Workers' Liberty

Review of Imaginary futures — from thinking machines to the global village by Richard Barbrook, Pluto Press, 2007.

This book is a history of the future, the history of an ideology, which, over the last 60 years, has sought to colonise our conceptions of the way the world is going.

This article reviews the way that the biggest activist-left group of the last 35 years or so in Britain — the SWP, then called IS — dealt with the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s, the breakdown of Northern Ireland into civil war in 1969. It continues a series about the British left and the decisive early stages of the nearly 40 years of “Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

[This is an edited and augmented version of the text in Solidarity. It includes excerpts from the minutes of the leading committees of the International Socialist organisation, which are not in the version printed in Solidarity.]

• Section 2 of this instalment of the series

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down
• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency"
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communal, Not Class, Lines
• Part 4: When militant sloganeering meant promoting communal war
• Part 5: When socialists looked to "Catholic Power"

A key factor in trashing the possibility of a united public-sector fightback this year against Gordon Brown’s 2% limit has been the decision by the civil service union PCS, although it already had a live ballot mandate for action, to withdraw into prolonged “consultations” of its membership while the POA and CWU strikes and the Unison health and local government ballots came and went. Having “consulted” and announced that PCS members supported further national strike action, the PCS leadership then... decided to call off any further national action, at least for the time being.

Statement by the International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran

The recent extended wave of oppression against the well-known activists of workers' organisations in Iran and other social movements is not a new incident but a routine practice of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This wave of repression nevertheless exhibits particular characteristics, including the radicalisation and development of class-based labour protests, advancing social movements within the specific socio-economic context and pressures from both within the country and internationally.

Open Letter to an SWP Student

Dear Comrade,
If different sections of the left can work together to defend NUS democracy, why can't we work together to present a united challenge to those who are attacking democracy in the elections at the next NUS conference? That was a question that members of Workers’ Liberty were among the many people asking SWP and Respect students at the NUS Extraordinary Conference on 4 December. The response was universally positive — with a crucial exception.

On 29 November Edinburgh City Council’s SNP/Lib-Dem coalition administration announced plans to axe a thousand jobs. The announcement was e-mailed to staff even before the City Council unions had been informed.

Tube cleaners working for contractors to Metronet are to receive substantial pay rises when Transport for London takes over the failed privateer’s contracts, marking a huge victory for the RMT on London Underground.

“United Russia” (UR) — the political party which backs Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin — won an easy victory in the elections held on 1 December for the Duma (the lower chamber of the Russian parliament). At the time of writing, early results indicate that UR won 63% of votes cast.

The left-wing website Indymedia seems to have allowed itself to be manipulated by the anti-semitic right again. A recent report on the site, citing the Iranian-government-sponsored Press TV (for which Yvonne Ridley works) as source, claims that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a former agent of the Israeli secret police Mossad.

PERVEZ Musharraf has stood down as head of the armed forces and been sworn in a civilian President. Thus he has achieved what he set out to do by imposing a state of emergency on 3 November and sacking the judges who ruled his continuance as President was unconstitutional. Many opponents of his regime remain in jail. Although Musharraf has called elections for 8 January, he has not ended the state of emergency.

At the time of writing, Glasgow City Council daycare strikers are about to begin their eighth week on strike. All the signs are that they will still be on strike over Christmas and the New Year.
The indefinite strike action is in response to the City Council’s implementation of “Single Status”, which is meant to end sexually discriminatory rates of pay in local authorities.

I work in a social services department, where we are constantly fighting to provide the best service we can to their service users, with very scarce resources.

Like most councils our department is plagued by “performance indicators” (PIs) and the “star” system. The PIs work like targets in the NHS and league tables in schools. They put forward laudable aims — giving timely services, in a flexible and appropriate way — and that is what we all want. But in practice they skew the work done so that the limited resources are put into getting the appropriate box ticked, rather than prioritising, on the basis of assessment, areas of greatest need.

As we go to press the publication of the School Teachers’ Review Body recommondation on teachers’ pay for 2008 is imminent. The STRB passed their report on to the government at the end of October but there has been no announcement yet. Meanwhile the Government has reaffirmed its intention to restrict teachers’ pay increases to no more than its 2 per cent public sector pay target.

A small group of postal workers met on Sunday 2 December to assess the result of the ballot which has now ended the CWU’s long-running dispute over pay and working practices, and discuss the way forward for militants who opposed the deal. The meeting was organised by the same people who led the “No” campaign under the name “CWU Rank and File”, though unsurprisingly it was considerably smaller than the launch meeting they organised at the start of the ballot.

Remploy workers have vowed to fight the government’s plan to close 28 out of 83 factories in the publicly-subsidised network employing disabled workers. A few weeks ago government minister Peter Hain was promising sincerely to look seriously at the trade unions’ plan to improve the running of the factories in order to stay within their £111 million subsidy.

A two day strike has called for 6 and 7 December in the Department of Work and Pensions by the civil service union, PCS. The PCS leadership in DWP have rightly called for all members to receive at least the rate of inflation (currently 4.2%) as an increase in year 1 and want talks about years 2 and 3. Under current arrangements 40% of DWP staff will get no consolidated increase in year 2 and 74% will 1% in the final year.

AT the Extraordinary NUS Conference on 4 December, the NUS leadership narrowly managed to pass its wide-ranging Governance Review. The Review will seriously damage NUS as a democratic institution that represents and campaigns for students, replacing its already bureaucratic structures with layer upon layer of inaccessible conferences and committees.

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After the “cash for peerages" row, the New Labour party of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is now deep in another scandal about dodgy funding from millionaires, one which has already brought a police investigation and forced the resignation of Labour Party general secretary Peter Watt.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference meets in Bali from 3 to 14 December. There will be a flurry of greenwash. But the problem will remain: the economy does not need to be tweaked a little bit to include a carbon emissions. It needs a complete overhaul to produce for human need and to prepare for the climate chaos that is inevitably coming our way.

Upon the election of Nicolas Sarkozy there was a strong current in the media — both in France and internationally — claiming that “things had changed”.

Ed Maltby met with Natacha, a member of the Trotskyist organisation Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire and a worker in the Austerlitz train station in Paris.

Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, lost his referendum on constitutional reform by a tiny margin, with 4.5m votes against (50.7%) and 4.4m (49.3%) in favour. Chávez has accepted the results, saying that the proposals had not been approved “for now”, but that he would continue to struggle for his version of “socialism”.

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was locked up by the Sudanese authorities for allowing her class to call a teddy bear Muhammad, said of her experience: “The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.”

A critical exmaination of Joel Kovel’s eco-socialism as set out in his book The Enemy of Nature. That book has recently been updated and republished to include more emphasis on the effects of global warming, which Kovel argues has “become the defining issue of the ecological crisis as a whole”.

In response to David Broder’s letter (Solidarity 3/122), I should first make my position clear on the kitchen sink. I’m for it. Definitely. As to other things raised about or as spin-offs from my little letter in Solidarity 3/120...

Reviews of Boy A (Channel 4)

Who could forget the murder of James Bulger by two teenage boys, Jon Venables and Roger Thompson? That was Liverpool 1993.

After they were released from jail, Venables and Thompson were given new identities and injunctions were taken out to protect them from reprisals. Blake Morrison wrote a fantastic and scrupulously objective book about the case. As If, told the story of the media and public hysteria of the time. Boy A, shown on Channel 4 (2 November), goes over the same social and emotional ground.

George Galloway was addressing a Whitechapel Respect Renewal rally on Sunday 2 December. According to the East London Advertiser it was “Muslim-dominated”. In that case a socialist message to such an audience could have been anything from fighting low pay to issues about council housing or fighting racism. But according to the Advertiser, and perhaps predictably, Galloway chose to spread a little religious fervour and to highlight the sanctity of his new organisation:
“There’s one God, there’s one Respect”, he said.

Extracts from an AWL leaflet distributed at a regional meeting of the National Shop Stewards Network, held in Glasgow on 1 December.