than attacking the Tories,

Starmer’s Labour is attacking its own dedicated members. That is because the right wing’s aim is not to win elec-tions, but to drive out the left and return the party to Blairism.

The base of Labour’s support is the working class, young people, and the

oppressed. It is the interests of these layers that the Labour Party is supposed to represent and defend. Instead, with its flag-waving and appeals to big business, it is currently alienating all three.

Starmer out!This situation cannot continue. Unless the right wing is kicked out, and Labour is fundamentally transformed into a ve-hicle for socialist policies, then the party is ‘heading over a cliff’.

But Starmer and the right wing won’t go without a fight. The left must there-fore organise to drive out Starmer and the saboteurs.

Grassroots Labour activists and trade unionists are already calling for Starmer to go. We urge rank-and-file members and left-led unions to join the Starmer Out campaign: to mobilise so that we can remove the right wing

– starting with Starmer at this year’s Labour conference in September.

As Unite’s Howard Beckett recently put it: “We have to mobilise right here and now, and let all of society know that we reject him [Starmer]. We reject his leadership, or so-called leadership. We want Labour back for socialism, and we demand it immediately.”

Beckett is totally correct. We need a socialist Labour Party that is capable of taking the fight to the Tories and the capitalist system they represent. But Starmer and the right wing stand in our way.

We must fight to remove the right wing and transform the party along so-cialist lines.

But to do this, we must urgently build the Marxist tendency within the labour movement. We urge you to join us in this task. ■


Back to Contents

Operation Barbarossa

Andrew Wagner

80 years ago, on Sunday 22 June 1941, the Nazis unleashed the larg-est invasion force yet assembled on

the people of the Soviet Union. Up to 4.5 million Soviet soldiers – out of a pre-war army of more than 5.3 million – became casualties by the end of 1941. Approxi-mately 40% of the Soviet population fell under Nazi occupation.

The 1941-45 struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was the decisive theatre of World War Two. Of the 13 million Nazi military casualties in WW2, 10.7 million occurred fighting the Soviets.

From the earliest days of the war, the Soviet people in occupied territories waged a vast and heroic partisan struggle against the Nazi invaders. The Red Army dealt crippling blows to the fascist forces

at Stalingrad, Kursk, and during Operation Bagration, which proved to be the greatest military advance in history.

It is absolutely true that the Soviet people were responsible for the victory over Hitler, who had, prior to turning his sights on them, conquered the major capitalist powers of Western Europe and brought the British Empire to its knees. The nationalised planned economy of the Soviet Union armed the struggle against Nazism, outstripping German war production by 1943.

However, the same credit does not ex-tend to Stalin. At every step in the historical process between the Soviet bureaucracy’s consolidation of power in the USSR and the Nazi invasion itself, Stalinism prepared the ground for Hitler: first his ascension to power; then his domination of Europe; and finally his march into the Soviet Union.

Defeats in GermanyThe mighty German revolution could have led to the end of capitalism – not just in Germany, but throughout Europe. This was cruelly defeated, however, due to the betrayal of its leaders: the reformist Social Democrats; and the Stalinist leadership of the Communist International.

Consequently, the German ruling class began to fund and promote the hitherto obscure Nazis as a means of crushing the militant working class.

Tragically, the forces of the working class were divided in the face of the fascist threat. The fully-Stalinised Communist International had adopted the ‘Third Period’ thesis. This held that the German Social Democratic Party were ‘social fascists’.

Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union and how Stalin prepared the way for it



Back to Contents




The German Communists, under direc-tion from Moscow, adopted the position that the Social Democrats were the main enemy of the Communist Party.

In their struggle against the Social Dem-ocrats as the ‘main enemy’, the Communist Party formed a de facto bloc with the Nazis. The Communist Party supported a Nazi-in-itiated 1931 referendum against the Social Democratic government in the state of Prussia, scandalising the Social Democratic workers. Communist militants actively col-laborated with Nazi hooligans to physically attack and break up Social Democratic party and union meetings.

Not only did the errors of Stalinism shipwreck the German revolution, but without them Hitler would never have come to power, setting the scene for Germany’s brutal invasion of Russia.

Stalin’s foreign policyStalin committed another grave crime in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler in late August 1939. Stalin de-cided it would be better to secure tempo-rary peace by partitioning eastern Europe. But this manouevre simply eliminated the Soviet Union as a potential threat to Hitler’s plans, paving the way for the Nazi conquest of their European rivals – above all France – between 1939 and 1941.

The Pact created a wave of dissension and doubt in the ranks of the Communist In-ternational worldwide, who overnight had to make a 180-degree turn from anti-Hitlerism to presenting Nazi Germany as an ‘ally’ of the Soviet Union.

In the years prior to Barbarossa, Stalin concluded a number of trade agreements with Hitler, in another naive attempt to buy ‘peace’ by arming the fascist butchers as they subjugated the working class from Poland to Brittany.

Stalin decapitates Red ArmyBy the late 1930s, the Red Army had become one of the most powerful militaries on Earth. The Soviet five-year plans emphasised heavy industry and defense production in the interest of defending the country from imperialist encroachment – and defending the privileged bureaucracy from the Soviet masses themselves.

Years of hard warfare in the period after the 1917 Russian Revolution produced a Red Army officer corps that included some of the leading, most talented military theo-rists of their time. Chief among them was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most successful Red general of the Civil War.

Precisely because of these outstanding abilities, Stalin identified the Red Army officer corps as the most acute threat to his rule. In early 1937, the NKVD began

arresting junior Red Army officers, alleging ‘counterrevolutionary Trotskyite views’.

By June, the purges reached the heights of the Red Army, claiming Tukhachevsky, seen as closely associated with Trotsky for his role during the Civil War, as well as many other senior officers.

Between 1937 and 1941, the purges wreaked havoc throughout the Red Army. In fact, the purges continued through the first months of the Nazi invasion. The USSR’s Supreme Court later arrived at the figure of 54,714 total victims in the Red Army purges. But the final toll remains unknown.

This was a one-sided civil war against the Soviet armed forces, waged purely for cynical political reasons. Ultimately, three out of five Marshals of the Soviet Union, 80% of divisional and corps commanders, and all 16 military district commanders fell victim to the purges on the eve of the invasion.

Many units experienced a continual revolving door of new commanding officers in the years leading up to the war. This led to a predictable breakdown of discipline and coordination. Morale and combat readiness plummeted, with rates of suicide, drunken-ness, and accidents jumping dramatically.

All of this happened in full view of the im-perialist powers. The German Chief of Staff, von Beck, wrote in 1938 that the Soviet army “could not be considered an armed force” be-cause the purges “sapped morale and turned it into an inert military machine”.

During the planning for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler assuaged his generals’

concerns about the size of the Red Army by simply stating “the army is leaderless”. The purges made the Soviet Union an inviting target for Nazi aggression.

In addition to the physical absence of qualified commanders, the purges also gave rise to an atmosphere of fear and resignation among surviving officers. With the purges continuing through the Nazi in-vasion, Soviet officers were understandably reluctant to deviate from inflexible standing orders or textbook schemas for fear of being reported to the NKVD.

No conspiracy ever conceived could have damaged the Soviet war effort against Nazism more than Stalin’s purges accom-plished in fact.

The road to warDespite clear indications of German mili-tary buildup in Eastern Europe, and even intelligence reports pinpointing the day of the attack, Stalin was concerned above all with avoiding a possible provocation with Hitler’s forces along the border. He ignored the fact that the Germans had evacuated their embassy, and that all Ger-man-flagged ships had left Soviet ports.

More than 300 Nazi reconnaissance flights entered Soviet airspace in the weeks prior to the attack, but were totally unopposed. Communist railway workers in Sweden also sent warnings to the Soviet government of a military buildup, but to no avail. The vast majority of Soviet units along

stalin and ribbentrop 1939


Back to Contents



the border were completely flatfooted on 22 June 1941, and this led to their swift defeat.

Hitler expected that a rapid, stunning defeat would provoke a political crisis in the Soviet Union that would lead to the disinte-gration of the Soviet government. However, Nazi intelligence completely underestimat-ed the sheer size of the Red Army, as well as the USSR’s capacity for mobilisation. This ultimately rendered Nazi plans for a quick victory unrealisable, compelling them to drive deeper into the Soviet heartland.

CatastropheAt 3:00am on 22 June 1941, squadrons of German long-range bombers crossed the Soviet frontier to bomb Soviet cities as distant as Leningrad and Sevastopol. At dawn, swarms of German planes ap-peared above Soviet airfields in the border regions, destroying more than 1,200 Red Air Force craft, mostly while they were still on the ground.

The Nazis controlled the skies over the battlefield for the first decisive weeks of their offensive, allowing them to pummel Soviet reinforcements, wreck Soviet logistics, and bomb Red Army positions with impunity.

In the first days of the war, Soviet communications broke down, and accurate information about conditions at the front was impossible to discern from Moscow.

After a few days, Stalin, despondent, withdrew from activity for two weeks. Retreat-ing to his personal dacha at the end of June, Stalin told his subordinates: “Everything is lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” The Soviet people would not hear from Stalin until 3 July.

Soviet generals spent the first weeks of the war hurriedly trying to patch together a defense and organise the planned coun-ter-strikes against German spearheads, but were out-maneuvered and overwhelmed at nearly every turn. Within three weeks, Nazi forces swept through the Baltic republics, positioning themselves for an advance on Leningrad.The Nazi armies had advanced more than 600 kilometers into Soviet territory, and inflicted more than 750,000 casualties on the Red Army, destroying more than 10,000 tanks and nearly 4,000 aircraft in the process.

However, by mid-July, Nazi armies, which expected to encounter little re-sistance in the Soviet heartland, began running into huge Soviet formations that German intelligence was unaware existed.

Trotsky wrote in 1936 that the main advantages of the USSR in war would be its vast territory and enormous population, and these two factors were beginning to make themselves felt.

OccupationThe Nazi occupation was extremely brutal. Heinrich Himmler set a goal of re-ducing the Slavic population to 30 million people; and Herman Göring boasted to Mussolini’s Foreign Minister that 20-30 million people in Russia would starve in 1941.

Modern estimates of the actual toll of this policy indicate that 4.4 million Soviet citizens died from starvation-related causes during the war.

By the end of the war, nearly three mil-lion Soviet citizens were forced into slave labour in German industry. Nazi forces, upon occupying a town, routinely executed several people to terrify the population into submission.

Orders issued on 19 May 1941 called for: “Ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, irregulars, saboteurs, Jews, and total elimination of all active and passive resistance.”

All of this shows the folly of the Nazis’ expectation of a political crisis that would topple the Stalinist government. Their poli-cies seem purposely intended to drive the population into the arms of Stalin. Faced with the choice between extermination at the hands of the Nazis or the planned economy won by the revolution, the over-whelming majority of workers and peasants rallied to the Soviet cause in short order.

Stalin’s disastrous roleOn 29 July, General Zhukov proposed withdrawing Soviet forces from the Kiev region to reinforce the central sector and shorten the Red Army’s defensive front, allowing them to better concentrate their depleted forces. For this sensible sug-gestion, Stalin removed Zhukov, his most capable commander, as Chief of Staff.

Stalin feared that the abandonment of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, would send a poor signal to his British ‘allies’. Thus Sta-lin was more concerned with his standing in the eyes of ‘democratic’ imperialism, which would do nothing to stop Hitler at this stage, than the safety of Moscow and the vast number of Red Army soldiers.

The Nazi advance on Kiev began in early August. By 16 September, Nazi forc-es completed their encirclement of Red Army troops near Kiev. Orders from Soviet command to withdraw finally came, but much too late. Of the more than 750,000 Red Army troops fighting near Kiev on 1 September, only 15,000 escaped.

The destruction of the Red Army in Ukraine was an unmitigated calamity, opening a southern axis for the coming advance on Moscow and depriving the beleaguered Red Army defenders in the central sector of much-needed reinforce-ments.


german troops at soviet border 1941


Back to Contents


Losses incurred exceeded those in the June border battles. The entire Red Army command staff foresaw this disaster. Only one man – Joseph Stalin – prevented them from doing anything about it.

The proletariat and the warThe USSR’s nationalised planned econo-my was an inestimable advantage in the struggle against Nazism. In late June, plans were made to move industrial plants from the western Soviet Union to the Urals and Siberia, so the Nazis could not capture them. This was an enormous and complicated effort, and the state planning agency GOSPLAN coordinated it. The evacuation required 1.5 million railcars.

In the end, by November 1941, more than 1,500 factories were transferred to the east. They began producing almost immediately, often in improvised log cabins, or even outdoors by the light of enormous bonfires. This is more impressive given the sub-zero temperatures in which much of this transpired.

This was a severe blow to Nazi plans. The experience of capitalist France, which allowed its entire armaments industry to fall into Nazi hands intact, showed that such measures were impossible in a private-ly-owned, market economy.

Workers voluntarily undertook longer shifts in the factories to churn out war ma-terials. Soviet authorities also enlisted the urban population to build trenches, bunkers, minefields, and other defenses to aid the Red Army’s defensive battles.

As the situation grew more desperate, dozens of Peoples’ Militia divisions were raised, mainly from militant industrial work-ers.

The battle for MoscowNazi armies completed the encirclement of Leningrad in late September, sealing off the birthplace of the Russian Revolution. Desperate Soviet forces under Zhukov’s command halted the final German push into Leningrad’s outskirts by manning heavy tanks that had just rolled off the city’s assembly lines.

In the face of this resistance, and eager to resume the advance on Moscow, Hitler ordered his armies to settle in for a blockade and continuous bombardment of the city, while withdrawing armored units engaged there back to the central sector. The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days and killed nearly two million Soviet civilians and mili-tary personnel.

Hitler returned his focus to the Moscow front. Nazi forces assembled an army of nearly two million men, 1,000 tanks, 14,000 artillery pieces, and 1,390 warplanes. This

army struck the exhausted and depleted Red Army forces near Smolensk, Via’zma, and Briansk – a force of 1.2 million that could muster only 990 mostly obsolete tanks and 667 aircraft.

As Nazi forces surged forward, Stalin again gave inflexible orders for the army to stand its ground, and another massive enriclement ensued. More than a million Red Army troops were lost in this operation, called Typhoon, with 688,000 becoming prisoners.

Following this disaster, the Red Army had little available to defend the direct approach-es to Moscow. However, in mid-October, torrential rains turned the Russian roads into rivers of mud, making them nearly impassa-ble for the German mechanised forces. This slowed the fascist advance considerably, and gave the Red Army more time to assemble reinforcements before the city.

Nazi supply lines had grown exceeding-ly long and were also hampered by the mud and increasing partisan attacks. Luftwaffe squadrons were flying out of improvised air-fields, which lacked the hangars needed to keep their aircraft operable in poor weather. In contrast, the Soviets were fighting outside of a major industrial and transportation hub, and Soviet aircraft were flying out of perma-nent military airports.

In early December, temperatures plunged to -34°C. Tank engines needed to be left on at all times or else they would freeze, and Nazi fuel supplies depleted rap-idly. Frostbite and infections swept through the invading armies, which were unprepared for the elements.

On 1 December, the Red Army began a massive counter-offensive against Nazi forces outside of Moscow. The Red Army now had the advantage. Zhukov’s forces cut off and destroyed the Nazi spearheads north and south of Moscow, and a Soviet offensive began along the entire Moscow front by mid-December.

The Soviet counter-offensive provoked a crisis in the Nazi command staff. Between

November 1941 and January 1942, four senior German commanders – Reichenau, Rundstedt, von Brauchitsch, and Bock – suffered heart attacks, ailing under the compound stress of the Soviet offensive and Hitler’s unrealizable demands.

After several weeks of fighting without supplies in the snow and freezing tempera-tures, morale in Nazi forces collapsed.

After MoscowAs the war progressed, the surviving Red Army officer corps painfully absorbed the lessons of their early defeats. Command-ers who had proven themselves under fire rose through the ranks; and the Red Army yet again reorganised itself in the heat of the struggle, yielding better results as the war continued.

The relocated Soviet factories in the Urals and Siberia churned out more than 4,500 tanks, 3,000 aircraft, and 14,000 artillery pieces by the spring of 1942. The Soviet economy went on to overwhelm the Nazi war effort.

Stalinism’s failure to topple capitalism in country after country during the revolutionary periods of the 1920s and 30s condemned the Soviet Union – and the world – to the horrible suffering later unleashed by Hitler.

Stalin crippled the Red Army on the eve of this titanic conflict; then led it in blundering fashion to disaster after disaster in the war’s first months.

Only those gains of the Russian Revolu-tion that survived the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR – the militant proletariat, the Red Army, and the nationalised, planned Soviet economy – were able to stop fas-cism’s inexorable advance.

80 years after Barbarossa, Marxists are still fighting to end the system that gave rise to this horror.

The best way to honor those who fell in the struggle against Hitler is to complete the Bolsheviks’ task of international socialist revolution, so we can put an end to imperial-ism, war, and barbarism forever. ■

soviet red army 1942



Back to Contents

International

Daniel Morley

Earlier this month, Joe Biden assem-bled the G7 with one clear purpose: to show China a united front of

‘Western democracies’, all standing under one spotless banner. Yet so fractured is Western imperialism that the meeting succeeded only in airing the West’s dirty, tattered laundry.

The US-China conflict is central to the future of capitalism. It is a giant question mark hanging over the entire system. US imperialism cannot tolerate a serious rival to its domination. And yet, precisely because China is such a serious rival, there is little it can do to stop it. China is now too big and powerful; its economy too entwined with that of the US, and all of US imperialism’s allies, to be isolated.

The US has no hope of bullying China into submission, so it is gathering the hero-ic forces of democracy to lead by example instead – to show to the world that the West is still strong and that it stands for freedom, human rights, and of course trade wars with China.

International disorderPart of the US strategy was to use this summit to relaunch the US as the true leader of the world - the defender of

the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ – after a temporary aberration in which the defender-in-chief became sab-oteur-in-chief under Trump.

A ‘rules-based international order’ would benefit the US, because naturally the rules are drawn up to benefit the existing dominant imperialist power, as they always have been, and so would constrain China.

Generally, if you are going to relaunch the ‘rules based international order’ at a meeting, it is probably best to make sure the host country isn’t in the process of a very high profile act of international rule breaking. And yet that is precisely what the UK has been doing.

Just as the G7 was meeting, Boris Johnson was threatening to unilaterally break the Northern Ireland protocol he had only just signed with the EU.

Brexit itself has been a gigantic adver-tisement for the disunity and incompetence of the West; so much so that the Northern Ireland protocol Johnson wants to ignore also threatens the very existence of the ‘United’ Kingdom itself.

The anger provoked by these she-nanigans seeped into the G7 meetings, overshadowing everything else. Macron publicly attacked Johnson; and Merkel even refused to bump elbows with him. China must be shaking in its boots at this

Western unity!

Vaccine diplomacyAs if that wasn’t enough, the UK gov-ernment has also just massively cut its foreign aid budget. This meant it failed to deliver key COVID aid to India – a country not only in desperate need, but also a key one for the strategy of containing China.

This approach has been repeated on a larger scale by the entire West when it comes to vaccines: hoarding supplies and protecting their own pharmaceutical giants’ patents, instead of allowing vaccines to be produced all over the world by sharing technology..

One of the G7’s headline agreements was to donate one billion vaccine doses to poor countries. But this is thought to be less than 10% of what is needed.

China, by contrast, is now the world’s largest producer of vaccines. They will shortly announce more doses for poor countries than the G7 could muster – heavily subsidising production to achieve diplomatic ends.

Breaking ranksThe G7 is unable to agree to a public line on Russia or China. France and Germany


g7 summit airs west’s dirty laundry


Back to Contents

are breaking ranks on Russia. France sees an opportunity to gain diplomatic independence by being more friendly to Russia. And German companies make too much money out of Russia for the German government to back up US bellig-erence against Moscow.

According to the Financial Times:“Emmanuel Macron, the president

of France, stressed the need for Europe to maintain its ‘independence when it comes to our strategy to China’. This sentiment would be shared by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and even, to an extent, by Boris Johnson. Britain’s prime minister is described by one exasperated official, from an allied nation, as ‘still wanting to have his cake and eat it on China’.” (Financial Times 13.6.21)The same disunity is to be found in an-

other imperialist project revived by Biden: the military ‘Quad’ that is made up of the US, India, Australia and Japan, one which serves no purpose other than to intimidate China with massive military exercises.

But despite meeting recently, the Econ-omist states: “Security co-operation among Quad members has limits. Not only is India, long averse to formal alliances, reluctant to join ‘freedom of navigation’ patrols in the South China Sea; so too are Australia and Japan”. (The Economist, 12.6.21)

Tax agreementEven the celebrated global corporation tax agreement of the G7 reveals the same division.

This is clearly designed to ensure US tech monopolies like Amazon will actually pay less tax overall. But the deal will ex-empt offshore tax havens linked to London,

such as the Isle of Mann, Jersey, and the Cayman Islands, as well as tax havens in Europe like Lichtenstein.

But more telling was that the G7 meeting only advertised these divisions once again when the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak tried to get the City of London itself exempt.

This was nothing but an effort to claw back an edge for London, after Brexit led to many finance operations moving to Am-sterdam and other places in the EU.

In other words, it was another example of G7 countries publicly fighting against one another for privileges at the rest of the world’s expense.

No wonder Jeremy Shapiro of the Euro-pean Council on Foreign Relations report-ed that “there is considerable scepticism in Washington that a divided, self-interested Europe will ever manage much support for US efforts against China.”

Globalisation in retreatThe very reason for the convening of the G7 in these circumstances is why it can-not meet the tasks set for it. Capitalism is too crisis-stricken, and US imperialism too weakened, to impose a united front that would genuinely contain China.

When the G7 was originally formed in 1973, it collectively comprised around 80 per cent of world GDP. Today, it accounts for about 40 per cent.

As Western imperialism declines, it resorts to protectionist measures that will only depress the world economy, without achieving the goal of preventing China’s rise.

Take a look at Donald Trump’s main policy – his trade war with China, which is being continued by Biden.

In November 2020, the US trade deficit with China was 70% greater than it had been in January 2017, when Donald Trump

took office. China has weathered the COVID economic storm

better than any other major economy; and as a result its exports are booming despite the trade war.

According to The Econ-omist:

“Nearly 600 companies responded to an annual sur-vey of business confidence conducted by the European

Union Chamber of Commerce in China, which was published

on June 8th. They described surging optimism about China, with economic growth having resumed far more quickly than expected… Fully 91% of the firms said they would maintain their investments in China, rather than move them elsewhere. Over a quarter of manufacturers are bringing supply chains more completely into China, five times as many as are moving them offshore.” (12.6.21, our emphasis)In other words, US export controls

on sensitive technologies are having the opposite effect than intended – rather than encouraging European capitalists to pull all production out of China, so as to continue having access to US technology, they are moving production out of the US, so as to maintain access to the Chinese market.

Capitalism’s impasseIt is for these reasons that the relaunching of US imperialism at the G7 will fail. But it does not follow from this that China will supplant the US and the G7.

Chinese power is predicated entirely on the growth of its economy. However, Chinese capitalism, like any other, is subject to the laws of the market, which means crises. The Chinese economy is living on the never-never, constantly ac-cumulating more debt and exacerbating overproduction.

In order to escape this crisis of overproduction, China must export, and expand its own imperialist sphere of influ-ence. This is the meaning behind its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative.

Therefore, whilst US imperialism is too weak to contain China, by the same token world capitalism is too weak to facilitate the endless rise of China.

What capitalism is faced with is a deadlock between two imperialist powers which cannot be resolved. This means that the period ahead is one of trade wars and proxy wars, which will only provide an additional drag on a crisis-ridden system. It will be a period of social turmoil, and inevitably also of rising class struggle.

The G7 is yet another summit of platitudes and handshakes, barely con-cealing bitter division and impotence. The fact that this is the best it can offer after a liberal reset, and in this moment of dire need amidst a global pandemic, demonstrates clearly the impasse and bankruptcy of the capitalist system. ■


The G7 is yet another summit of platitudes and handshakes, barely concealing bitter division and impotence.


Back to Contents

International

israel:new government, same rotten politics

Franz Rieger

and Francesco Merli

On 20 June, Israel’s Knesset (parliament) elected a new gov-ernment by a narrow majority of

one: 60 for to 59 against – ending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 year-long hold on power.

The very composition of the coalition that has ousted Netanyahu is proof of the profound crisis of Israel’s political system. In a desperate attempt to find a way out of the impasse, President Rivlin entrusted the ‘moderate liberal’, Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, with forming a new government.

Fragile coalitionLapid set about forging an extremely peculiar alliance. On the right, the coali-tion comprises the far-right Yamina party and its chairman Naftali Bennet, who has been sworn in as Prime Minister. He represents the national-religious settler movement.

Then there is Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, which is also a right-wing, pro-settler and racist party. The coalition also included the nation-al-conservative Gideon Sa’ar, a longtime member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, who has now established his own list.

However, to achieve a parliamentary majority, Lapid needed the support of even more parties. The so-called ‘Zion-ist Left’ hurried to his rescue.

The social democratic Avoda, and the left-liberal Meretz party were quick to

offer their support. The cherry on top is the inclusion of the Arab-Islamist Ra’am party. In surreal scenes, Ra’am’s leader shook hands with the fanatical Zionist, Naftali Bennett, as a deal to join the government was struck.

This absurd and extremely unstable alliance is only united by one thing: op-position to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s attempt to twist the situation in his favour was part of the reason for the escalation of violence by the Israeli state in Jerusalem and later in Gaza.

Netanyahu calculated he could kill this alliance stone dead through a new war against the Palestinians, which would drive a wedge between the Zionist right and left, and would make it impos-sible for the Arab Ra’am party to join a coalition with right-wing settler parties.

However, after two weeks of ruth-less bombardment, which left over 260 Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead, and thousands of lives destroyed, Netan-yahu discovered to his dismay that he had not only failed to prevent a coalition against him, but he had perhaps even strengthened it.

Netanyahu and the bourgeoisieBy claiming to be the defender of the Jews against the ‘Arab threat’, the Israe-li ruling class rallies the Israeli workers and youth behind the Israeli state – that is to say, behind the defense of the fun-damental interests of the capitalist class.

Of course this idea is a smoke-screen hiding a different reality: Jewish workers and Jewish capitalists have

fundamentally antagonistic interests. Israel is a country with very high social inequality, where 20 percent of the popu-lation lives below the poverty line.

To keep their system in power, the Israeli capitalist class has always rested on nationalism and the oppression of the Palestinians. The Zionist project to expand Israel as a homeland for the Jews is being carried out through con-stant land grabs at the expense of the Palestinian population and by waging wars against its neighbours.

These policies were designed to fuel a siege mentality and anti-Arab hysteria amongst the Israeli workers and youth. Racism and scare tactics are intended to blur class differences and rally the Jewish-Israeli workers behind the Israeli state every time the danger of an exis-tential threat to Israel is evoked.

Benjamin Netanyahu perfected this method. But to the chagrin of the Israeli bourgeoisie, Netanyahu increasingly re-lied on these policies not for the further-ance of the interests of Israeli capitalism as a whole, but merely to stabilise his own position of power.

We’ve seen the methods from his playbook deployed in the Gaza bombing and invasion in 2014; the racist Jewish Nation State Law introduced in 2018; the loudly announced (but never implement-ed) annexation of the West Bank in the spring of last year, and the bombing of Gaza over the last few weeks.

As Netanyahu’s popularity began to decline, he relied more and more on



Back to Contents

International


right-wing and far-right parties, in par-ticular those of the settlers’ movement. This temporarily kept him in power, but at the cost of alienating a growing section of the Israeli population, in par-ticular workers, youth and urban middle classes.

Moreover, an increasing number of Israelis have been able to see that the question of war and peace is decided on the basis of Netanyahu’s personal power considerations and has nothing to do with the defence of the interests of the majority. His policies have eroded the effectiveness of a core tactic that the Israeli capitalist class uses to bolster its rule. This is a serious threat to Israeli capitalism’s long-term stability.

...As bad as the lastFrom the point of view of the working class and the oppressed Palestinian people, this government offers nothing. Its programme can be described as, ‘Ne-tanyahu’s politics without Netanyahu’.

The fact that the so-called ‘Zionist Left’ (Avoda and Meretz) have joined the government cannot disguise the govern-ment’s right-wing agenda.

The so-called Labour party (Avo-da) and Meretz have shown their true colours. The supposedly ‘left’ Zionist parties always tail the right-wing Zionist parties. While portrayed as progressive, they are always ready to support one group of right-wing and racist settler parties against another.

Indeed the very notion of ‘left’ Zi-onism is a contradictio in adjecto. It is impossible to both defend the interests of the working class and share the na-tionalist Zionist ideology of the Israeli ruling class.

Revolutionary alternativeThis ‘anti-Netanyahu alliance’ is excep-tionally weak and it won’t be long before bitter infighting breaks out.

If a genuine revolutionary party exist-ed in Israel today, the splits in the ruling class and the increasingly discredited and splintered nature of its parties would present an opportunity to cleave away a layer of the Jewish-Israeli workers from the Israeli capitalist class and towards an independent class position.

However, there does not yet exist a party on the Israeli left with clear ideas capable of utilising this opportunity.

Against discrimination, perpetual war, the oppression of the Palestinian people, and the corruption of the estab-lished parties, the biggest party of the

Israeli left is Hadash. This is an alliance dominated by the Communist Party of Israel (Ma’Ki).

Hadash raises the demand for more “democracy”. But what does that mean? Bourgeois parliamentary democracy? The corruption and the haggling for posts, through which the ruling class decides which of their representatives should “represent and trample” the masses, as Marx once wrote?

The truth is that there can be no end to Israeli imperialism and the oppression of the Palestinians on a capitalist basis; nor can there be an end to corruption and exploitation. What we have in Israel is not some form of ‘unfortunate’ and ac-cidental state of things. This is the best that capitalism can offer.

What is needed is not moralising or abstract demands for ‘democracy’ or ‘peace’. What is needed is a struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois Israeli state.

Class struggleIn the past weeks, we have seen a hero-ic mass movement of Palestinian youth emerge.

But instead of organising them, going from neighbourhood to neigh-bourhood, coordinating the movement for the revolutionary overthrow of the Israeli state, Hadash preached a tooth-less pacifism.

Each imperialist ‘peace’ is based on racism, discrimination, land grabs and evictions, and the violent suppression of the protests by the Palestinian people. It is periodically cut across by imperialist war, which pursues the same aims by other means. War in turn is followed by a new imperialist ‘peace’ in an endless cycle of oppression.

The class interests behind this mech-anism of oppression must be mercilessly exposed. What is necessary is a struggle to overcome the reactionary nationalism fostered by the Israeli state, by pro-moting class struggle, class solidarity, and proletarian internationalism in the context of a revolutionary wave that is shaking capitalism and imperialism on a world scale.

What is needed in Israel-Palestine is a genuinely re-volutionary Marxist organisation that can offer a concrete perspective for the revolutionary over-throw of the Israeli capitalist state and the establishment of the Socialist Fed-eration of the Middle East, within which both the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian people could live peacefully along with all the other peoples of the region.

Such an organisation has yet to be forged.

Accomplishing this is the pressing task of the most progressive and radical workers and youth throughout the whole of historical Palestine. ■


Back to Contents

International

Joe Attard

Since his inauguration, Joe Biden’s ‘statesmanlike’ presidency has earned plaudits from establishment

mouthpieces worldwide. “More than Trump ever did, Biden is making America great again,” gushed the liberal Observer news-paper.

Far from overseeing a new era of pros-perity, however, Biden seeks to rescue the capitalist system from an existential crisis, while resolving none of the fundamental problems facing workers and youth in the US and internationally.

And while he may put on a kinder face than his predecessor, the brutal, exploita-tive, racist nature of US capitalism remains fundamentally unchanged under Biden’s watch.

Despite the myths and hype, the reality is that ‘Uncle Joe’ is no saint or saviour, but the leading representative of capitalist imperialism.

‘Build back better’Central to Biden’s programme is his ‘Build Back Better’ agenda. This has earned glowing comparisons from the establish-ment press to FDR’s ‘New Deal’ spending programme, which sought to stabilise US capitalism during the Great Depression.

Similarly, the aim of Biden’s $7 trillion package is not to save working-class house-holds, but to save US capitalism.

Alongside bailing out big business, there is also a protectionist side to the plan, with state subsidies used to shield American firms in the face of Chinese competition.

Imperialist interests also underpin Bid-en’s plans for climate-related investment, the aim of which is to outcompete China in green technologies and Russia in natural gas.

Meanwhile, calls for student debt cancel-lation, a $15 per hour minimum wage, and universal healthcare have been dropped or ignored.

In short, Biden’s spending measures are a testament to the parasitic nature of US capitalism, which is sustained only by the iron lung of public finances, and which is incapable of meeting society’s basic needs.

Racism and oppressionFollowing four years of the reactionary bigot Donald Trump, oppressed groups surely breathed a sigh of relief after Bid-en’s inauguration. But what is his real re-cord when it comes to challenging racism and oppression?

In relation to Black Lives Matter, it is notable that police shootings under Biden have remained steady, with 406 killings since January (at the time of writing). The change of personnel in the White House has made no material difference.

Police racism and brutality are not a case of a few bad apples. The entire US law enforcement apparatus is rotten to its core, given its role as the armed defender of the exploitative, racist capitalist system. And Biden himself is part-and-parcel of this vile state apparatus.

For example, he penned the 1994 Crime Bill, which led to the mass incarceration of (primarily) black and Latino men. And he consistently supported the disastrous ‘War on Drugs’, which again led to the mass death and imprisonment of mostly young, working-class black and Latino people.

Meanwhile, little has fundamentally changed in terms of US immigration policy under Biden, whose administration arrested 170,000 migrants at the border in March alone.

This is the highest number in 15 years, and includes thousands of unaccompanied children.

Such callousness is hardly surprising, given Biden’s role in organising mass de-portations under the Obama administration, which first introduced the policy of caging migrants at the border.

America FirstAny hope that President Biden would pursue a policy of ‘peace, love and under-standing’ with America’s rivals has been dashed. His stance on China, if anything, represents a hardening.

Under Biden, we continue to witness the rise of protectionism. For example, the Bid-en administration has been a major player in the disgusting spectacle of vaccine na-tionalism. The US has sat on tens of millions of excess doses; continued the ‘wartime’ policy, instituted by Trump, of embargoing the export of COVID-19 products; and (until recently) used the US’ veto at the WTO to reject any waiver of vaccine patent rights.

Elsewhere, Biden is continuing the bloody work of US imperialism, albeit without Trump’s theatrics: defending Israeli airstrikes on Gaza; supporting the Saudi re-gime’s war in Yemen, despite initial promis-es of American withdrawal; and maintaining vicious economic sanctions on Cuba.

Meanwhile, his much-lauded interna-tional tax reforms are merely an attempt to use America’s financial clout to keep its businesses competitive – bullying other capitalist countries into following his lead, so that US companies do not lose out. These are not the actions of a presidential Robin Hood, but of an imperialist hypocrite.

No support for Biden!Given the dearth of genuine left-wing leadership, it is understandable that ordi-nary workers and youth around the world have certain illusions in Biden. Especially following the reckless, racist, reactionary madness of the Trump administration.

It is the duty of socialists and labour ac-tivists internationally, however, to dispel any illusions in Biden. He is no ally or role model for our movement – but the chosen figure-head of a murderous system, rotten-ripe for overthrow, and will serve its interests to the last. ■

joe biden: fact and fiction


Back to Contents

Review

Caoimhe Lyons

A new documen-tary ‘The 8th’ has hit cinema and TV

screens, detailing how the 8th amendment – the subsection of the Irish constitution that placed a pregnant person’s life on a par with the life of an unborn embryo or fetus – was removed from Ireland’s constitution.

The amendment was added to the constitution in 1983 by referendum with a margin of two to one. Thirty five years later it was removed by the same mar-gin – a seismic shift in Irish society in a single generation. The film follows the story of the activists involved in the fight to repeal the amendment, focussing on Ailbhe Smith and, to a lesser extent, artist Andrea Horan.

The documentary certainly does a wonderful and emotive job in capturing the stories of those involved in the cam-paigning. What the documentary perhaps missed was the real story of the amend-ment itself.

A number of women’s voices ring throughout the documentary, detailing horrific stories that demonstrate the brutal-ity and injustice of the amendment. While encompassing all narratives present dur-ing the campaign it never strayed from the cases of those materially impacted.

One woman describes a night where she was bleeding on her kitchen floor and was stepped over by her partner on the way to the fridge. He turned the kitchen light off upon his exit, leaving this woman – like so many others – literally suffering in the dark.

The documentary also told the infa-mous and harrowing story of Savita Hal-appanavar, a tragedy that shook Ireland, galvanising support for repeal among the public. Denied access to an emergency abortion, Savita was allowed to die unnec-essarily on a hospital bed. The documen-tary included an emotional interview with her husband, showing the scars that this barbaric amendment continues to leave on so many lives.

Role of the church

From the formation of the Free State a century ago,

the Catholic Church has been all but an extension of the state in Ireland.

During the documentary, a visit is paid to the site of one of the mother and baby homes in Tuam, County Galway. The heart wrenching truth of eight hundred infant bodies – infants left in the protection of the church – is laid bare.

The story of such slave houses, where so-called ‘fallen women’ and young chil-dren were abused and left to rot, exposes the hypocrisy of an institution which claims it is protecting unborn life. It was only in the 1990s that the horror of these places was brought to light, forming a massive crack in the church’s hold over peoples minds.

The film focuses on the key year of 2018, the year of the referendum, captur-ing the mood that existed at mass demon-strations, where thousands of people raised slogans such as, ‘get your rosaries off my ovaries’ – a complete rejection of the church and its abuses.

However, today the Catholic Church retains much of its power in Irish society – running schools and hospitals. It retains its ill-gotten wealth and continues to form a component part of the Irish ruling class.

Because of the Church’s ongoing hold over education, sex education is simply not addressed in many schools to this day. Perhaps for stylistic reasons, this point was downplayed in the documentary. But these omissions meant that a certain dimension – in terms of both context and historical narrative – was missing.

Seismic shiftIreland has undergone huge changes in the past few decades, developing into a more urban society with a young, edu-cated working class, which is no longer willing to live under the church’s domina-tion. A seismic shift has taken place at the foundations of Irish society.

In the context of a deepening capitalist crisis in Ireland and internationally, work-ing people, and above all working-class women, are beginning to awaken to

political activity. In this sense the Repeal earthquake is part of a global awakening of the oppressed, occurring at the same time as mighty struggles for abortion rights have erupted in Poland and much of Latin America.

Yet the focus of the film, on murals and slogans, and intermittent montages of newspaper headlines, leaves one with the impression that the referendum was fundamentally decided by language, and how each side framed its arguments.

The final chapter of this struggle is yet to be written.

Many women today still cannot access abortion services due to the suffocating influence and control of the Church. Abor-tion services are provided by just one-in-nine GPs in Ireland, and in just over half of the country’s maternity hospitals.

The political establishment at Leinster House, who were hand in glove with the Church for decades, see the issue as settled – but it is not. The fight to achieve full liberation for women can never be truly actualised without the destruction of capitalism. ■

‘THE TH’DOCUMENTING THE

WOMEN TO CHOOSESTRUGGLE OF IRISH

REVI

EW:

In the context of a deepening capitalist crisis in Ireland and internationally, working people, and above all working-class women, are beginning to awaken to political activity.


Back to Contents

Adverts

stock up on summer reading with wellred!Wellred books is the

publishing house of the International Marxist

Tendency. Recently we have published a history of the first ever working class mass movement, Chartist Revolution, the history of the German revolution Germany

1918 - 33: Socialism or Barbarism, and the history of the overthrow of the Franco dictatorship The Great Betrayal.

We also republish Marxist classics, including recently The First Five Years of the Communist International, The Civil War in

France, and a newly translated and improved version of Trotsky’s Sta-lin. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been pub-lished. We also stock a wide range of literature from other publishers. Our aim is to help spread Marxist ideas.

order here!

http://wellred.net


Back to Contents

Letters

[email protected]

Justice for Dalian Atkinson!Dear Editor,

Recently, on 23 June, a police officer was found guilty of manslaughter for the death of ex-footballer Dalian Atkinson.

Anderson, a black man, had been behaving erratically (likely an acute mental health episode) when he was tasered for six times the recommended duration by the police officer. Once on the floor, the police officer proceeded to kick him in the head. One witness described his “head snapping back” from the impact. Paramedics were unable to save his life.

While the court ruling is the first time in 35 years that a police officer has been charged for murder/manslaughter for some-one in police custody, this offers little justice or relief to Atkinson’s family or other victims or police brutality.

In the UK, black people with mental health issues are 40% more likely to receive mental health support through the criminal justice system, “less likely to receive psy-chological therapies, more likely to be com-pulsorily admitted for treatment, more likely to be on a medium or high secure ward and be more likely to be subject to seclusion or restraint” (according to statistics by mental health charity Mind).

To fight this discrimination, we need to do away with the bourgeois law courts and police force, replacing them with democrat-ically-accountable workers drawn from the local community. We also need a massive funding and recruitment drive in NHS men-tal health services.

None of this is possible under capitalism. To fight for justice for Atkinson and countless others like him, we must overthrow this rotten system and the racism it relies on to survive.

Comradely, Dr Raj Mistry

STARMER’S CHANGING TONEDear Editor,

In January 2020, I read an interview with Keir Starmer, in which he said: “I am a so-cialist… not just pretending”. He also added that “certain services simply shouldn’t be in the private sector”. He then added that Jere-my Corbyn had been “vilified” in the national press. How times have changed since then.

Sir Keir was seeking votes to become leader of those workers - hundreds of

thousands of them - who had joined the Labour Party because of Corbyn and his attempts to move his party from the old cen-tre-right consensus of parliamentary politics.

One thing that wasn’t reported on at the time was the source of Starmer’s campaign funding. His main opponent from the left, Rebecca Long-Bailey, openly listed all funding sources as soon as the leadership campaign got underway. Sir Keir did say that he had received £100,000 from a local lawyer but did not reveal the names of the other big donors at the time. This meant that by the time the donations were officially logged into the official record, the leadership election was over.

Then we saw that the money had come from all sorts of wealthy New Labour and anti-Corbyn types. We might assume that they were all at ease with Sir Keir’s brand of ‘socialism’.

Remember, in 2016, a year after Jeremy Corbyn was first elected leader, Starmer was one of the shadow cabinet members who resigned in a timed sequence in an attempt to try and force Corbyn out.

We also now know that in 2017 attempts were made to undermine the Labour elec-tion campaign from within. Again, Starmer has nothing to say about this.

Eric Krieger, London

BRUSH STRIKERSDear Editor,

I recently visited striking field engineers at Brush Electrical Machines in Ashby, Leices-tershire. The company owners, venture-cap-italists Melrose, are using fire and rehire tactics to impose new contracts on workers that will cut salaries by up to £15k.

These are proud and skilled engineers who were classed as key workers for travel-ling the globe during the pandemic to install power station generators.

Requests for the company books to be opened to see evidence justifying the cuts have been patronisingly dismissed. Instead, more director positions have been intro-duced, all taking ever increasing bonuses.

Unfortunately the workers, organised by Unite, were threatened with legal action af-ter initially protesting outside the company’s main offices near the busy Loughborough train station and now have to picket on a low profile industrial estate.

Labour MP Barry Gardinar visited the strikers and is pushing through a private

members bill in parliament. But this will take months to go through.

It is likely that the workers could win their case at industrial tribunals under existing legislation. However, this process involves months of stress and anxiety and the firm is still not obliged to then rehire.

But spirits, organisation and solidarity were high on the picket line in the face of the divide and rule tactics of the company.

The strikers got me a pasty from the lunch run and bought a paper on the con-dition that I give it to one of the directors passing by. When he refused to take it I asked why he didn’t want to read about how the workers were going to expropriate his business after he sacked them.

He didn’t reply but the workers cheered!

Phil, UCU

leeds police brutalityDear comrades,

Footage has been released showing police racism towards an unidentified black man in Leeds town centre, just after 6pm on Monday 7th June.

Three police officers accosted the black man, who according to activists from BLMUK exercised his right under law to refuse to give his name and details to police.

One police officer then pepper sprayed the man directly in the eyes, and the other two officers helped to force him to the ground and arrested him.

Onlookers called out, “this is outra-geous”, “unnecessary”, and ‘what is he being arrested for?’, to which the police either made no response or told people it was “nothing to do with them”.

BLMUK called for an emergency protest on Tuesday 8th June, attended by around 100 people. Marvina Newton, organiser of the protest and representative of BLMUK, commented on the “diversity of the crowd” saying “inequality for one of us is inequality for all of us”.

Some groups within the working class are clearly being targeted by the police. The man featured being brutalised by police in Leeds was both homeless and black.

The tragic rise of homelessness and the economic suffering causing it, are, as with most crises, felt most by poor and minority groups who bear the brunt of the suffering.

Where this man needed help, he has instead been brutalised, reflecting the treatment by capitalism towards all those in unfortunate circumstances and in need of support.

To end police brutality, we must overthrow the system at its root. Without dismantling the ruling class and enacting socialist measures, the divide and rule strategy which produced racism and police brutality will only reproduce them.

Alice Greenwood Bliss, Leeds


Back to Contents

Tell the Truth

At the start of the 20th century, the British ruling class was deeply split on a number of political questions.

And no event would reveal this more than the mutiny at the Curragh army base in March 1914.

In the preceding decades, the question of the ‘Corn Laws’ – essentially whether to pursue a protectionist or free-trade policy – had divided both the Tory and Liberal parties. Added to this was the Liberal gov-ernment’s pursuit of increased taxes on the rich, known as the ‘People’s Budget’, being blocked by the Tory-dominated House of Lords. Parliament was thus locked in a constitutional crisis, leading to two general elections in 1910.

While the Liberals eventually managed to overcome the Lords’ obstruction on con-stitutional and social reform, they still relied on the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party for support, who in turn demanded ‘Home Rule’ for Ireland.

This issue of Home Rule – the ‘Irish Question’ – had dogged the British bour-geoisie ever since the Irish Parliament was abolished by the 1801 Act of Union. The chief difficulty lay in the sectarian divisions planted in Ireland by British imperialism, as a tool of colonial and class oppression in Britain’s oldest imperial conquest.

These divisions would spin out of the control of the ruling class, creating the looming threat of a sectarian bloodbath in Ulster.

The largely Protestant, industrialised north-eastern province of Ulster was raised into a reactionary frenzy against the idea of an all-Ireland parliament, which would be dominated by southern Catholic politi-cians. Institutions like the Orange Order, which had been established to divide the Irish working class on religious lines, con-demned Home Rule as a plot to destroy the rights of Protestants and eject Ireland from the British Empire.

Edward Carson, the leading represent-ative of the anti-Home Rule section of the Irish ruling class, infamously pronounced that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’, implying the Catholic majority would vote however the Pope or the Churches dictat-ed.

The majority of Irish industrialists, based in the north-east of Ireland – who depended on the markets opened by the Empire – demanded that Home Rule be abandoned by the Liberals, or at the very least Ulster be exempted from it.

Carson formed the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ against Home Rule – a pseudo-Biblical pledge signed by over a million people, some literally in their own blood – and oversaw the formation of the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force to resist.

Supporting this campaign was the increasingly reactionary Tory Party under Andrew Bonar Law. Law repeated the fear mongering over ‘Rome Rule’, overlooked the smuggling of 25,000 German guns into Ireland to arm the UVF, and accused the Liberal party of “lighting the fires of civil war” in an “ignoble conspiracy” to deliver Home Rule.

As attempts by the ruling class to resolve their disagreement collapsed, and fears of civil war grew, the Liberal government became concerned about the loyalty of the British forces in Ireland. Many army officers had familial or financial connections to Ulster, and shared the Prot-estant-supremacist and pro-Empire views of the Unionists.

A special cabinet committee was formed to investigate, and the Command-er-in-Chief of the colonial forces Sir Arthur Paget was duly informed of the govern-ment’s concerns.

Paget then announced to the 70 of-ficers stationed at the Curragh base that the army would imminently be deployed

to counter the UVF, going as far as to say that Ulster “would be in a blaze” in a matter of days. Officers with homes or property in Ulster were recused, while any others who refused were threatened with dismissal.

In response to this, the mutiny took place: 57 of the officers said they would refuse to fight the UVF and tendered their resignations. It is unclear if any such attack was ever really planned, or if Paget spoke out of turn, as following the media furore over the ‘Curragh Incident’ the Liberal gov-ernment denied everything.

At the time, the Irish Marxist James Con-nolly was sceptical of the incident, believing the ‘mutiny’ was deliberately provoked in order to force the government to concede to Ulster’s demand for exemption from Home Rule. In any case, this is what happened: a temporary exemption for Ulster was includ-ed in the final Home Rule Bill.

The ‘Irish Question’ was not resolved by exemption, however; it would later become the partition of Ireland that survives to this day. The Home Rule crisis was cut across by the First World War, forcing the ruling class together in ‘national unity’. Even the Irish bourgeois nationalists went along with this, allowing the implementation of the Home Rule Bill to be delayed until after the war.

Home Rule would never come to pass however, and after 1916 Ireland would enter a revolutionary period.

The ruling class today preaches that the working class must pursue its interests through peaceful, democratic and consti-tutional channels. But in Ireland, when its vital interests were threatened, the ruling class cast off ‘constitutionality’ and went so far as to support mutiny.

There are important lessons in this for the working class today: the ruling class will go to any lengths to protect its interests, and the working class should be prepared to go to the same lengths.

TELL THE

TRUTHTHE CURRAGH MUTINY


Back to Contents

Trade Unions

interviews with newly-elected nec memberstime for real change in unison

On Friday 18 June, the national executive committee (NEC) of Unison met for the first time since

being elected earlier this month. In these recent NEC elections, the left slate won a clear majority. And at this latest NEC meeting, the left also took all three lead-ing positions in the union’s presidential team.

This represents an earthquake for the British labour movement. Unison is the biggest trade union in the country, with 1.4 million members across the public sector. And this is the first time in the union’s history that its NEC has been won by the left.

Paul Holmes was one of the NEC candidates who stood under the slogan of #TimeforRealChange, having nar-rowly missed out in the Unison general secretary elections earlier this year.

Paul agreed to speak to us in a personal capacity about the left’s NEC victory, its implications, and his thoughts on the issues facing the union.

Socialist Appeal: Thanks for agree-ing to this interview. Two weeks ago, Unison’s NEC was won by the left for the first time since it was formed. What does this victory mean for the union?

Paul Holmes: I think it means that the slogan we stood under – #Timefor-RealChange – is going to be implement-ed. The members don’t want things run the way they always have been; they want change, which is why we stood under that slogan.

SA: The left now has a solid man-date to implement the kind of change you’re talking about. What do you see, personally, as the priorities for the new NEC?

PH: There are three main priorities. The first one: We’re determined that the biggest union in Britain starts to fight its weight. We want a high-profile union where our members are involved in de-veloping its policies, and can also see them being implemented.

Two: We will reach out to other trade unions as brothers and sisters, and not as competitors. It is only by agreed joint action with fellow trade unions that we can advance the cause of all working people in the country.

Three: The aim of this union is not to have cosy deals behind closed doors. Its number one priority will be the economic wellbeing of our members.

SA: And what are the big issues imme-diately coming up that the union will face?

PH: There’s no doubt that the em-ployers are looking towards the end of COVID, and what further attacks they can make at that point. Recent research shows that 9% of workers, and 18% of workers under 26, have already had their pay and conditions cut over the last 12 months. This is before the real attacks begin!

The main tool of the bosses will be ‘fire-and-rehire’ tactics. We’ve already seen disputes at the Manchester buses, JDE in Banbury, Heathrow Airport, Tow-er Hamlets council and numerous other instances because of these tactics.

The employers will want to extend those attacks. It is Unison’s role to coor-dinate our members’ defence alongside other trade unions. We will not flinch from uniting our members against these attacks.

SA: Unison is also one of the biggest unions affiliated to the Labour Party. What do you make of the recent by-elec-tion results?

PH: Having looked at the result of the Chesham and Amersham by-election, Labour’s vote fell from 7000+ to 622 (and they lost their deposit). My understanding



Back to Contents

Trade Unions

is that Labour has more than 622 members in that constituency. They couldn’t even get every party member to vote for them!

I see the result as an anti-Tory govern-ment vote – but also a vote of no confidence in Labour’s current direction.

The debate needs to be about what Labour are going to do for ordinary people in this crisis, not about personalities or careers.

It is only through open debate and ac-countability that confidence in Labour will return. The 2017 manifesto was incredibly popular among voters. We now need to have a serious debate about what the Labour Party can do to improve the lives of ordinary working people.

The rules of that debate shouldn’t be set by the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph, but by what ordinary people at the sharp end want.

The debate should be about getting rid of foodbanks, not building royal yachts! ■

The crisis facing the working class in Britain has had a particularly sharp effect on young people. As the last

gains of the post-war period are snatched back, one after another, and precariousness becomes the norm, young workers face an onslaught from the employers.

In this context, the election of Lilly Boulby and Keira Hilder to the young members’ seats of the Unison NEC is very significant. Standing under the slogan #TimeforReal-Change, along with other lefts, these two were able to beat the right wing’s chosen candidates.

Lilly spoke to Socialist Appeal recently in a personal capacity about what this means for the union.

“People are ready for change,” Lilly began telling us. “The left won a majority in all different areas and service groups, which shows that that change is exactly what people want across the union.

“People want Unison to take a different course in what it’s doing, not only on the local but also on a national level. They want a union that’s ready to fight the battles that we know are coming up.”

Noting that the youth have suffered particu-larly heavily under both the last decade of austerity, and over the course of the COVID pandemic, Lilly laid out some of the priorities she sees for young people:

“I feel personally that young people are being attacked on all fronts: on housing, jobs, anything you can think of really. As soon as they come out of education, depending on what level they’ve left at, they’ll be up to their eyeballs in debt.

“Then they face insecure contracts in

the workplace, and in the public sector you have councils that are strapped for cash and a chronically underfunded NHS which limit the ability of people entering those workforces to gain good pay and decent experience in the kinds of jobs they want to do.”

As the recent situation in Tower Hamlets council has shown, the issue of underfund-ing and austerity has led to another threat that unions like Unison are facing: the dis-graceful spectacle of ‘fire-and-rehire’ tactics being used to hammer workers.

“This is going to be one of the biggest issues facing the whole trade union movement,” Lilly explained to us. “It’s happening in every sector, public or private, with everybody from local councils to cocktail bars using it.

“It’s clear that this tactic is how the boss-es plan to attack terms and conditions across the board. And there’s no doubt in my mind that this will hammer young workers in particular.

“In my view, we must fight this practice tooth and nail; and we must reach across to our sister unions to present a unified front against it. Other unions are already engaging in this struggle and showing that this is a fight that can be won. And we should be prepared to lend our union’s full weight to the battle to end fire and rehire once and for all.”

In terms of the role Lilly herself could play, and what she would personally like to see as the union’s response to this situation, she responded by strongly outlining her thoughts:

“The first thing I think we should do is launch a national campaign to get young workers into the union, which

also involves and is guided by our cur-rent young members. To organise these workers to fight against attacks on them, we need to show them that the union is prepared to back them to the hilt, and won’t back down from taking on the employers.”

That Unison has elected a left NEC at a time when most members are being squeezed is no coincidence.

The public sector pay freeze, which will see Unison ballot its members in higher educa-tion this week, is a deliberate slap in the face to those workers who have kept the country running during the pandemic. It demon-strates the real priority of this government of the rich – the maintenance of capitalism and its profits.

The Tories are already outlining how they intend to make our class pay for the pan-demic. In response, there is a clear need for fighting leadership and firm socialist policies in the labour movement.

The election of a left Unison NEC, with candidates such as Lilly who stood under the #TimeforRealChange banner, is a step towards this goal.

interview with Lilly BoulbyUnison national young members’ officer



Back to Contents

Trade Unions

Socialist Appeal

Socialist candidate Howard Beckett has taken the magnanimous de-cision to stand down in the Unite

general secretary contest, for the sake of left unity.

Previously there had been three left candidates in the race: Howard Beckett, Steve Turner, and Sharon Graham. On the other side, Gerard Coyne is standing with the open backing of the Labour right wing and the establishment.

Recently, for example, Lord Peter Mandelson penned an article in the In-dependent, calling for a vote for Coyne, in order to “clean up the union”. And this from a New Labour relic who also recently stated that “hard left factions attached to trade unions have got to go”.

This shows what is at stake in these elections – and what lies in store if Unite were to fall into the hands of the right wing. The ramifications for the whole of the left and the labour movement would be catastrophic.

DangerMany on the left had assumed that Coyne would fail to reach the threshold of nominations required to make it onto the ballot. But in the end, all four candi-dates gained the necessary number of endorsements.

This led to understandable concern about the threat of a right-wing victory, with the danger of a split vote if there were three left candidates on the ballot. Such an outcome would be a disaster, given the important role that Unite has played in supporting the left of the labour movement in recent years.

In order to defeat the right-winger Coyne, Beckett has therefore dropped out of the race and called for his sup-porters to back Steve Turner. We respect Howard’s decision and the reasoning behind it.

CompromiseAll of the three left candidates are cur-rently assistant general secretaries of the union. But their campaigns have all emphasised different questions.

Having narrowly won the backing of the union’s broad left last year, Turner was able to secure the largest number of branch nominations. He is seen as the ‘continuity’ candidate, having been Len McCluskey’s campaign manager for the past three Unite general secretary elections.

During the Corbyn years, Turner openly supported the left-wing Labour leader – in particular, through his role as chair of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.

More recently, however, Turner has signalled that, if he became Unite gen-eral secretary, he would not openly chal-lenge Keir Starmer. Instead, he would seek to compromise with the right wing.

“Sometimes it’s right to shout,” Turner stated in an interview with the Huffington Post. “But on some occasions diplomacy is best done privately.”

Similarly, he has suggested that he would oppose moves to replace right-wing Labour councillors. And he has praised the virtues of negotiating with the Tories and the bosses over taking militant action.

“The Tories are in power and the Tories hold the pen on decisions,” Turner remarked in the same HuffPost interview. “I’m in the room, I’m at the table. I’m not outside lobbing bricks over the wall.”

SyndicalismAlso still in the running is Sharon Gra-ham, the union’s national organiser.

Graham has won notable backing from rank-and-file members, thanks to her support for workplace organisation, strikes, and militant action – including important victories won recently by bus drivers in Manchester and library work-ers in Bromley.

unite ELECTIONS UPDATE

beckett stands aside for left unity unite needs a fighting leadership



Back to Contents

Trade Unions

As a result, Graham came second in the race for nominations, behind Turner.

While emphasising the need for greater organisation and action on the industrial front, however, Graham has downplayed the importance of using the union’s weight to battle on the political front.

Such syndicalist attitudes are un-derstandable, given the atrocious role currently being played by Starmer and the Labour right wing, who have refused to support workers in struggle.

But such contemptuous behaviour on behalf of the right wing only under-lines the need for the unions – especially large left-wing unions, such as Unite – to wage a political fight to remove Keir Starmer and his right-wing leadership.

And by continuing to run in this race, Graham’s campaign, despite the best of intentions, threatens to split the left vote and hand Coyne a victory. This would serve to strengthen the position of Starmer and the Labour right wing, denying workers the political support and leadership they need.

OppositionIn contrast, Beckett’s campaign gen-erated enormous enthusiasm amongst grassroots activists due to his bold tone and militant approach in relation to fighting the bosses, the Tories, and the Labour right wing.

Howard has spoken passionately about the need to end ‘fire and rehire’; to support striking workers; and to end the anti-trade union laws.

And most notably, he has pulled no punches in his opposition to Keir Starmer and the Labour right wing, correctly call-ing – in no uncertain terms – for Starmer to go. For all these reasons and more, Socialist Appeal supported Beckett’s bid to become general secretary of Unite the Union.

LeadershipIn announcing his intentions to stand aside, Beckett has released a joint state-ment along with Turner. This promises a “blended manifesto, taking the best ideas from both candidates”.

The task now for Beckett and his supporters is to continue organising

and fighting for the radical demands his campaign has raised; to ensure that Beckett’s bold left-wing programme is taken up and carried through in Unite, in the Labour Party, and across the whole labour movement.

During his campaign, we have to say in all honesty, Turner has come out with a number of worrying statements, which suggest that he is willing to take a more moderate and compromising approach on both industrial and political questions.

Left activists must not allow this to be the case. Capitalism is in a deep crisis. A tsunami of attacks is heading towards workers.

And the Labour right wing are deter-mined to purge the party, and make it a ‘safe pair of hands’ for big business once again.

Instead of compromises and conces-sions, we need militant socialist leader-ship at the head of the labour movement, fighting for genuine socialist policies.

Only on this basis can we defeat the bosses and kick out the Tories. And this means building the forces of Marxism, in Britain and internationally. ■

PCS MarxistsThe national conference of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – the main union for civil servants and similar workers in privatised companies – took place on 13-14 June.

The conference was a big success, with a record turnout of delegates and a radical mood of militancy and determination to fight for a better society.

Reps aligned with PCS Marxists – sup-porters of Socialist Appeal – attended the conference and contributed to the discussion.

The atmosphere at the conference was one of optimism and confidence in the role that the PCS can play in future struggles – struggles that are going to intensify as the working class is presented with the bill for the COVID crisis.

Reps spoke about the issues faced in their workplaces. Significantly, the first motion at the conference was raised by the PCS DVLA branch.

This branch has been completely trans-formed in the last few months, becoming the biggest branch in the union, following a dispute over workplace safety during the pandemic, with weeks of strike action by PCS members.

A radical motion was raised, demanding no confidence in DVLA CEO Julie Len-nard, and demanding the resignation of Tory transport minister Grant Shapps. This motion was passed unanimously.

It is clear that union reps in many other PCS branches have been inspired by the DVLA strike, and are ready to replicate this success in their own workplaces.

The question of pay is also a crucial one. In real terms, pay has been cut year on year since 2008. And now the Tory gov-ernment wants civil servants to accept a zero percent pay increase, even when inflation is accelerating.

Conference rightly responded: We have kept crucial public services running throughout the pandemic. Now is the time for a pay rise, not a pay freeze!

The Tories and bosses continue to jeop-ardise our safety during the pandemic; they freeze our pay; they treat us with nothing but contempt.

This is the nature of life under capitalism – not just for civil servants and others organ-ised by PCS, but for workers across the board.The struggles facing DVLA workers today will be the struggles facing all civil servants tomorrow.

This year’s PCS conference proclaimed one thing clearly, above all: Our union is getting ready to fight these looming battles – and to win them.

PCS national conference:We won’t pay for the COVID crisis!


the marxist voice

of labour and youth

[email protected]/join

socialist_Appealsocialist-appeal

Socialist_appmarxist-voice

JOIN US!

http://socialist.net/join

https://www.instagram.com/socialist_appeal/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo_Moc4DU_WbHpA3q5SKoSQ

https://twitter.com/socialist_app

https://soundcloud.com/socialist-appeal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4dYv-1eNho

Date post:	04-Feb-2022
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	1 times
Download:	0 times

ISSUE 350! GIVE THE TORIES THE BOOT!

Documents