Labour Briefing Sept 2015

£1SEPTEMBER 2015

BRIEFINGLABOUR

A MOVEMENT IS BORN

2 3Labour Briefing September 2015

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Labour Briefing September 2015

3 Editorial: A movement is born4 Martin Mayer: Unite the Labour left5 The John McDonnell Column6 Campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn Diary 7 United Communities for Labour for Jeremy8-9 London, Bristol, Durham and The Ecologist for JC10 After the leadership election 11 Unison for Jeremy12 JC - the cause of Scottish Labour 13 Very special in Scotland14 … And in Wales; stop the witchhunt 15 Diane Abbott MP: Celebrate diversity16-18 The return of the left: Liz Davies interviewed 19 Government attacks education20 … and welfare benefits21 … and housing 22 … and the NHS23 … and trade unions 24 John Burgess for Unison General Secretary; Sports Direct25 Fightback on the Tube26-27 The case against austerity28 Chinese economy in crisis 29 US/UK futility in Iraq and Syria30 Greece meltdown31 Tony Burke: US fast track trade deals; Letters32 The Outside Left Column; Folkstone United for migrants

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CONTENTS EDITORIAL:

A MOVEMENTIS BORN

THE SPECTACULAR GROWTH IN SUPPORT FOR JEREMY CORBYN’S bid to be Labour leader has taken the entire political establishment by storm. The groundswell of support that pressurised just enough Labour MPs to nominate him then soared, making key trade union executives - including Unite and Unison - issue their backing. Even before the other candidates abstained on Tory government welfare cuts, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign was ballooning into a genuinely popular mass movement, with meetings around the country booked out and overflowing.

To those in the Party and media who ignored the huge anti-austerity vote in Scotland and preferred to see the 2015 General Election result as a linear shift to the right, this is a colossal shock. To others, including this magazine, less so. We have argued for many years that British politics is suffering from a crisis of representation, where the needs and interests of the overwhelming majority of people are flagrantly and routinely disregarded by governments of all stripes. This crisis reached a new intensity under New Labour, when Blair and Brown pushed policies such as privatisation, tuition fees and an illegal war that were hostile to the best traditions of our movement and deeply unpopular with Labour voters.

Even at the last election, policies such as bringing rail and post back into public ownership were supported by most voters, including UKIP and Tory voters, but were put forward by only the Greens. Now this and a range of other ideas which already command majority support are being articulated by a credible and inclusive candidate. Beyond this, the whole tenor of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign breaks with the elitism, careerism, backbiting and egoism that now dominates politics at the top. The integrity of the candidate has proved as inspiring as the political ideas he is putting forward.

Unable to halt Corbyn’s momentum, his opponents have been reduced to claiming he can’t win an election beyond the party faithful - as if the other three candidates could! While loser after loser - Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock, David Miliband - is wheeled out to bemoan Corbyn’s unelectabilty, polls are showing that UKIP and SNP voters and others would be more likely to vote for a

Labour Party led by Corbyn than any of his rivals.It was Tony Blair who let the cat out of the bag when he

said that not only couldn’t Corbyn win, but it wouldn’t be right if he did. It’s not Corbyn’s inability to appeal to the wider public that the Blairites fear - it’s the fact that he could be only too popular, building a movement, taking power and undoing much of the neoliberal regime New Labour inflicted. The pitifully poor performance of Liz Kendall in this contest, however, shows just how sidelined those ideas are - for now.

What we are experiencing is undoubtedly the most important political development since the 1984-5 miners’ strike. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the explosion against the austerity consensus has been triggered from within Labour. For socialists in the Party, this raises new challenges. How can the momentum and creativity of this new movement be maintained beyond the leadership election?

A Corbyn victory will not make his detractors within our movement evaporate. The vast majority of Labour MPs and the party machine will remain hostile. Plots to oust him are already being prepared. It’s clear that the transformation that Jeremy Corbyn proposes - of both our Party and society - cannot be carried through by one person alone, from the top, but will need a mass movement to make it happen. The Party must be reconfigured into a genuine social movement, linking up with the unions, students and communities that so desperately need change.

We need a conference of the campaign very soon after the election result and the foundations laid for a new rank and file movement rooted in the Labour Party. But we must also learn the lessons of past failures and take seriously the desire for unity. Old divisions and sectarian self-interest must be put aside - or they will repel not just the new generation who have come into activity, but also those who have walked away in the past but been re-energised by Corbyn’s brilliant campaign.

We face a perhaps unique opportunity. The magnificent movement created in the last three months both vindicates the old Labour left but also challenges it profoundly. We have much to contribute but much to learn.

“Briefing is a marvellous magazine. If you don’t subscribe to it I hope you will” Tony Benn

EDITORIAL BOARD Graham Bash, Daniel Brookes, Tony Burke, Mick Brooks, Michael Calderbank, Simon Deville, Pete Firmin, Val Graham, Simon Hewitt, Ian Ilett, Stan Keable, Chris Knight, Ian Malcolm-Walker, Norrette Moore, Gordon Nardell, David Osland, Mike Phipps, Susan Press, Jackie Walker, Louise Whittle, John Wiseman.

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Front cover: Jeremy Corbyn speaks at packed London rally. Photo: Jason Harris/Jeremy for Labour.Next copy date: Monday 14 SeptemberNext issue out: Wednesday 23 September

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Labour Briefing was founded in 1980 to educate, agitate and organise. Along the way it incorporated Voice of the Unions and in 2012 Briefing readers voted to transfer the magazine to the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). It is run by a democratically elected editorial board as a forum for socialist ideas and action for the Labour Party, trade unions and wider campaigns. We welcome criticisms, contributions and ideas for future articles. All the articles in Briefing reflect solely the opinions of the authors, writing in a personal capacity, unless otherwise stated.

The LRC hosts Labour Briefing. The LRC is a democratic, socialist body working to transform the Labour Party into an organisation that reflects all sections of the working class.

Since July 2014, The Citizen, Journal of the Scottish Labour Campaign for Socialism, features in Labour Briefing: www.campaignforsocialism.org.uk

ISSN: 1757-6776Find out more at: www.l-r-c.org.uk

5Labour Briefing September 2015

THEJOHN MCDONNELL COLUMNJohn McDonnell is MP for Hayes and Harlington and Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and of the Labour Representation Committee

FROM PROTEST TO POWER

NOBODY PREDICTED THE ENORMOUS SCALE OF SUPPORT AND ENTHUSIASM for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership election campaign. In one of the very few interviews I have given about the campaign, I said that we would shock the establishment with the level of support we would generate but not even I thought we would be seeing rallies of 1,000 to 2,000 people overflowing into the streets.

Let’s try to understand where this support has come from. In a recent very astute article Selma James and Nina Lopez Jones from Global Women’s Strike explained that for some time now there have been numerous individual campaigns organised by local communities and specific groups within our society, often led by women on a massive range of issues - ranging from hospital unit closures, benefit cuts for disabled people, cuts and increased charges in child care, detention of asylum seekers, and the degradation of our environment through fracking. A high level of anger and determination has been present and suddenly has found itself a voice in Jeremy’s campaign and a single campaign to focus around.

In addition a new generation of young people has come through which isn’t saddled with the disillusioning lack of confidence of many of those who went through the hopes of getting rid of the Tories in 1997, only to have those hopes smashed by Blair and New Labour on the rocks of the Iraq war, the introduction of tuition fees and the PFI privatisation of our NHS. When we discussed the nature of our campaign I said our overriding theme must be to give people hope. I suggested that if we were to develop into a wider movement one name for that movement could be simply “Hope.” Nearly a decade ago we argued that another world was possible. We now have a mass movement in prospect that comprises people who are shaking off their lack of confidence that another world is achievable and others, many of them very young, who have no fear of trying for that world.

The potential of a new mass movement for radical change has put fear into every element of the establishment. The Labour establishment has gone into virtual

meltdown. The succession of ex-Labour leaders and cabinet ministers, from Blair through Brown to Kinnock, denouncing a Corbyn leadership, has been aimed at sowing doubt among party members and supporters as they vote. The media establishment has thrown every trick in the gutter press book at the Corbyn campaign - from pure invention to targeting his family and friends. The smear campaigning techniques of the media are increasingly taken by people with total scepticism. The coverage in the press has opened up the opportunity for live media coverage on TV and radio, which has given Jeremy the opportunity of successfully speaking more directly to people. The inventive use of social media has been an effective countervailing force against the traditional media bias.

But we haven’t seen anything yet. If we win the leadership election, the whole force of the establishment will be thrown at us to undermine the incoming left Labour leadership and the movement that is currently being born. The argument that has been put forward by our opponents is that a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be a protest movement rather than a party capable of being elected and capable of governing. This completely misunderstands how a radical movement of the left can come to power and be sustained in government. For a radical left movement to win and sustain democratic power it needs to be both a protest movement

mobilising people’s demand for change and a party with a coherent policy programme that is readily implementable in government.

The creativity needed to articulate and mobilise the demand for change that engenders the support of millions has to be combined with a professional expertise in administering change in government at all levels. We have to be more efficient, more effective and more pragmatic than the capitalist establishment in the arts of governance and economic management.

Whether or not Jeremy wins the leadership election we now must address how we take the enthusiastic support mobilised by the Corbyn campaign and create that movement of both protest and government. The campaign has shown what immense potential and talent there is in our communities. It is that talent and determination that we now have to bring together in the organisational form of a new movement, building on the creativity that has been unleashed and eschewing many of the old forms of centralised control politics of some elements on the left. This has to be an immediate task of the left. Especially it means determining how we come together immediately after the election result is announced and decide our first mobilisation at local grassroots as well as at national levels of campaigning to demonstrate the ongoing nature of our campaign. The message is straightforward. We are not going back!

John McDonnell on the campaign trail with Jeremy Corbyn.

Photo: Jason Harris/Jeremy for Labour


Following Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Leader, Martin Mayer, Unite delegate to Labour’s NEC and Chair of United Left, argues for Labour left unity to win back democratic control of the Labour Party

WE NEED TO UNITE THE LABOUR LEFT

JEREMY CORBYN’S STUNNING LEAD IN THE POLLS represents a huge leap forward for the left in the Labour Party - and demonstrates graphically that left policies and opposition to austerity are hugely popular across the labour and trade union movement, and across our natural electoral base. This apparently comes as a big shock to the Labour establishment and especially to New Labour which confidently predicted a lurch back to the right in the wake of Labour’s defeat in May.

Jeremy Corbyn’s lead is great news to all of us on the left - but it’s not entirely an accident either. Yes, it was a struggle to find enough Labour MPs prepared to nominate him - and many who did are not Corbyn supporters. But then the Parliamentary Labour Party has hardly represented the thinking of the wider party membership and supporters for some years.

The signs have been there for those who wanted to see it. From the loss of five million working class voters from 1997-2010, to the rise of UKIP and the collapse of Scottish Labour to the SNP, New Labour really has not been a vote winner for some time! The Labour Party leadership refused to listen to our calls for an anti-austerity message and a bold vision of jobs, sustainable growth and hope for working people, while New Labour’s stranglehold intellectually and organisationally has held the line on a right wing neo-liberal economic agenda, including “austerity-lite”.

This leadership election - the first ever using OMOV and with a credible left wing candidate allowed to stand - has at last given a voice to the wider labour and trade union

movement to express its view. Jeremy’s huge success in the polls is a triumph for the work so many of us have been doing to develop an alternative to austerity.

Key to this shift in thinking has been the trade union movement, the democratic voice of working class people, which has been increasingly critical of the right of centre direction in Labour Party policy. From about 2005 onwards there has been a growing consensus at annual TUC Congress on a broad, left-of-centre policy outlook. This includes demands for real trade union freedom and workers’ rights, public investment in our infrastructure and state intervention in, and regulation of, the economy, a new council house building programme and the reversal of privatisation of public services.

More recently - and especially during the Coalition government 2010-2015 - it was the trade unions and the TUC which led the popular opposition to austerity. Huge rallies in London have attracted hundreds of thousands of trade unionists - but also students, young people and ordinary people who share our anti-austerity position but felt no mainstream political party expressed their views. The People’s Assembly which attracted an astonishing 250,000 to its 20 June London rally, was set up with trade union influence in a conscious attempt to broaden the alliance between trade unions and the wider community. Unite’s Community branches have embedded this community and trade union connection at a local level while trades councils - often working alongside the People’s Assembly and Unite Community - have led the

protests against austerity in our towns and cities.

While the trade union movement as a whole has been building support for an alternative to austerity, Unite began a serious review of its actual relationship with the Labour Party. As the saying goes, “If you’re in a club and you don’t like it, you have two choices. Get out or change it”. Our most significant achievement has been to get Unite shop stewards and convenors selected as candidates to stand for Parliament. Had the Labour Party won the 2015 election we might have seen upwards of 40 new working class trade unionists elected. In the event we secured 26. Not only have we ensured the PLP has shifted to the left in this election, it’s also true that without them Jeremy Corbyn would not have received sufficient nominations to get on the ballot paper at all!

Even if he fails to win and comes second, the left’s voice in the Party cannot any longer be marginalised. The time is right to consolidate the various left tendencies in Labour (Unite, CLPD, LRC, Tribune, etc) into one co-ordinated Labour left organisation to counter New Labour’s “Progress”. We must ensure that the Labour left unites to win back democratic control of our Party; to embed a left political agenda in our policy framework; and crucially consolidate the massive expansion in support we have witnessed in the last few weeks. We have a real opportunity to re-engage with young people to build on the enthusiasm which exists for a fairer and more progressive future - with a revitalised Labour Party as the vehicle to achieve it.

JEREMY CORBYNFOR LABOUR LEADER

6 Labour Briefing September 2015



IT BEGAN WITH TALKING. Not just to friends but to acquaintances, people I bumped into on the street. I progressed onto social media. I couldn’t stop it. Some people might call it obsessive. I call it politics.

7 July For the ‘Meet Andy Burnham’ event, my question is prepared, “Given the success of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, in particular his anti-austerity policies, if you win, how would this inform your policy making?”

Burnham’s introduction, low on policies and full of clichés like “Labour needs to make an emotional contact with people again”, was expected. Then he told that awful story about meeting the ex-Labour, now UKIP, voter who complained of being the only English speaker at his work’s canteen. So before I put my question I described my experience campaigning against Farage in Thanet South, told him it was AUSTERITY that was the problem. Burnham blinked, a rabbit in the headlights look, responding with vague “we have to learn to talk to ‘ordinary people’ in their own language” sort of stuff. When I tried to challenge his response I was silenced by his MP minder but, when four further questioners took up the theme and he saw he was losing his audience, he quickly moved his position.

ANYONE WHO HAS FOLLOWED JEREMY CORBYN’S POLITICAL CAREER as a true socialist, as a humanist and as an internationalist, will have realised how desperate the Labour Party is for Jeremy’s leadership of this great party, both nationally and internationally.

Nationally, the Labour Party has suffered many setbacks and may be in danger of losing its sense of direction and political purpose. The Labour Party desperately needs to be rescued and its original traditions restored through genuine socialist values and principles designed to serve the interests of ordinary men and women. No one recognises these original values and principles better than Jeremy Corbyn. He can be assured of our total support.

Internationally too, there is no issue of great human concern where Jeremy Corbyn is not found playing a major role in supporting the weak, the oppressed and all victims of brutality and injustice. Unlike too many fellow politicians, Jeremy Corbyn has always been on the side of the victim rather than on the side of the oppressor. This is the unique quality of an honourable and authentic democratic socialist. Jeremy was a very active leader in the anti-apartheid movement. He continues to be a very active leader in defence of the Kurdish and Palestinian people. He is a powerful, effective and fearless advocate of humanity and justice. What better leader could be found for a truly internationalist Labour Party? Jeremy we are with you, just as you are with the weak and the oppressed.

Therefore Jeremy Corbyn can be assured of the full moral and political support of the United Communities For Labour.» The United Communities for Labour incorporates Kurds for Labour

8 July Parliament Square, the afternoon of the Budget. Jeremy Corbyn came out of Westminster to speak to demonstrators as news of the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich sent Tory backbenchers apoplectic with triumphalist joy - and the rest of us seething with indignation. When Jeremy finished, wardens, backed by police, stormed through the crowd in protective gear, removing a sound system that had been playing John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance to the crowd in the sunshine of a summer afternoon. You couldn’t make it up … really. I was outraged. It was then I decided, we HAVE to stop the Tories, and I realised the ‘we’ meant me – it was time to make the political deeply personal.

9 July Brockley station in South East London was the first stall. I was joined by a new comrade recruited on Facebook, her mother of 80 and Jeremy’s niece (a local in the area). I had LRC leaflets, T shirts, badges, copies of Labour Briefing. I repeated the mantra, “Vote Jeremy Corbyn for the anti-austerity leader of the Labour Party!” The response was immediate and enthusiastic.

So much for Jeremy’s supporters being the young and politically naïve; I find supporters coming out of the woodwork are in the 60-plus age group... and mostly women. These lapsed Labour voters became disillusioned as New Labour set the Party on the quest for that mythologised, Blairite, political Holy Grail of the ‘middle ground’, whatever they believed it was. I had always known New Labour’s strategy was a chimera, a shape-shifting ploy to dissolve ideology and people-politics into Murdoch-palatable sound bites that would lead the labour movement to oblivion.

11 July My best friend’s daughter’s wedding. The bride is from a family of Jewish, left wing, anti-apartheid campaigners. It sounds like a setting for a strange rom-com but I just happen to speak to the bride, the groom, a number of the guests and get eight signed up as registered supporters. What better way to mark the optimism of a wedding than voting for Jeremy? It worked. Not only did they text, they went on to campaign with their friends. That’s grassroots.

16 July The Honor Oak stall was emotional. Joined by two male comrades, the response was overwhelming, cars and even a London bus, laden with rush hour passengers, stopping to grab leaflets from our hands. One woman sticks in my mind in particular, a night cleaner at a hospital, walked towards me, laden down with bags of shopping and the two children dragging at her heels. She said she knew nothing of politics but had been told at work about the cuts which would affect her paltry wages and her tax credits. Even though she looked exhausted we talked for 15 minutes, her asking questions and me sharing my thoughts. She put her bags on the ground, I held the children and she texted to become a supporter. A grassroots supporter.

19 July At the end of a Bristol weekend visiting my son (and of course dropping off LRC Support Jeremy Corbyn leaflets for him to distribute) we get to the Tolpuddle Festival. It’s a beautiful day. I take my turn on the stall. The level of interest means even with three people there’s almost always a queue. Jeremy badges and T shirts are everywhere. When Jeremy arrives he’s surrounded by well-wishers. Jeremy’s not set to be on the main stage, ridiculous as it seems – but we’re told he will speak after the formal end of the festival for any that are interested - and it looks like most are. At last Jeremy begins to speak and he tells of the Martyrs, of the history of agricultural labourers and their unions, of the history of struggle, of the great accomplishments of the labour movement. We plan for the future by remembering the struggles of the past. And then I realise, if Jeremy becomes leader, it will change my life, the personal and the political.

23 July Lewisham stall. There were the self proclaimed anarchists who took 50 leaflets to distribute to their mates, the Eastern European builders, the 60-plus men and women and the younger voters as before, a whole load of professional looking black women, but for the first time there was also anger – from two (youngish, middle class, white) Labour Party members. And they were livid. “You’re destroying the Party!” they insisted. “Don’t you get it? You’re making us unelectable!” I repeated their statement back to them word for word. They were stunned. It obviously hadn’t occurred to them that, as far as I was concerned, it was they, and their New Labour politics, that had destroyed Labour’s electoral base.

1 August On the surface it might be hard to see why marching on a protest against deaths in the Eurotunnel in Folkestone, with fascists baying at our heels, protected by a police cordon, and speaking on the same afternoon to a meeting of potential Corbyn supporters in Broadstairs, are linked.

In South Thanet, the constituency where Farage failed to be elected (though we do have the only UKIP council), austerity is made palatable by stirring up hatred against, mainly non-existent, immigrants taking ‘our jobs’ and overwhelming our services. News of a 13 year old killed in the Tunnel trying to get to England, and the unwillingness, some might call it cowardice, of the Labour Opposition to actually oppose the Welfare Bill, initiates a group of like-minded locals to discuss the Corbyn 4 Leader campaign and think what we can do, apart from screaming at the radio every time a politician calls human beings a “swarm” or worse. We decide to march on the Tunnel. Never mind there’s a meeting later in the day, we’ll make sure we get to both.

At the Corbyn meeting I speak to a packed room of mostly older, many ‘we once voted Labour’, locals. They are enthused. Jeremy has made a video responding to local issues. We end on one note – the campaign to win the next election for anti-racist, anti-austerity politics starts here, we happily agree.

From then on we were on a roll. Stalls in Ramsgate and Broadstairs, even in Folk Week, much to the annoyance of some local UKIPers who believe politics should be banned from folk music; I don’t think they have much sense of history. There was contact with comrades in Medway, supplying T shirts and always... talking, talking. It hasn’t stopped. Like I said, this is the start of the campaign that can win for Labour, for a Jeremy Corbyn led government in 2020. And that’s got to be a grassroots movement.

CAMPAIGN DIARY

So they think it’s just a load of adolescents? Well, here it is, the Diary

of Jackie Walker, aged 61¼, one of thousands enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Leader

“Socialist, humanist, internationalist”

Bektas Yavuz, co-chair of United Communities for Labour, writes

Campaigning for Jeremy is lot’s of fun!

Photo: Jackie Walker

Jeremy Corbyn with a member of United Communitites for Labour

7Labour Briefing September 2015


IT’S 7.45PM ON 23 JULY and Jeremy is almost an hour late. But looking around in the Malcolm X centre, in one of Bristol’s most historic and diverse areas, people don’t seem to mind. There is an energy of excitement and anticipation, people are telling jokes. “Jeremy’s train has been delayed”, a member of staff apologises over the crackling PA system. “Nationalise the rail” is shouted out, sending a chuckle rippling through the crowd. Good humour, people are patient, relaxed, they appreciate Jeremy travels by train. They relate to him.

By the time he enters, there is no more room and people are having to stand outside. Huge applause. Jeremy clapping too, acknowledging the audience. A pattern repeats: Jeremy comments – on equality, on human rights, on austerity, on peace – each time met with thunderous applause. At about 9pm the talk is finished but people want more and Jeremy is being swamped. I talk to strangers: “He’s brilliant, isn’t he?”, “Finally I feel like there is someone to represent me”. I meet many who were previously non-political or participated outside the sphere of traditional party politics. I meet a 15 year old girl and an 80 year old man with a bad leg, a dreadlocked hippy and a full-time mum. I wait patiently until the numbers dwindle for a few moments with Jeremy. I feel guilty, he looks very tired and tomorrow he will do this all again. He gives me a hug.

THE GALA WAS BIGGER THAN EVER THIS YEAR. I went armed with a monster Stop Benefit Sanctions Banner, a Corbyn T shirt and lots of red LRC Jeremy for Leader flyers.

The weather was glorious and there was a definite buzz for JC, especially as Unite had just agreed to back Jeremy. Support for Jeremy was highlighted at a meeting of Unite Community and the Unemployed Workers Centres Combine - soon to launch a Welfare Rights Charter at TUC Congress.

Jeremy is the only candidate to oppose benefit sanctions and the scapegoating of unemployed people. At the Miners’ Hall in the evening I attended a book launch on blacklisting and a meeting about the Trade Union Bill. There was a high level of awareness about Jeremy standing and leaflets just flew out of my hands. Most people I spoke to told me they were members of affiliated unions and would be supporting Jeremy.

Among the thousands at the Gala, I spotted more red Corbyn T shirts and leafleters - so many young people and so much enthusiasm. I missed Jeremy who was asked to speak after the National Union of Mineworkers (North East Area) announced it was supporting him to lead the Party earlier in the week because of his anti-austerity stance. But I caught Owen Jones and Len McCluskey who said: “Anyone who thinks that Jeremy’s policies are too left, or could not win popular support in our country - watch this space. People call Jeremy and Unite the extreme left. Is it extreme to oppose austerity, wrecking the lives of millions? Is it extreme to stand for higher taxes on the wealthy to help tackle the inequality? Extreme to support our NHS? Extreme to oppose criminal wars like Iraq? And is it extreme to support proper rights for trade unionists? No, comrades, it isn’t. We stand for the common sense of our age. We stand for the values of equality, decency, fairness and social justice.”

Applause, a great day, excitement and hope after the disappointment in May - a sense we are on the move again!

I ARRIVED AT CAMDEN IN GOOD TIME. Scarcely had I got out my Briefings than I was surrounded by people anxious to buy. It felt like Back to the Future, perhaps to 1984 - except that, even at the height of the miners’ strike, we never packed this massive building like this. Ghosts from my political past came up, often surprised to realise that Briefing still existed, sometimes teasing me with “Labour Take the Power!”. That sounded amusing but somehow appropriate once again, at least to my ears. Shoving his microphone under my nose, Michael Crick of Channel 4 News described himself as a subscriber who remembered me well. Who, he asked, was our current Class Traitor of the Month? Gate-crashing the interview, a nearby SWP-er said we should expel the Blairites. Speaking to the camera, I asked why he thought he had any right to tell Jeremy who to expel. Labour is a broad church in need of unity, not expulsions. I did concede that maybe a few Blairites might consider their position, which made Crick happy enough. I sold fifty Briefings within twenty minutes. Discovering ten extra copies lying on a stall, I sold them even more quickly as people formed an orderly queue.

Two longer queues, side by side, had by now completely encircled the entire block. The main hall plus all available overflow rooms were packed. We thronged outside until eventually our hero appeared on the roof of the FBU’s bus. He began by quoting the firefighters’ magnificent slogan: “We rescue people, not banks”. The crowd went wild. I can’t report what happened inside because, despite having a ticket, hundreds of us never got in.

THE GUARDIAN’S FOR YVETTE COOPER. The Mirror is for Andy Burnham. The Telegraph was for Jeremy Corbyn. Until they suddenly got a sick feeling in the pit of their guts as they realised he was set to win the contest. So who’s The Ecologist for? Corbyn, of course.

The decision’s an easy one. He’s the only candidate to publish a substantial, detailed manifesto purely on environmental issues. And we like what he says. He’s all for renewable energy, against nuclear power, against fracking, and wants to bring the Big Six power companies to heel, along with water and the railways.

As for coal, mischief has been made over his suggestion of restarting coal mining in South Wales. In fact, he’s clear that he wants any new coal power stations to be equipped with ‘clean coal’ technology to pump the CO2 emissions safely underground. Moreover he’s after high quality anthracite from deep mines, not landscape destroying open cast pits.

He’s been slagged off as a “yesterday’s man” with “old solutions for old problems”, like nationalising energy companies. But his mission is not to recreate the old monopolies of the CEGB and the Gas Board. It’s to devolve energy to communities, co-operatives and local authorities to create real freedom of choice and democratic accountability, not to mention lower energy bills. That’s a modern approach to a problem of today.

We know also that Jeremy is no recent convert to green issues. For example he was an outspoken supporter of the 1990s road protests against the M11 Link Road in Leytonstone, a ghastly project that cut a huge swathe though housing, parks and open spaces in a deprived corner of north east London.

And we can be confident that Jeremy will stand up against the iniquities of Tory rule today. As Team Cameron takes a sledgehammer to wind and solar power, home insulation programmes and the fight against fuel poverty, while featherbedding fossil fuels and energy monopolists, it’s been hard to detect a squeak of dissent from the opposition benches. Under Corbyn that will all change. And about time too.

But can Corbyn win not only the leadership but also the next General Election?

His record of increasing popularity in his London constituency, the packed halls as thousands throng to hear him speak, and the surge of support within the Party all cry out: “Yes he can!”

Newly signed-up registered supporter Jonathan Lealand

describes JC’s visitVal Graham reportsChris Knight reports from outside

– but not inside – an extraordinary London rally on 3 August

The Ecologist’s editor Oliver Tickell explains

Jeremy comes to Bristol

The Durham Miners’ Gala

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The Ecologist is for Corbyn

Photo: Jason Harris/Jeremy for Labour

Labour Briefing September 2015 9



F O R J e r e m A MC P A G N I N G yI

10 Labour Briefing September 201510 Labour Briefing September 2015 11

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF JEREMY CORBYN’S CAMPAIGN? Of course, it is to win the leadership of the Party. But there is far more to it than that.

The enthusiasm the campaign has brought out, shown in enormous inspirational meetings, support in polls and social media, reflects a rejection of the politics of the Westminster bubble and all that goes with it – austerity, blaming migrants, warmongering, growing inequality, weakening rights at work and assaults on the welfare state and those dependent on it. It is a refusal to accept that the only choices we (are allowed to) face are between the Tories and a Labour Party with Tory-lite policies.

But the campaign also reflects – and helps form and build – the opposition to austerity policies in the here and now. Immediately after the General Election there were large spontaneous demonstrations in many towns and the People’s Assembly anti-austerity demonstration attracted around 250,000 people. Corbyn himself has always been part of that resistance to austerity and, win or lose, that boost to the movement must not go away. Clearly the anti-austerity movement is not restricted to Labour Party supporters (and must not be) but the movement needs to be stronger, more democratic and more militant in resisting the government’s attacks. The willingness of many union leaders to support Corbyn for the Labour leadership, rather than one of the “safer” options, and their militant speeches against the Tories’ new anti-union Bill makes it essential we hold them to their words and organise real resistance to this government, unlike during the last Parliament when many of them bottled it.

Win or lose, the Corbyn campaign has transformed the debate in much of the labour movement, and beyond in British politics in general. The media have had to cover arguments which they have long ignored, even if their coverage has largely been dismissive. That alone is a major achievement. It has revitalised a movement, bringing in new forces and – what much of the mainstream coverage has ignored – tapping in to the frustrations of many long-standing party members and supporters. If Corbyn wins, that energy and enthusiasm will be much needed. We probably won’t face the immediate coup that some of the most hardened right wing MPs, encouraged by much of the media, talk about, but are much more likely to face indirect attacks – slow attrition by the party machine and a hostile PLP, supported by the media, hoping to

UNISON VOTED BY A CLEAR MAJORITY TO NOMINATE JEREMY CORBYN for Labour Leader at the National Labour Link Committee - not known for its radicalism. The Labour Link national forum had met at the beginning of July when leadership hustings were held and it was clear that there was support for Jeremy from a good portion of the 150 delegates there from different regions.

The committee itself, which consists of eleven directly elected reps from the regions and twelve members elected from among NEC members, chose not to make the decision at the forum but to consult members via regions and report back at a specially convened meeting on July 29. This decision to hold the meeting towards the end of the nomination process proved to be crucial. Some of us supporting Jeremy used the time to set up a Facebook page with over 600 supporters and put out a statement online with hundreds of activists signing up to support throughout the country. This included not just those normally associated with the left but broad layers of activists - including both a former Unison President and a previous vice-chair of the committee.

The growing support was reflected in the regional consultation processes. Most regions did their surveys of members just prior to

Pete Firmin, National Political Secretary, Labour Representation Committee, looks forward to the struggles after the leadership election

Andrew Berry, member of Unison National Labour Link Committee and currently standing for re-election from Greater London, reports

CORBYNWHAT NEXT?

UNISONBACKS JEREMY

undermine and ultimately defeat Corbyn, and more importantly, the movement he has brought to life.

For this, the left needs to be well organised. No one should expect Corbyn alone to be able to transform the Labour Party. That will only be possible with the support of a strong movement across the Party and unions, pushing for democratic decision-making. But that isn’t just about the internal life of the labour movement. To achieve real change that push within the movement must be linked to a real effort to make socialism relevant and credible to the wider working class. That means an involvement in struggles against the government and bosses, and taking the argument to people around austerity, internationalism, migration, racism etc. Politics will have to be done differently, not just about winning votes in elections, but winning arguments and struggles.

Those who say a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party could not win elections, apart from using extremely dodgy analogies with 1983, believe politics is only possible within the narrow spectrum of acceptance of neo-liberalism, and capturing the votes of those who voted Tory in previous elections. Tony Blair revealed their real intentions when he said that even if he thought an election could be won by tacking left, it would still be wrong. Quite. They have no concept of winning the allegiance of those who don’t vote, despite them being about one third of the electorate, often not voting because they think the main parties are “all the same”. Corbyn’s opponents may be right that if you “do” politics solely in the way they see it, the Party would be up against a hostile media as well as the Tory Party and Labour grandees. For a mildly left Labour Party to defeat those forces ranged against it is hard enough. A left party will only do so by breaking out of this way of doing politics. The way the Corbyn campaign has taken off

on social media is a partial indication of how this can be done, but it would need to be stepped up severalfold. Elsewhere in Europe (and beyond) the likes of Syriza and Podemos have shown it is possible to break out of that mould and win popular support for left policies.

Win or lose, we have to make every effort to ensure the left comes out of this campaign much stronger than it went into it. The risk is that if Corbyn loses, people will be demoralised and slip back into inactivity. Socialists need to point out how much this campaign has achieved and how much more it can do if well organised and victorious. To let the impetus created dissipate is not an option.

the July 29 meeting. The later the region did the consultation the clearer was the message from members to nominate Jeremy. The General Secretary Dave Prentis gave a clear steer to the committee to follow the members’ wishes and later spoke on Channel 4 about our members needing hope and that was why he was supporting Jeremy.

The failure of the Labour Party to oppose the budget and the changes to welfare was a major factor and the campaign for Jeremy now had clear momentum. This is not a surprise as the tax credit reforms alone are likely to hit hundreds of thousands of low paid, mainly women, Unison members very hard.

The disadvantage of leaving it late is that we had very little time to use the union’s support for Jeremy to register more supporters although Unison did immediately send an email to all its members informing them of the nomination and the need to register. The Collins reforms mean members do not now automatically get a vote but have to opt in as supporters. The Corbyn campaign has however boosted the numbers signing up in all unions, including Unison. Unison also backed Angela Eagle for Deputy Leader.

Greet the Dawn - Bob Jiggins - Wantage CLP



General Secretary Dave Prentis supports Jeremy Corbyn

Photo: Simon Deville

Andrew Berry


Liam Burns, Maryhill and Springburn CLP Youth Officer and Scottish Labour Young Socialists, finds hope for Scottish Labour in Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign

JEREMY CORBYN’S CAMPAIGN EXPLODED INTO SCOTLAND for a non-stop two day tour engaging with over 2,000 supporters covering Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I was honoured to have been asked to chair the Edinburgh and Glasgow events.

Like many of Jeremy’s events, they were all over-subscribed, with overspill rooms having to be used. Supporters also heard from life-time social justice campaigners such as Neil Findlay and first time speakers like April Cummings - who as a youth voter felt very disengaged until she got inspired by the campaign.

April told us that Jeremy respects the membership and looks to learn from them.

ENTHUSIASM, FORWARD MOMENTUM AND SUCCESS are not things the Labour Party in Scotland has been familiar with for a long time and, given the depressing situation the Party finds itself in, they are desperately needed. It should be good news to all in Scottish Labour then that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign has all these things - in addition to the necessary politics required to give the Party a fighting chance of dealing with the big problems it faces. These are reconnecting with its traditional working class base and engaging a new generation of people seeking to help build a fairer society.

Jeremy is leading the contest. Already his campaign has the support of the largest number of Scottish CLPs and, among many of those where another candidate was nominated, Corbyn has been the runner up. Campaign phone canvassing has found support for Jeremy is consistently strong among members, and there’s very little indication that the large numbers of new members and supporters signing up will be voting for a candidate other than Jeremy. Rallies, social media and polls have all shown Jeremy’s support. Within half an hour of being publicised, tickets for Jeremy’s campaign visit to Glasgow sold out, and a bigger venue had to be found, which, of course, sold out too. Similar events have followed the same pattern in Dundee and Edinburgh.

Despite the hysterical reaction in the media and among some Labour commentators, Jeremy’s candidacy isn’t seen as dangerously radical or a retreat to a comfort zone. It is desperately needed, nowhere more than in Scotland. Jeremy’s stance against austerity and his commitment to bring vital industries back into public hands would help to make our society more equal.

Labour has been struggling for more than a decade and this can

THE CAUSE OF CORBYN IS THE CAUSE OF SCOTTISH LABOUR!

make the issues faced complex, but they can be largely understood as a reaction against Labour’s concessions to neoliberal doctrines in the ’90s. Though there were some distributive successes of the 1997-2010 Labour administrations, the failure to reverse the Tory deindustrialisation and workplace disorganisation was the start of a process that ended with Labour timidly accepting the argument for austerity and misguidedly campaigning with the Tories during the referendum. The warning signs were there, as throughout this period turnouts declined and Labour slumped.

This sorry scenario is exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies of the Scottish political environment and made apparent by an ostensibly safe alternative in the eyes of the working class and some on the left - the SNP. The SNP has deployed leftist arguments and an anti-austerity position in their battles with Labour, as well as their traditional nationalist narratives. Their successes continued in the recent council by-elections with a pattern of more than 20% swings from Labour to the SNP.

Yet for all the success and grandstanding, there’s little to be seen in practice from the SNP. Their top priority remains Scottish independence - not an equal society. Instead of increasing tax on those who can bear it, the SNP has frozen Council Tax, to the benefit of middle and high incomes families but to the detriment of the poor who rely on the council services that must be cut to uphold this freeze. In putting Scottish public services out to tender they have continued with the PFI agenda that helped to put the Labour Party in the muddy political terrain it is in just now. Their commitment to full fiscal austerity and corporation tax cuts indicates a fiscal policy not only at odds with socialist principles but also with economic reality. Even their position on austerity was similar to Labour’s at the 2015 election - cut little less over a little longer.

Labour in Scotland needs to challenge this situation by realigning itself with its core purpose, giving it legitimacy in the eyes of the working class once more and the ability to frame the debate in Scotland that revolves around the same key issue as elsewhere in Europe - the approach to austerity. Austerity inhibits the future. The decline of the state and transfer of wealth toward the rich increase inequality and reduce the ability of people to look forward to some kind of stable and desirable future. Zero-hours and short term contracts, unorganised unskilled workplaces and a market that favours employers have caused wages to depreciate continuously since the ’70s. Debt hangs over the head not only of those who want to go to university, but those who want to start a family, learn to drive or have a roof over their head. It’s a deeply alienating reality and Labour should be at the forefront of challenging it. But to do this it needs to reassert the core values that made it the political force it once was. This is what Jeremy’s campaign is all about, why it is popular and why it must succeed.

His priorities of fairness, equality and social justice are expressed in a manner that is free from the jargon and hollow sound bites that have become the standard in parliamentary politics. In doing so he breaks boundaries that never should have existed, between people and politicians, the Party and its members.

The noticeable thing about the campaign is that it is organic, natural and from the grassroots. It’s people talking about real issues with a sense of honesty and sincerity.

During the events, you could hear a pin drop when Jeremy spoke to an audience whose make-up was gender balanced, covering all age groups and many ethnicities. He has engaged with our youth and brought

tears to the eyes of the maturest of audiences.

It feels like this is the moment that many have been waiting for and his politics of hope have reignited the fire in everyone’s belly. People are passionate about him and that’s why the emotions shine through.

Glasgow’s rally was electrifying. The beautiful setting of the Old Fruitmarket could have been packed out twice over. Jeremy came on to a standing ovation when he took to the stage. Before he spoke he looked out at the audience and whispered in my ear “Tony Benn would have loved this.” He realises that this isn’t about Jeremy Corbyn the man but Jeremy Corbyn the movement, while reflecting on many who have campaigned before him.

As he finishes the crowd starts to chant “Jez We Can” The band (who Jeremy renamed the Socialist Band) finished off the evening with a rendition of Bandiera Rossa. We were all in full voice and you suddenly get that feeling that we are all part of something very special indeed.


SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL!

Denise Christie, Campaign for Socialism Executive member, reports on Jeremy Corbyn’s very special visit to Scotland



The Jeremy Corbyn for Leader campaign has been inspiring and its dynamism has come in no small part from the young people who have given up their time to fight for the different kind of society that Jeremy represents. Scotland is no exception. A group of young Labour members has decided to harness this energy and create a group where young people can discuss, organise and campaign autonomously. We have called it the Scottish Labour Young Socialists and we want to channel some of the energy of Jeremy’s campaign in Scotland into rebuilding the Party and fighting for socialism north of the border. Find us on Facebook at Scottish Labour Young Socialists or follow us on Twitter @SLYSocialists.

Labour Briefing September 2015 Labour Briefing September 201514 15

STOPTHE

WITCH HUNT!

LOUISE WHITTLE, Briefing photographer and occasional writer, has been refused admission to Bristol East CLP. Louise has been a party member on and off since 1985, with a history of canvassing for Labour in national and local elections. She rejoined the day after the General Election, before there was any indication that Jeremy Corbyn would stand for Leader. Her monthly payment was duly taken from her bank account.

Then when the ballot papers were sent

out, she contacted the national Party and was informed her membership had been refused.

Her crime? She had spoken at a Left Unity meeting two years ago, since which time she has had no contact with them. She is not, and never has been, a member of Left Unity.

She appealed and will receive a ballot paper and have a vote in the leadership election. However, if the original decision is upheld, her vote will be removed!

IT’S ALL GETTING VERY UGLY IN POLITICS at the moment when it comes to immigration. We have had the grisly words of the Prime Minister describing desperate migrants and refugees as a “swarm” and Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond saying Europe would not be able to protect its “standard of living and social infrastructure” if it had to absorb millions of migrants from Africa. These comments have drawn criticism from anti-racist campaigners and Amnesty International, who point out that Calais is a symptom of a global refugee crisis which is seeing Syrians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Iraqis escaping a myriad of crises to neighbouring countries. If the image of people rounded up in a stadium in Greece is shocking, it’s also the product of Britain refusing to co-operate with the EU on how to deal with this global issue in a humanitarian way.

Our foreign policy of intervention has resulted in destabilisation. The response to the fall out cannot be more bombs, as has been suggested - with the bombing of boats trafficking people. We need to have a compassionate response towards people risking a horrific death in the Mediterranean who are clearly desperate to escape poverty, war and social unrest, the likes of which we in Britain have not experienced.

I commend prominent members of the Jewish community for calling on David Cameron to step up and respond like a human


CELEBRATE OUR DIVERSITYW

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Diane Abbott MP calls for an end to scapegoating of migrants in desperate need

Darren Williams, Secretary Welsh Labour

Grassroots, reports

IN RECENT WEEKS, JEREMY CORBYN’S LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN has surpassed all expectations in the support it has won across Wales. It has shown Welsh Labour MPs to be disturbingly out of touch with the views of party members and supporters. Not a single Welsh parliamentarian is backing Corbyn and only one – Huw Irranca-Davies – nominated him for the leadership, after CLP members told him that they wanted a wider debate around the election. Once local parties began to discuss the contest, however, it became clear that Corbyn was well ahead of his rivals, securing nine CLP nominations – comfortably more than any of the others. There is little doubt that he would have added to this total if party officers in some constituencies had not decided not to nominate, often on somewhat spurious grounds.

On Jeremy’s first visit to Wales, in early

July, he attracted larger than usual audiences to public meetings in Swansea and Cardiff: about 120, and 80, respectively. These turnouts – based on just a few days promotion – were dwarfed, however, by the attendances on his return to Wales on 10 / 11 August. Three hundred people packed into a hotel meeting room in the politically sleepy North Wales seaside town of Llandudno, while 200 turned up to hear him address a meeting at Connah’s Quay Labour Club, near Wrexham, a couple of hours later. A visit to the Aneurin Bevan memorial stones on a mountain top in Tredegar the following morning also drew a couple of hundred, who heard Corbyn claim Bevan’s legacy and pledge himself to roll back the privatisation and marketisation of health care in England, emulating and consolidating the policies of the Welsh Labour government.

That evening, Jeremy addressed a crowd of 1,000 in a meeting room in a Cardiff hotel. With every seat taken, hundreds crammed into the aisles or sat on the floor to hear him set out his alternative to austerity and vision for a radical Labour policy programme, flanked by supportive Welsh politicians and trade unionists. It has been generally reckoned to be the largest political meeting in Cardiff since the miners’ strike. Among those backing Jeremy in Wales is the health minister, Mark Drakeford, who was also – as Rhodri Morgan’s chief special adviser – the architect of the ‘clear red water’ policy programme. Four other Assembly Members – Mike Hedges, Mick Antoniw, Christine Chapman and John Griffiths – are also publicly supportive, along with dozens of councillors from local authorities across Wales, including the leader of Blaenau Gwent and deputy leaders of Cardiff and Swansea.

Jeremy Corbyn visiting the Aneurin Bevan memorial stones

being and remember that we have a proud tradition of being a refuge for those in need. And over 60,000 people are petitioning David Cameron online to provide medical support to migrants in Calais, who have been injured trying to get to Britain, and whose numbers include pregnant women and children.

Lest we ever forget, Britain is the product of migration. London is a world class city that won the Olympics because every team in the world would have a welcome party cheering them on here. It is an international generator of commerce because it is a citadel of the globalised world. We cannot be uncomfortable with the movement of people, when we have benefited infinitely from the movement of goods. It is a travesty that the Tory Mayor of London has not led on this issue.

Blaming refugees and migrants for the destabilisation that they face is also a handy distraction in the midst of an economic crisis that has set off all kinds of reaction in the world. It is not only morally wrong, it devalues the regard the international community has for a city like London on the world stage. Let’s see the rounding up of migrants in a stadium in Kos as a red line too far, and remind our leaders that now is the time to step up and provide a humanitarian response. Britain is a nation of migrants, and is better and more successful for it – let’s celebrate our diversity and stand up to racism.

» Diane Abbott MP is currently running to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London – sign up for updates and more information at www.diane4london.co.uk

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» Joan Twelves has also been told her membership has not been accepted. Joan was a Party member from 1980 to 2000, when she held many positions at constituency, borough and London level, including being a member of the London Labour Party’s Executive Committee and vice-chair of its Campaigns Committee (to Jeremy Corbyn’s chair). Joan was leader of Lambeth Council from 1989-1991, when she and twelve others were suspended over their opposition to the Poll Tax and the

Gulf War. Joan subsequently served a one year suspension for “bringing the Party into disrepute” but was then fully reinstated into the Party and stood as an endorsed candidate in the local elections in May 1994.

Since leaving the Labour Party in 2000, Joan has never joined or supported another party. She has been seriously ill for many years. During the recent General Election she donated to the Party and arranged leaflet deliveries. When

she rejoined earlier this year, she received a welcoming letter and membership card from Harriet Harman. This is clearly expulsion rather than rejection of membership, since membership was accepted, as was attendance at meetings. Suspicion that this is driven by local Lambeth right wingers seeking to exclude Corbyn supporters is compounded by the fact that Helen Shaw, co-chair of Inquest, has been rejected as an affiliated supporter.

WHY IS IT THAT, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF JEREMY CORBYN, all the candidates for the Labour leadership are so lacklustre? Are Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall really the best the centre-right of the Labour Party can offer?

One reason for the poor quality of these candidates is that we are still enduring the legacy of the New Labour years. To be selected as a parliamentary candidate in those times, you had to be uncontroversial and loyal. Yvette Cooper became an MP in 1997, Andy Burnham in 2001 and Liz Kendall in 2010. After the 2010 election defeat, the Party became less controlling about who could be a candidate and the 2015 intake has produced some more distinctive, authentic and hopefully principled figures.

Jeremy Corbyn is 66. He has been MP for Islington North since 1983, selected at a time before the New Labour exclusion machine was even dreamed of. The level of conformity demanded in the Blair years especially fuelled servility and spinelessness

and explains in part the absence of younger talent on Labour’s benches to this day.

Someone who might have been a towering figure leading the Labour left by now is Liz Davies. It’s 20 years since she was selected as parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East only to be publicly witch-hunted, vilified and denied the opportunity to run by the leadership of her own Party. At a time when some in the Labour Party believe that Tony Blair was a great winner and others damn him only for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, it’s worth recalling the vicious role he and his supporters played in that witch-hunt.

“In July 1995,” Liz herself later wrote, “I was catapulted from being an obscure and not atypical Labour Party activist and local councillor to the front pages of the newspapers.” Having been democratically selected by members of Leeds North East, approval by the National Executive would usually be a formality unless there had been procedural irregularities. But even before the NEC met, the press was reporting


Twenty years ago a New Labour witch-hunt

stopped Liz Davies from being a parliamentary

candidate. Mike Phipps examines the legacy of

that experience and asks Liz about the

opportunities opening up with Jeremy Corbyn’s

run for Labour leader

- because New Labour spin-doctors had briefed it to do so - that Blair had “gone ballistic” and was determined to stop the selection going ahead on the grounds that Liz was too left wing.

This, the tabloids decided, was to be an acid test of Blair’s leadership. Liz found herself at the centre of a ferocious media feeding frenzy, with both her political views and private life in the spotlight. The Blairites had fed her to the wolves and with no evidence of any wrongdoing on her part, they were forced to invent some. Liz later won a libel action against three Islington councillors who had been persuaded to concoct a story that she incited violence at a council meeting. But this victory came far too late to stop her being deselected at the time by the NEC as an act of pious loyalty to the new leader, although no specific reasons were ever given.

Tony Benn noted in his diary at the time: “Liz Davies is due to have her endorsement as a parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East refused by the NEC tomorrow

morning… Frank Field, MP, has encouraged Labour voters in the past to ‘Vote Liberal’ and that’s alright. Roger Liddle, who was an SDP councillor until May and voted against Labour, is taken into Blair’s private office. But Liz Davies, who voted against her Labour Council - to save a nursery school - is not allowed to be a candidate.”

Vetoed by the NEC, Liz appealed to the 1995 Party Conference. Clare Short - often upheld as a left winger in the Blair team - was wheeled out to finish the job. She denounced Liz’s association with the “nasty, vicious” magazine Labour Briefing - more damaging to Labour’s cause apparently than the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, Blair had recently flown to Australia to court. Which is why Tony Benn observed, “If Liz had written for the Sun instead of Labour Briefing, she would have been honoured by a special visit from the leader to Australia.”

Liz wasn’t the only casualty in this witch-hunt. Leeds North East CLP was suspended by the NEC, disciplinary proceedings were taken against its leading activists and four were expelled - the price of defying the Blair machine.

New Labour could not get rid of Liz entirely. In 1998 she was elected as part of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance slate to the NEC, where she fought hard on a range of policy and organisational issues - detailed in her book, Through the Looking Glass (Verso, 2001) - before resigning from the Party two years later.

The significance of Liz’s 1995 exclusion as a candidate was clear. Blair, elected leader only a year earlier, had already expunged Labour’s commitment to common ownership - Clause 1V - from the Party’s constitution. The attack on Liz Davies - and the very brutal, public way it was executed - was a clear signal to party activists that the selection of candidates from the left would not be tolerated and a high price would be paid by those who attempted to disobey. This dissuaded many talented left wingers from even considering seeking a parliamentary candidacy. The result was a generation of uninspiring careerists, three of whom are aspiring to lead the Party today.

Twenty years after Liz Davies’ witch-hunt, I asked her some questions about it and subsequent developments.

Briefing: Twenty years ago you were in the media spotlight and under intense political pressure as never before. What do you remember most of that period and what lessons do you draw from the experience?

Liz: It was an extraordinary, intense experience. Most people who find themselves on the front pages have had some preparation for it: MPs are used to local, and then national, headlines. To look around a train carriage and see that people are reading articles about you, accompanied by your picture, is very odd. And there were times when the press pack acted as a scrum, particularly after the Clare Short denunciation at Party Conference when the Labour Party stewards held back and allowed the press to surround and harass me. Tony Benn stepped in, stood in front of me and diffused the tension by making jokes at the media’s expense.

Mainly I remember the warmth and support from Labour Party members. In Leeds North East and Islington Labour Parties, hundreds of members wrote letters of outrage. Some were close colleagues and friends; others were not; but they regarded my views as falling within Labour’s broad church and therefore my selection as perfectly proper.

I also remember watching the case against me fall apart. Blair’s acolytes were desperate to paint me as a full time revolutionary, or a man-hating feminist. But the accusations against me were no reason to deny me the candidacy. I had broken the Labour whip twice on Islington Council, to defend nurseries and adventure playgrounds. When the NEC decided not to endorse my selection, explicitly on the say-so of Blair, they couldn’t manage to find any logical reason, so refused to give one.

Even the right wing press recognised this was Blair moving against the selection of a socialist, whose views were perfectly consistent with the views of sitting Labour MPs.

In terms of lessons, I learned that when the press smears you, you always, always respond. It’s tempting to let it go, but then a false allegation gains currency. I also learned that many Labour Party members 20 years ago had very different politics from their leadership. There was definitely a hope that Blair might end the years of Tory rule, and that Labour would be elected, hence a willingness to tolerate him as leader. But it was clear to me that Party members - and I was invited to speak at hundreds of local Labour Party meetings around the country at the time - believed in public spending, progress towards equality, and democratic values - very different to the values Blair was imposing on the Party. Over the last 20 years, the disparity between the beliefs of grassroots Labour Party members and those of the leadership has massively increased.

Briefing: What assessment do you make of Tony Blair’s role and legacy?

Liz: Tony Blair’s greatest achievement was bringing neoliberal ideology into the Labour Party. The Labour Party used to stand for something different from the Tories. Although there were always sharp political divisions, there was a consensus that inequality should be lessened: the distinction was over how and how much. Nowadays, Labour Party economic policy is simply a reflection of the Tories’,

Continued on next page ›

The return of the left


UNBEKNOWN TO PARENTS, CHILDREN AND MOST TEACHERS throughout England, the Education and Adoption Bill quietly making its way through the House of Commons will begin the final stage of the destruction of education as an accountable public service. The date of the Report Stage of the Bill has yet to be announced but its passage through Parliament is a certainty.

For schools in England, the Bill’s provisions will:» Require every school judged ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted to be

turned into a sponsored academy. The government has estimated an extra 1,000 schools could be converted to sponsored academy status over the current Parliament.

» Give new powers to the Secretary of State for Education to intervene in schools considered to be underperforming, and constrain local authorities from doing so in some circumstances.

» Expand the legal definition of the ‘eligible for intervention’ category to include ‘coasting’ schools, and enable (but not require) the Secretary of State to turn such schools into sponsored academies or intervene in them in other ways.

» Allow the Secretary of State to issue directions, with time limits, to school governing bodies and local authorities, to speed up academy conversions.

» Place a new duty on schools and local authorities in specified cases to take all reasonable steps to progress the conversion.

» Require schools and local authorities in specified cases to work with an identified sponsor toward the ‘making of academy arrangements’ with that sponsor.

» Remove the requirements for a general consultation to be held where a school ‘eligible for intervention’ is being converted to a sponsored academy.

The mythology, painstakingly created by the Blair-Brown governments and the Coalition that succeeded it, is that academies with their supposed additional freedoms are inherently better than the local authority schools that they replace. Ofsted Inspections, woefully unreliable and inconsistent themselves, reduce their superficial evaluation of a school with all its complexities to one of four contentless categories: outstanding; good; requiring improvement; inadequate. These categories are contentless because their attendant criteria are arbitrary and supplied on an ever changing roller coaster of evidence-free whimsy by the Secretary of State and the DfE. Nevertheless, if we play the game and accept these judgements as valid, the proportion of “failing” (inadequate) academies is the same as the proportion of “failing” local authority schools.

So what is different about academies? Essentially, they are run by the private academy chains such as ARK, AET or Oasis and any legislation applying to them is contained entirely within their

funding agreements. The loss of rights for parents, children and staff is colossal but the local community also loses because the elected local authority can no longer plan for school provision in its area and it loses the right to intervene when it perceives a problem or when it would have liked to disseminate good practice. The governing body of the schools is small and totally appointed by the private companies – ie the sponsors.

Schools by law are directed to teach democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance as British values. One of the more ironic consequences of the Bill is the appropriation of the decision-making process away from elected local authorities by the Secretary of State without even the fig-leaf of local consultation. There is to be none. So much for democratic values.

60% of all state secondary schools are now academies. The Bill represents a huge expansion of the privatisation programme. Schools in “special measures” will automatically be academised,

even though most forced academisations have been rejected when parents have been consulted. The addition of the “requires improvement” category of schools allows forced academisation of schools that used to be considered “satisfactory” which is roughly another 40% of local authority secondaries and 16% of primaries. The crowning glory of the Bill is the forced academisation of “coasting schools”. The Bill does not define “coasting”. It is another contentless category, the content to be supplied by the Secretary of State.

At the moment, “coasting” is being defined as schools with a steady 60% 5+ A to C GCSE pass rate. Most schools with working class or impoverished intakes will fall into this category if they haven’t already fallen into the others. And like all administratively convenient categories, the content will change to suit the needs of the administration.

None of this was flagged up during the General Election. What was known then was that there is a severe shortage of primary school places. 90,000 additional primary places were needed during academic year 2013-14. By 2017-18 there will be a need for almost 130,000 more new places, the equivalent of 4,750 classes. And the education service is haemorrhaging teachers - 20% of newly qualified teachers entering the profession leave by their third year of teaching.

» Join us at our Conference November 14 Whose Education Is It Anyway? www.ticketsource.co.uk/date/181569

» Campaign for State Education, part of the Reclaiming Education Alliance, http://www.reclaimingeducation.org.uk/.

Keith Lichman, Secretary, Campaign for State Education, warns of the dangers in the government’s new attack on education

Whose education is it anyway?

THIS IS THE FINAL PARAGRAPH of the article entitled Liz Davies, the Labour Party and the future of the left written by Graham Bash following Liz’s decision to leave the Labour Party.

“A difference of opinion with Liz? Definitely, though in the long run it may be more a division of labour. Liz Davies has been an inspiration to me and countless others on the Labour left. I know that inside

or outside the Labour Party she will continue - in her unique, dignified and determined way - to fight for human liberation. We on the Labour left - and in my opinion, those outside too – have been set a challenge: to rebuild a mass party of labour in which Liz Davies and the countless thousands of others who have left the Labour Party in despair and disgust, can play a central role.”

From Briefing May 2001

The return of the leftContinued from previous page ›

with some small nods to humanity. Read the debate over the Welfare Reform and Work Bill - swingeing cuts to benefits, reduction of the benefit cap which will impoverish yet more children - and the Labour Party’s response has been to join in the Tory discourse about “shirkers and strivers”, to agree that the deficit should be reduced by making benefit claimants poorer.

Of course, Blair can never escape the legacy of taking Britain into several wars - not just Iraq, but Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sierra Leone. He and the Labour MPs who supported him bear personal responsibility for the huge numbers of deaths and instability in Iraq and surrounding countries as a result. We saw with the parliamentary vote against action in Syria that the public is now very sceptical about foreign intervention and that’s a good thing. But what Blair also did was to establish the idea that rich western countries should intervene militarily if there appeared to be a moral humanitarian justification - a notion that should have ended with the empire. Obviously in Iraq, the public didn’t buy his attempts at justification. But generally the discourse of “we must do something” has taken hold. And that means doing something militarily rather than providing asylum, hosting peace talks or providing humanitarian relief for civilians caught up in conflict.

Briefing: When you left the Party, the prospects for a revival of the left looked bleak. Now Jeremy Corbyn seems to be opening up all kinds of possibilities. What is going to come out of all this activity?

Liz: When I left in 2001, Blair had entrenched neoliberalism in the Party and changed the structures so that there was no prospect of party members changing policies through democratic process. Later came Blair’s slavish support for American foreign policy.

I’m very pleased to join the Party as a supporter because of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign. There has been a real surge in support and none of us know what is going to happen, because Ed Miliband’s rule change means that the unrepresentative block vote of Labour MPs can’t stop him having a chance at winning. Thousands of people who are not traditional Labour Party supporters are flocking to join because they support Jeremy Corbyn. A Labour Party with Jeremy’s politics is exactly the sort of political party I want to support.

The surge of support for Jeremy shows that there is real hunger for a mainstream

anti-austerity political party. I hope all those who have been inspired by Jeremy’s politics can work together to build Britain’s anti-austerity movement: the unions, single issue campaigns, Labour Party members, Greens, members of Left Unity and other left parties, anti-austerity campaigners in Scotland and Wales who might support the SNP or Plaid, or no party.

All my political life I‘ve argued the left cannot ignore the electoral process. If the Labour Party elects Jeremy and becomes an anti-austerity party, I’ll be a very committed member of it. If not, an intense political discussion must be had on the left over whether Jeremy’s result means there is a chance that the Party might turn left, or not. It’s impossible to predict the outcome of that debate. Politically there needs to be an anti-austerity voice at the next General election.

Briefing: How are you supporting the Jeremy Corbyn campaign?

Liz: I’m supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign by joining the Labour Party

as a supporter, having resigned from Left Unity, and urging others to do the same. I’ve been writing and organising and donating. What’s so fantastic about Jeremy’s campaign is the number of volunteers. The campaign office has been inundated. He’s raising money from ordinary people - unlike the other candidates who receive large donations from the rich. That’s a tribute both to Jeremy’s politics and the support for an anti-austerity, pro-peace candidate, and also to his personal following.

I’ve known Jeremy for over 30 years and he’s tirelessly addressed meetings all over the country, he’s worked incredibly hard and effectively on behalf of his constituents, and gathered huge respect, even in Parliament where hardly anyone shares his politics. An immigration lawyer told me that he would be voting for Jeremy because he had regularly seen Jeremy in Taylor House [the immigration tribunal] speaking for asylum seekers and other migrants with immigration cases who were not legally represented. That’s a level of dedication, and common humanity, that marks Jeremy out from the vast majority of Labour MPs.

THE WELFARE REFORM ACT 2012 was a huge attack on the most vulnerable in society. Post-General Election, the Tories are wasting no time on getting further benefits cuts with its new Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

There is nothing in this Bill to abstain on. There is not one proposal that has any merit. No notice has been taken of any of the evidence that sanctions do not have any positive effect. Iain Duncan Smith is of course suppressing the evidence of their negative effect - the huge number of suicides of people with high levels of mental distress following their benefits being stopped.

The main proposals are the cut in the benefit cap, the freezing of benefit rates for four years and the bizarre proposals about removing child tax credit for third children of families if the child is born after 6 April 2016. The changes to child tax credit show that the government does not anticipate that universal credit (the centrepiece of the 2012 Act) will be up and running as a ‘universal’ provision for some years to come. Otherwise why bother with changing child tax credit? Child tax credit is one of the benefits that will vanish when (if) universal credit is phased in instead. Universal credit was supposed to be largely in place by now. Its introduction is running about three years behind schedule. Secondly child tax credit is the main way that poor families struggling to make work pay are given a hand-up by the rest of society. This move hits a lot of these hard pressed working class people.

The benefit cap will be reduced to £23,000 per year in Greater London and to £20,000 per year elsewhere. This is for families - the amounts for single people are lower. The benefits cap is currently £25,000 for a family anywhere in the country. The cap is applied to a claimant’s housing benefit. So far, outside of London this has meant that it has affected a small number of large families - often families facing several different problems at once. With the lower cap and soaring rents, this is

a recipe for mass homelessness and the social cleansing of London and other areas seen as desirable by the wealthy.

The freezing of benefits will mean that the screw will be increasingly tightened. Inflation is low now but, once inflation picks up, anyone on benefits will face a daily struggle to stay alive. Electricity will be a luxury as will clean clothes.

The crowning viciousness though is the removal of the ‘work-related activity component’. This has received less attention because most people do not imagine themselves as ever being seriously ill for a long period of time. The work-related

activity component is an extra £29.05 a week added to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) once the DWP accepts that you have ‘limited capability for work’ - the more politically acceptable term for being unfit for work. ESA is the benefit that you can claim if you are unfit for work. This extra money reflects the extra costs of being ill or disabled for a long period of time - for

instance needing to use mini-cabs instead of walking or using public transport. Apart from pinching money from the vulnerable, the suspicion is that the government is looking to lessen the ‘incentive’ for people to appeal decisions that they are fit for work and therefore need to claim Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) instead of ESA. Once on JSA, people will find it difficult to get back on to ESA due to other changes in the social security rules that have already been introduced. Also if you are on JSA, the risk of getting sanctioned increases dramatically. Once sanctioned, people will lose benefits for long periods of time. The main groups of

people that are likely to be affected are people with mental health problems such as depression and learning difficulties. These are among the most vulnerable people in our society.

There are some further nasties. The Bill contains proposals to turn help that people get with mortgage costs into a repayable loan. Currently someone who has a mortgage who claims a benefit such as JSA or ESA can have help towards paying the interest on their mortgage. The thinking is that the mortgage interest that an owner-occupier pays is comparable to the rent a tenant pays as it is the payment for the person having a home. There are three points on this. First, this is a simple grab like some of the other proposals in this Bill. Second, it will drastically decrease the likelihood that an owner-occupier will be better off in work than being on benefit. Third, there have been mutterings that all benefits should be recoverable loans. If this happens, to go on benefits will

be to enter into a lifetime of poverty and debt. Indeed if you have children it will be poverty cascading down the generations.

I end with a call for the Labour not to abstain on this ever again - but rather to take the lead in campaigning against the Bill and its effects if passed. Once back in power Labour must repeal this Bill along with the Bedroom Tax.

Labour Briefing September 2015 21Labour Briefing September 201520

FIXING THE FOUNDATIONS IS THE NEW TORY HOUSING POLICY. It replaces the Coalition’s Laying the Foundations which Cameron said in 2011 was going to “unlock the housing market”. Since then house building has averaged 116,000 per year, whereas under Labour average output was 145,000 homes. So it’s not unreasonable to want to fix the foundations. The question is whether the new policies will work any better.

Even in 2011 the priority was promoting home ownership, but since then it has become an obsession. The task is huge: ownership has declined from 71% to just 63% of households in the last decade. The numbers of owners with mortgages fell by more than half a million just in the period since Cameron took office. Building ‘a home-owning Britain’ will require more than the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme or building cheap and nasty starter homes - two

elements of the new strategy. So Cameron and Osborne have decided

to turn the clocks back to 1980. That was when Thatcher unleashed the right to buy (RTB), which sold off 1.8 million council houses and was to see owner-occupation increase by 10% in a decade. The new government hopes to pull off a similar trick by opening up RTB to housing association tenants, but unlike Thatcher it faces many more obstacles.

The first is whether tenants will buy. It is now much more difficult to get a mortgage and only a third of tenants are in employment, whereas in 1980, half of council tenants had jobs. The National Housing Federation thinks 220,000 tenants will buy over five years but this may be optimistic.

The second is how to pay for the discounts. Under RTB for councils, debt was so low that councils could bear the costs. But associations are private bodies, and the discounts - now up to 70% - will have to be reimbursed. To do this without dipping into Treasury coffers, the government’s wheeze is to sell off high-value council houses, and force councils to donate part of the receipts towards compensating associations – both for discounts and to replace the units sold. Encouraged by a typically over-the-top projection from the right wing Policy Exchange, they expect this to generate £4.5 billion annually, but experts think it will achieve perhaps half that amount and create a funding gap.

A third problem is whether associations can meet the promised levels of replacement. Even if they are compensated for the discounts, government measures will undermine their finances in other ways: cuts in their rents over the next five years and further changes in welfare which are bound to increase the numbers of tenants in arrears. The new homes will have to be let at higher, ‘affordable’ rents, with tenants more dependent on benefits and at greater risk of arrears.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the

changes raise the issue of whether associations can still be treated as private bodies, given the degree to which the government plans to control their income and their assets. The Office for National Statistics has announced it will look at the issue, raising the prospect that associations’ £60 billion private finance will be added to the national debt.

Not surprisingly, the plans have provoked an outcry from housing associations. Cameron and Osborne anticipated this, saying they are “determined to take them on”. Hence the attacks on associations in the media in July, cleverly focusing on their high chief executive salaries but also – audaciously – blaming them for the government’s failure to build enough homes.

Big associations that continued building after the Coalition’s cuts will feel deeply offended by this: after all, they had to cope with grant levels being cut from almost £3 billion annually under Labour to less than £500 million annually in the programme that ended last March. Despite this, output of affordable housing, which peaked at 60,000 under Labour, was still just over 40,000 last year.

But now they have been recast as villains who insist on building mainly for rent, when the new government’s interest lies solely in having more home-owners. So they will be forced to sell their assets, have their incomes cut, and be accused of combining “public sector lethargy with private sector greed”. This could prove to be a huge mistake, prejudicing the capacity of one of the most productive parts of the housing sector. Meanwhile, those many younger households who have little prospect of buying can only fume, especially if those who buy the sold-off council and housing association homes turn out to be landlords, not owner-occupiers.

» Monimbo blogs regularly at https://redbrickblog.wordpress.com/author/monimbo99/

Welfare reformEtonians mug the poor

Policy without foundations

Photo: Louise Whittle

Tony Benson examines the government’s new Welfare Reform and Work Bill - and cannot understand how

Labour could have abstained

Tory plans to make housing associations sell their properties may yet backfire, warns a housing policy expert, who writes as

Monimbo for the Red Brick housing blog

designed by Freepik.com

23Labour Briefing September 2015Labour Briefing September 201522

NHS STAFF ARE NOTORIOUSLY UNCOMPLAINING but last month they unleashed a twitter storm under the hashtag #ImInWorkJeremy. Doctors, nurses and paramedics who routinely work nights, weekends and public holidays were incensed by Jeremy Hunt’s suggestion that the NHS is not a 24/7 service and that their reluctance to get out of bed was leading to excess patient deaths.

At the same time David Cameron was busy promising a “truly seven day NHS”. In his first major post-election speech Cameron suggested that seven days a week opening would help deliver a “safer NHS and more lives saved”. As usual his speech was long on buzzwords (spirit of one nation, values, dignity, etc) but short on evidence and detail. The NHS has always been open for business 24/7 so Cameron was referring to routine work. What would be the cost of introducing seven day routine access? Doctors work in teams and if you want routine work done the whole team will have to be present – nurses, a fully staffed imaging department, pathology lab, pharmacy staff, physiotherapists and more. If there is no extra money for this, then having staff doing routine work at nights and weekends means they will not be working at other times. The result will be that the whole service and its staff, already under extreme pressure, will be stretched even thinner.

Where is the evidence that patients actually want seven day routine access to the NHS, especially if they understand the consequences for a service that is already overstretched? Several Clinical Commissioning Groups have pulled the plug on pilot schemes for seven day GP access schemes due to lack of demand and cost effectiveness, with only 12% of Sunday

appointments taken up and patients not wanting to go to surgeries other than their own. Surely it would be more sensible to concentrate on providing a better five day service by ensuring more appointments during the week?

The government has refused to cost or fund the ‘seven day NHS’ and can’t possibly staff it – thanks to the relentless attacks on primary care one third of GP training posts are unfilled and one third of GPs intend to retire or emigrate in the next five years. But as usual the staff will be blamed for the inevitable failure of the proposals.

Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt has used questionable statistics to suggest that excess patient deaths are due to doctors opting out of weekend work. Hospital mortality data used by the Department of Health show that patients admitted at the weekend have up to a 16% greater chance of dying. Hunt, without any attempt to analyse the findings, launched an attack on doctors, threatening contracts which would force them to work at weekends, and accused the BMA of being a “roadblock to reforms” which would save patients’ lives.

This was a new low even for a government notorious for abusing statistics. Doctors can opt out of routine weekend work, eg routine

operating lists (although many do them). Hunt deliberately confused routine out of hours (OOH )work with emergency OOH work to imply that doctors could opt out of the latter, which is untrue. Almost all junior and senior doctors routinely do emergency OOH work. Freedom of Information requests revealed that only 0.1% of consultants don’t, hence the angry twitterstorm of #ImInWorkJeremy. Meanwhile experts said there were good reasons for the hospital mortality figures, relating to the serious illnesses of those admitted at the weekend. Hunt has not apologised.

Hunt’s position is abominable – he and his government are directly responsible for the current dire state of the NHS, both through the chaos resulting from Lansley’s ‘reforms’ and because of the chronic underfunding which is driving staff shortages, cuts and closures. Yet as a consequence of those same reforms Hunt can stand on the sidelines blaming staff for the very problems his government is responsible for.

Cameron showed his disdain for the NHS by putting Hunt in charge and leaving him there when he had clearly lost the confidence of NHS staff – a petition calling for Hunt to resign attracted 100,000 signatures in a single day. It is surely time for staff and patients to look at direct action to save the NHS – in a market driven system there are plenty of actions that would not harm patients. Cutting unnecessary admin and paperwork for instance might even free up more clinical time. But one thing is for sure – with their unfunded promises and attacks on staff this government is trying to divert attention from the terrible mess they have made of the NHS. We are not fooled – we know who is to blame and it is not the hard working NHS staff.

DAY

Dr Jacky Davis, founder member of Keep Our NHS Public, co-author of NHS For Sale and NHS SOS and member of the BMA Council, reports on new

proposals which will put the NHS and its staff under even greater pressure

7

Nick Toms, Streatham CLP and barrister specialising in employment rights, warns of the huge threat to trade unions posed by the Trade Union Reform Bill

THE TORIES HAVE LAUNCHED the most vicious assault on trade union rights since Taff Vale in 1901 when the judges crippled the ability of trade unions to take industrial action. Trade unions in Britain are already in a tight legal straitjacket through the most restrictive trade union laws in Europe.

We have no right to strike. Under the judge made common law, strikes are effectively unlawful with employers able to obtain injunctions, using what are known as the industrial torts (civil wrongs) to prevent them. Industrial action is only possible through the limited statutory immunity provided since 1906 where the action is in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute.

The immunity is limited by the restrictive definition of a trade dispute which must be between workers and their employer. Certain types of industrial action, e.g. secondary action or action to support a closed shop, have no immunity at all.

A trade union also loses its immunity if it fails to comply with the myriad of requirements for a lawful industrial action ballot. These provisions are not about democracy but, instead, preventing strikes.

Partly as consequence of our repressive laws, strikes have declined dramatically since the 1980s. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were on average 7,213,000 working days a year lost through strikes between 1980-89. This fell to just 647,000 in the period 2010-14. In 2013 just 443,600 working days were lost due to industrial action. The level of industrial action in the UK is on average half that in the rest of the EU.

Trade union membership has also fallen sharply from 13 million in 1979 to around 6.5 million today. According to the Department for Business statistics, trade union membership was just 25.6% of the workforce in 2013. It is increasingly concentrated in the public sector where 55.4% of the workforce are in trade unions compared to 14.4% in the private sector. Collective bargaining coverage has declined steeply from 70% in 1980 to under 30% today – and that is also largely concentrated in the public sector.

The Tories now seem set on destroying the right to strike and trade unions altogether along with their political voice, the Labour Party.

Measures in the Trade Union Reform Bill include:

» Ballots will only provide trade unions with immunity where the turnout of those eligible to vote exceeds 50%.

FIGHT THETRADE UNIONREFORM BILL

» In ‘important public services’ at least 40% of those eligible to vote will have to vote in favour for a ballot to preserve the immunity. Important public services will be defined by regulation from the following categories: health; education of those under 17; fire; transport; decommissioning nuclear installations and management of radioactive waste; and border security.

» Requiring still more detailed information on the ballot paper about the matters in issue in the trade dispute, the types of industrial action short of strike action contemplated and the period or periods industrial action is expected to take place.

» An expiry date for the industrial action mandate of four months after which a new ballot will be needed.

» Two weeks’ notice of industrial action for employers (as opposed to one week currently).

» Employers being allowed to hire agency staff to break the strike.

» Extensive union supervision of picketing with unlawful or intimidatory picketing becoming a criminal offence (it is currently a civil wrong or tort).

» Political funds in all unions will be limited to contributions from members who opt in. At present members can opt out.

These measures will make strikes even more difficult to organise, if not impossible, and could grossly restrict the ability of trade unions to fund the Labour Party and other political campaigns. Restrictions on

political campaigns are limited to trade unions. Private companies that want to fund political campaigns for the Tory Party will remain free to do so without restriction. This is a blatant attack on working class political representation.

Further, the government has announced plans, through an amendment to the Bill, to end check off in the public sector. No doubt they hope to cripple public sector trade unions and to kill off much of the trade union movement altogether.

These measures can only further extend the gross inequality in our society which has risen as trade union rights have been curtailed. Employers will be free to act as they wish in the knowledge there is little their workforce can do to stop them.

These new measures mean that trade unions face a threat to their very existence. The Bill represents a watershed moment. There is no middle road. Either the trade unions accept defeat with their remaining role being little more than a dwindling, glorified and expensive citizens advice bureau or they have to make it clear this is a step too far and they will defy and/or ignore the law in order to represent their members. Where trade unions are strong they have shown the law can be reduced to an irrelevance e.g. in the construction industry. If the trade unions want to survive they need to follow this example.

Trade unions are not an anachronism from a bygone age. Most of the employee benefits we enjoy and which are now being eroded were fought for and won by the trade unions. We will never be able to roll back neo-liberalism and austerity without strong and representative trade unions.

Photo: Molly Cooper

24 25

I HAVE BEEN FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE HELD THE POST of Branch Secretary for Barnet Unison for 13 years and during the last seven years we have been organising our fight against outsourcing.

Despite the odds we have managed to maintain a positive approach to these serious challenges. Our branch has learned from other branches and embraced innovative ways to mobilise and publicise our numerous campaigns. I know just how

Unison must step up the resistance

TUBE WORKERSFIGHT BACK

John Burgess, Unison Branch Secretary for the Tory flagship borough of Barnet, explains to Labour Briefing why he is standing in the

forthcoming national election for Unison General Secretary

it feels when wave after wave of cuts and/or outsourcing land at the door and just how hard it is when we try to mobilise a workforce that feels powerless in the face of the ongoing austerity measures.

The Trade Union Reform Bill is designed with one end – to finish off the trade union movement. It is clear to me that the government believes that the trade unions are the major obstacle to ending public services.

We have a government committed to the destruction of our National Health Service and all our public services. It is also ruthlessly committed to dividing and ruling the working class by encouraging racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant prejudice. Unison must stand against this government, in support of public services and equality and against all forms of discrimination.

We know that austerity hits women hardest of all. As the union with around a million women members, Unison has to organise our members to hit back.

If we are going to be able to defend our members and public services, one of the first things that needs to change is to

encourage branches to share experiences to become more effective.

Large numbers of our activists understand we are living in desperate times. One example of this mood is the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign - across the country it is showing that people have had enough of the politics of despair and really believe that there is an alternative to austerity.

I want to increase the confidence of our lay activists to lead the campaigns we need by releasing the support and resources they need.

With a hostile government encouraging rogue employers to victimise our activists, Unison needs to stand up for our people like never before.

This is why I believe we need to elect a Unison lay rep for this challenge which is why I am standing as a candidate for Unison General Secretary.

ON SEPTEMBER 9, THE DAY OF THE COMPANY AGM, Unite will hit Sports Direct outlets nationwide with over a hundred actions. Several European unions are supporting the day of action as they fear boss Mike Ashley’s business model. While he has climbed up the Rich List, his Shirebrook distribution centre is run more like a workhouse or labour camp than a workplace. Most of the 5,000 workers, many Eastern Europeans, are agency workers in fear of the sack from a six strikes and you’re out rule. You can get a strike for being off sick or talking. One Polish worker, heavily pregnant, gave birth in the toilet fearing to leave work. The Secrets of Sports Direct has featured on Channel 4 and a more hard-hitting BBC programme is planned for the autumn. The more exposure Ashley’s way of doing business gets, the less attractive those cheap trainers and the England shirts look. Many Newcastle fans already think he is not fit to wear the shirt - or make it and sell it.

Direct Hit Val Graham, Chesterfield TUC, reports

Jeff Slee, RMT Executive Committee (personal capacity), reports

Photo: Jeannie Robinson Unite Community action at Sports Direct Chesterfield

LONDON UNDERGROUND WORKERS HAVE TAKEN TWO STRIKE DAYS, on 9 July and 6 August. These were the first strikes to involve all Tube unions - RMT, ASLEF, TSSA, and Unite - since the 1926 General Strike. Support for the action was completely solid and the Underground system was completely shut on both days.

The strikes are over several disputes.» London Underground Ltd (LUL) plans

to bring in all-night Tube running on the Jubilee, Victoria, and most of the Central, Northern and Piccadilly lines from 12 September. The unions do not oppose this in principle, although they are concerned about the consequences of the loss of overnight engineering work for maintenance of the Tube infrastructure. Transport for London also plans to cut night bus services on some routes as a result of night Tube running - and this will hit poorly paid night time workers such as cleaners who use the buses instead of the more expensive Tubes. What the unions are opposed to are the new, worse, rosters that LUL plans to impose on drivers and other staff. These will mean more night

and weekend working, and so damage family and home life. RMT is demanding that no one is forced to work more nights and weekends than on current rosters. LUL has offered a one-off nonconsolidated lump sum to staff in return for this, but it’s not money that is the issue, it’s quality of life.

» LUL’s pay offer of 1% which members of all unions have rejected.

» The RMT is also in dispute over LUL’s plans for stations which include massive cuts in station staff jobs, the closure of ticket offices which has already started, and imposing on station staff more flexibility of workplace and duties. These plans will mean dangerously understaffed Tube stations, short notice enforced changes to duties and work locations, fewer promotional opportunities, and unacceptable rosters which will destroy Tube workers’ work/life balance. This issue has been ongoing since last year, when RMT took several strike days but were not then successful in stopping it. The RMT has now successfully brought together in this dispute station members’ opposition to

these plans with the anger of all LUL workers over the night Tube and pay.

Behind these issues are Boris Johnson’s aims of imposing austerity measures on Underground workers, trying to break the strength of the Tube unions, and furthering his own political ambitions.

RMT, TSSA, and Unite have called more strike action on 26 and 28 August, which will shut the Tube network for most of that week. The unity of the unions has been broken, however, by ASLEF which - at the time of writing - has pulled out of striking on those days. This is on the feeble grounds that LUL are talking about delaying the night Tubes. LUL have not, however, committed to postponing the introduction of night Tubes, let alone shown a willingness to have serious talks over rostering.

Reports from train operators’ (drivers) depots indicate that many ASLEF members are unhappy with their union’s decision and want to strike alongside the other Tube unions. The solidarity and determination of Tube workers is stronger now than it has been for many years.

Labour Briefing September 2015Labour Briefing September 2015

Photo: Molly Cooper

JEREMY CORBYN IS THE ONLY LABOUR LEADERSHIP CANDIDATE who is firmly opposed to the policies of austerity. The other leadership candidates all dance to George Osborne’s tune. Austerity is the dominant political issue of our time, not just in Britain but all over the world. We must make the case against austerity to the British people.

Chancellor George Osborne has proposed the principle that the government should only ever spend as much as it receives in tax. Economic policy is to be entirely subordinated to balancing the government’s budget. This is not only to be the policy of the present Tory administration – it should be binding on all governments in future for ever!

At first sight this may sound like sturdy common sense. After all, you can’t spend money you haven’t got. In fact it is not just nonsense. It is poisonous nonsense intended to distract our attention from the real problems of the country.

Labour and the crisisWe have been through a massive crisis of capitalism. As a result the Labour government felt it necessary to bail out the banks, whose insane speculation was the trigger for the crisis. Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, estimates the total cost of the bail out at £1.162 trillion at its peak.

Public debt, which had been a modest 35.9% of national income (GDP) in 2006-07 more than doubled in the wake of the recession.

As Marx explained, “The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is – the national debt.” Bailing out the banks meant that their gambling debts became our property. Thanks for that.

Because of the crisis government receipts fell sharply. In just one year – 2009-10 – national income fell by 6% and tax receipts by 18%.

Labour had inherited a national debt of 42.5% of GDP in 1996-97 and whittled it down in the years of prosperity before the crash. Criticisms about ‘Labour’s deficit’ are frankly half-witted. The actual budget deficit in 2007 before the crash was just 0.4% - a tiny amount compared with the vast sums that the government juggles with.

Defenders of austerity fail to understand that the state of public finances in a capitalist economy is determined by the state of the economy. Where were they when the Great Recession struck? Did they even read the papers? Do they really think Gordon Brown caused the crisis of capitalism – the subprime mortgage fiasco in the US and the economic crisis in Iceland, in Ireland and all over the world?

It is true that Brown favoured ‘light touch regulation’ that made the UK banking system more susceptible to a crash. The Tories complained at this time that deregulation wasn’t going far enough; at the same time they pledged to match Labour’s social spending pound for pound.

Mick Brooks, Ealing-Southall CLP and author of Capitalist Crisis - Theory and Practice, explains that the government’s austerity programme is an act

of class war waged against the poor

The Case against Austerity

26

Tories have failedThe Tories have utterly failed in the task they set themselves in 2010 to get rid of the deficit by 2015. They should be reminded of this. The country is still running a deficit of over £70 bn. That means the national debt is still creeping up – now at more than 80% of GDP – over £1.5 trn. Albert Einstein defined insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” By this definition austerity is mad.

The deficit is the difference between what the government gets in and what it spends. If the state is spending more than it receives then the national debt goes up. That is what has been happening for the last five years, despite the Tories’ commitment to austerity. In a crisis-ridden capitalist economy the government can’t control how much tax income is generated in the private sector.

Borrowing for what?The Tories like to compare their budget with that of a household. First it would be odd for a family to shell out on a machine gun before paying the rent and buying food. But that is what the government is in effect doing in commissioning a Trident replacement while shredding the welfare state.

We spend money we haven’t got all the time. It’s called borrowing. Households do borrow, and they have reason to do so. The same government that wants to abolish the national debt is urging citizens to put themselves in hock for enormous sums in order to gain a university education. The Tories are also encouraging people to buy their own homes by way of a huge mortgage. Household debt is actually bigger than the government’s debt. Though households have been trying to pay down their debts since the Great Recession, household debt is set to exceed £2 trn by 2020.

It may well be rational for people in a capitalist society to borrow in order to make their lives better. Households go through cycles of relative prosperity and other periods of desperate need and hardship. Only someone like George Osborne, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, could fail to understand this.

Is the national debt the only problem? According to a Report published by the McKinsey Global Institute called Debt and Deleveraging, published in 2012:

» UK household debt was 98% of GDP» Non-financial corporate debt was 109% of GDP» Financial institution debt was 219% of GDP» Government debt was 81% of GDP» Total UK debt was 507% of GDP (all figures for the second

quarter of 2011).

Overall the UK has gross debt at more than five times GDP. Britain is one of the most indebted countries in the world. These figures give you an idea of the relative size of all these debts. So why do the Tories have this preposterous obsession with government debt alone?

Borrowing for consumption may be unwise. But Osborne is not even prepared to borrow to fund public investment. In taking this stance he is short-sightedly doing permanent damage to the infrastructure of the economy and its productive potential for the future.

Despite the shock experienced as a result of the perceived need to bail out the banks in the Great Recession, the national debt actually remains historically low. Since 1694, when it was formally set up, the debt has averaged 112% of GDP, mainly to finance wars. The establishment can always find the money to pay for a war.

No alternative?There is an alternative. Of course there is. Britain’s debt to GDP ratio is currently running at about 82% of GDP. After the Second World War it peaked at almost 250% of GDP – three times as much. The Labour government elected in 1945 responded by setting up the

National Health Service and the welfare state, not paying down the debt. That was what they were elected to do. That was their mandate.

How did the post-War debt come down? The British economy grew throughout the great post-war boom and the debt diminished as a result. That was a one-off. It’s not going to happen again. As a result it’s crunch time. The boss class really feel the need to put the boot in and ‘balancing the books’ is the perfect excuse.

The debate about deficits and public debts is an old one. As the Great Depression bit in Britain in 1931, government spending increased while its income fell. The Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald was offered the ‘Treasury view’ – that all would be well if the government just balanced the books. Sounds familiar?

How were they to balance the books? By cutting public sector pay, cutting armed forces’ pay and cutting unemployment benefit. Ramsay MacDonald fell for it and went over to the Tories to form a national government. Did it work? Of course not. It just made poor people even poorer – as it was intended to do.

Is the government deficit the real issue? Take the balance of payments deficit. Britain now buys 6% of GDP more from abroad than we earn. Shouldn’t we be doing something about that? Then there is the collapse in productivity since the Great Recession to be dealt with. Surely it is more important to pay our way with the outside world and to make workers more productive than to balance the government’s books?

The fixation with debt and deficit detracts from the real problems of the UK economy. The economy should be a means of making us all better off. The Tories are distracting us from that real task by turning our attention to symbols, to worshipping a totem. At the same time they are waging a class war of rich against the poor. They are using the rhetoric of austerity to drive down the living standards of working people. Say No to austerity and to the Tories and their system. Support Jeremy Corbyn for Leader.

Photo: Simon Deville

THE CHINESE ECONOMIC MIRACLE has been heralded as the biggest phenomenon in the last 50 years. From a poor, mainly agricultural, totalitarian closed state, it has become the fastest growing and largest manufacturing economy in the world. That ‘miracle’ has raised 620 million people out of internationally defined poverty. No country has ever grown so fast and been so large (with 22% of the world’s population).

But is it all over? The ‘western media’ has been pumping out articles and studies by mainstream economists and ‘market watchers’ that it may well be. In recent weeks, the Chinese stock market has taken a massive drop. This followed a humungous boom in stock prices since the beginning of 2015.

This stock market bubble is of the proportion of the US in the 1920s that led to the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Is this what is in store for the Chinese economy as well?

China’s stock market performance has rarely had much, if any, correlation with the country’s real economy. Only 7% of urban Chinese have money in the market and the Chinese government, through state-owned and directed banks and cross-shareholdings of state companies, can exercise considerable control over stock market trading. The stock market bubble was a deliberate policy of the Chinese government. China can afford even serious losses to bank capital from a stock market bust.

Even so, there is no doubt that China’s economy, however you measure it, is slowing down. On official figures growth has slowed to 7% year-on-year from a previous double-digit pace, and most unofficial estimates reckon growth is really even slower. This slowdown in growth and exports partly explains why the government decided to devalue the Chinese renminbi

against the US dollar last month by the biggest amount in a decade.

The driving force behind the country’s growth has been investment. The mainstream argument goes that China is now a ‘middle-income’ economy and, unless it allows the market to rule, it will not close the gap in productivity and income per head with the advanced, older capitalist economies. So the cry is “liberalise with free trade and capital – that’s the only way to move on”.

For the World Bank and expert ‘China Watchers’ to demand the end of state planning, the privatisation of the financial system and the promotion of free markets in the stock markets and the key industrial sectors is the height of hypocrisy. After all, deregulation and free markets in the major capitalist economies led to the biggest collapse in global finance and output since the 1930s in the Great Recession. How can that be a model for future Chinese development?

What lies at the heart of the debate about China’s future is the class nature of its economy and social relations. China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is a weird beast. It is not ‘socialism’ by any Marxist definition or by any benchmark of democratic workers’ control. And there has been a significant expansion of

privately-owned companies, both foreign and domestic over the last 30 years, with the establishment of stock markets and other capitalist financial institutions.

But the vast majority of employment and investment is still undertaken by publicly-owned companies or by institutions that are under the direction and control of the Communist Party. The biggest part of China’s world-beating industry is not foreign-owned multinationals, but Chinese state owned enterprises. The major banks

are state-owned and their lending and deposit policies are directed by the government. Capital controls are imposed and enforced and the currency’s value is manipulated to set economic targets, as we have just seen.

Can the elite continue with this ‘halfway house’ without provoking either a crisis or slump that will force them to follow the ‘capitalist road’ as the World Bank and the pro-capitalist elements want? Will the elite face an eruption from below

as the fast-growing working class urban population starts to flex its muscles for a say in running society?

Well, I think not – at least not yet. Even on the most pessimistic estimates, China is still growing faster than any other major capitalist economy and nearly all the so-called emerging economies.

The key to continued growth and more equality will be democracy. China needs to move from so-called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (i.e. a state-led economy under a corrupt autocracy) to a China with socialist foundations (democratic planning and equality). China cannot just stay as it is indefinitely, whatever its leaders might hope.

» Michael Roberts blogs at: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com


TWO YEARS AFTER MPS VOTED NOT TO TAKE PART in the bombardment of Syria, British forces have been doing precisely that. Parliament will investigate the air strikes on Isis, the government’s authorisation of which shows complete contempt for democracy. But, beyond that, it’s worth asking what these attacks accomplish.

Last year. Parliament authorised air strikes on Isis in Iraq as part of a US-led coalition of attacks. Nearly a year on, the value of bombs dropped by British warplanes and drones on Iraq since September is over £20m, but little has been achieved. Britain is stepping up its role with a sharp increase in SAS operations, drone missions and RAF strikes. Meanwhile, retired US Army General Mike Flynn says that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing, just as the US-led invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State.

This latest phase of the conflict is turning into one of its bloodiest. According to the UN, 15,000 civilians were killed in the 16 months up to April 2015. Since January 2014, nearly three million Iraqis have been displaced due to the fighting.

Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the latest offensive against Isis. An independent monitoring group, Airwars, estimates that nearly 500 civilians and US allies have been killed in US-led bombing raids in the last year. Iraqi forces have also inflicted considerable civilian casualties in Anbar province in recent weeks. Elsewhere, in one notorious incident in July, an Iraqi fighter jet accidentally dropped a bomb over a Baghdad neighbourhood, killing at least twelve people.

Meanwhile Isis is no weaker than a year ago, US agencies estimate. Its murderous barbarism is undisputed: in addition to the atrocities perpetrated against civilians for smoking, eating instead of fasting, being of the wrong faith, and so on, there is now evidence that it is manufacturing rudimentary chemical weapons. But pouring more arms into the region is solving nothing.

When Iraqi forces fled Mosul last year without firing a shot, allowing Isis to establish its most significant urban base in the country so far, they left behind a large amount of material for the terrorists to make use of. No fewer than 2,300 Humvee armoured vehicles were left to fall into Isis’s hands - a majority of all the Humvees the US has delivered to the Iraqi army.

Nor was this an isolated incident. In May, Iraqi army and police ran away from an Isis advance on Ramadi, allowing more valuable

American weaponry to fall into the terrorists’ hands. US taxpayers might just as well be funding Isis directly.

In fact they are. It’s been revealed that Pentagon officials knew at least a year before Isis launched its campaign that NATO-trained “moderate” Free Syrian Army rebels were defecting to Isis or al Qa’eda to fight the Syrian regime, but the US continued to fund them anyway.

Turkey too sponsored Isis in its persecution of the Kurds. It didn’t just sit on its hands as Isis terrorists tried to take the Kurdish stronghold of Kobane in late 2014 - it now emerges that Turkey allowed free passage of Isis convoys across its borders to facilitate that onslaught. Meanwhile, Kurdish fighters were prevented from crossing into Syria to help their comrades. And Turkish soldiers

practise a shoot-to-kill policy against Kurdish refugees fleeing across the border from Syria.

So it came as no surprise in late July that Turkey used the cover of stepping up its so-called war on Isis to bomb PKK positions across the border - all given the green light by the US and NATO. Turkey went further, bombing Kurdish targets in Iraq, its foreign minister claiming there was no difference between Isis and PKK - both were “terrorists”. For its part, Kurdish resistance fighters suffering aerial bombardment in Iraq claimed the Turkish military were even bloodier than Isis.

A domestic crackdown on “terrorism” within Turkey led to 800 arrests over two days in July. Unrest broke out on the streets of Istanbul after the authorities killed a political activist unconnected with either Isis or the PKK. Earlier in July, Istanbul police repressed demonstrations in solidarity with victims of the massacre by Isis of over 30 socialist youth activists in Suruc. Opposition media talk of Turkey descending into civil war.

All these issues should be weighed carefully as the government gears up to ask Parliament to overturn its 2013 policy and extend its bombing of Isis into Syria. And MPs should also consider an academic study published earlier this year that shows that oil plays a bigger role in these conflicts than conspiracy theorists ever imagined. Foreign intervention in a civil war, it concludes, is 100 times more likely if the afflicted country has oil reserves.

» To subscribe to Iraq Occupation Focus’s free fortnightly e-newsletter, go to http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/iraqfocus

Michael Roberts looks at the evidence Mike Phipps, Iraq Occupation Focus, reports on the futility of current US-UK policy in Iraq and Syria

Chinais it all over?

Endless war leading nowhere

30 Labour Briefing September 2015

US to fast track trade deals

Tony Burke, Chair of the Campaign For Trade Union Freedom and Unite Assistant

General Secretary, reportsRETURNING HOMEI was a member of the Labour Party, and supporter of Labour Briefing, for many years from the 1980s to the early 2000s – but I have spent the last ten years in the Green Party.

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PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS SECURED THE LEGISLATION needed for the US-Pacific Rim free trade deal - the TransPacific Partnership, (TPP) - to be driven through the US legislature with the minimum of scrutiny. Michael Foreman who is leading the US negotiations has vowed to speed up the negotiations between the US and EU to secure not just TPP but also the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal before President Obama’s term of office ends.

Known as ‘Fast track’, the legislation allows Obama to submit trade agreements to Congress for straight ‘up-or-down’ votes without any amendments or line-by-line scrutiny. Foreman said: “We want to get TPP done and through Congress. We want to get TTIP negotiated.” Reports suggest he is also looking to get another trade deal done – the Trade In Services Agreement (TiSA) which covers two thirds of the world’s services, such as banking, care services, IT, engineering and communications. But that is unlikely as negotiations ran into difficulties recently.

These new generation of trade deals are “turbo charged neo-liberalism”, which curtail employment rights and rights to collective bargaining, threaten a sovereign government’s ability to pass pro-worker legislation and will force countries to privatise public services and utilities. The trade agreement between Canada and the EU known as CETA has been already been initialled and the EU expects to sign the CETA deal sometime this year or in early 2016.

Union opposition in EU, US and Canada is based on the experience of US and Canadian unions which suffered big job losses in manufacturing when Bill Clinton signed the North America Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. US and Canadian unions say over 700,000 decent jobs were sucked down into cheap labour non-union zones in Mexico.

US and EU unions also argue that the trade deals will create a race to the bottom as the US has never signed a trade deal with strong labour standards or ratified the main ILO Conventions on the right to form unions, the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining.

Also of major concern (and now being fought on the floor of the European Parliament) are the Investor State Dispute Clauses which allow for the setting up of secret courts, where corporations can sue countries which pass legislation which would affect their profits.

For regular updates on TTIP, CETA, TPP, TiSA and the campaign against the new generation of trade deals visit www.tradeunionfreedom.co.uk or follow @unionfreedom


IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A DAVID AND GOLIATH STRUGGLE. And on the morning of 13 July, when Alexis Tsipras and Angela Merkel emerged to announce they’d agreed the basis of a third Greek ‘memorandum’, it was clear that Goliath had won a substantial victory. Just a week after the Greek people’s overwhelming rejection of further austerity in the ‘Oxi’ referendum, Tsipras had been forced to sign a deal that even the Financial Times described as “akin to the relationship between a colonial overlord and its vassal”.

Acres have been written about every twist and turn of the saga, but three points stand out. First, the deal represents one of the most extreme examples of an austerity programme ever imposed. On debt, it continues the “extend and pretend” approach to Greece’s crisis by providing €86 billion of new loans to pay off the old ones and recapitalise Greek banks.

What next for Greece?

The loans come with a series of “prior actions” Greece must take before the various tranches can be released, including a set of privatisations and deregulations that read like a shopping list for European corporations – from ports to regional airports to water systems. This is extraordinary even by the standards of the IMF, which Eurodad research has shown includes an average of 19.5 economic policy conditions in the structural adjustments programmes it imposes on countries around the world. The previous Greek programme already had 41 - the new one is off the scale. What’s more, the requirement to “consult” with the Troika over any legislation that could affect the programme has been upgraded to “consult and agree”. In other words, all decisions must be authorised by Brussels.

Second, the Syriza leadership’s strategy, which was suspected to be flawed, turned

out indeed to be so. Despite the evident courage of defaulting on the IMF and calling the 5 July referendum, it failed because the Tsipras government ultimately stepped back from the brink of Grexit. Yanis Varoufakis, the Finance Minister, had prepared a plan to introduce a parallel currency and nationalise the banks, which would probably have led to Grexit, but it did not come to pass.

The reasons for this indicate why the alternative of Grexit after the referendum was not as viable as some have argued. While European leaders claimed very clearly that a No vote was a vote for Grexit, the referendum was won only once Tsipras had made clear that this was not his intention. Syriza’s Left Platform may have been proven right that the threat of Grexit had to be credible in the negotiations, but they hadn’t convinced enough people to take the risk. They may get the chance to test this more formally if Syriza now splits.

Third, Greece’s trauma has exposed the anti-democratic nature of the eurozone to a wider European public, and permanently weakened the euro as an irrevocable currency union. From Wolfgang Schaeuble’s “Elections change nothing” to Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s “Your banks will shut down” - a threat issued directly to Varoufakis in the Eurogroup in the spring, and carried out in the summer - not to mention the 61% ‘Oxi’ vote, the neoliberal logic of Europe’s monetary union has been shown to be incompatible with democracy.

The rift between Germany on one side and France and Italy on the other is real and represents the larger battle over the eurozone. Former German Vice-Chancellor Joschka Fischer called the imposition of crushing austerity “a break with Germany’s entire post-WWII European policy”.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways in which the bailout deal could unravel. One is the non-participation of the IMF, burned by global criticism of its participation in the previous bailouts despite the evident unsustainability of Greece’s debt. It has been unusually public in stating it will not participate without debt relief far beyond the minor rescheduling anticipated by Merkel, and will not commit before October. Elections across Europe in the coming months and now in Greece, could yet lead to surprises.

With a new European downturn looming and Italian debt, for example, heading north of 130% of GDP, the debt crisis caused by Europe’s banking crisis is far from over. A just resolution will surely require resistance to the dictatorship of finance in more than one country.

» Jubilee Debt Campaign is co-ordinating a pan-European campaign to Cancel Greek Debt, www.CancelGreekDebt.org

It’s been a turbulent summer for Greece. First a national referendum rejected the latest dose of austerity imposed by European institutions, then Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras signed up to even worse terms. Now he has announced his resignation as PM and called for early elections just seven months after sweeping to power. Jonathan Stevenson of

Jubilee Debt Campaign untangles developments

Printed by Swallowmax Ltd, 42 Aden Road, Enfield EN3 7SYPrinted by Swallowmax Ltd, 42 Aden Road, Enfield EN3 7SY

I MOVED TO THE KENT COAST IN MAY 2014. I knew I would miss the diversity of Brixton, my home for the previous 15 years. I also knew that some attitudes on the Kent coast would be problematic. Fear of migration is always highest where levels of migration are lowest.

I’m a union organiser so I threw myself into union activities in Kent. While I was running a stall for the NUT one Saturday a woman gripped my arm and told me why she thought there was a shortage of school places. “It’s the Muslims”, she said, “They’re taking over. ”I looked up and down the crowded, and entirely white, high street and gently asked her, “Where are they?” She faltered, knowing, I think, that there really was no foundation for her assertion, and slipped away.

When the General Election build-up began in earnest UKIP, which had a stronghold on the Kent coast, began ramping up its anti-immigrant rhetoric. I saw the impact of its relentless and blatant scaremongering. People became emboldened to say what had previously been unacceptable.

Working in Folkestone one day, I entered into conversation with a man who was from Greenwich and, attempting to make conversation, I said that I had gone to school in Greenwich. “It’s awful round there now”, he said. He continued, “It’s all black. Do you know that there are schools where some classes are entirely black? If I had a gun, I’d shoot them.” He spoke in the bland, calm tones you might use to discuss the weather, and I realised that he assumed that I would agree with him. He didn’t think he was saying anything particularly shocking.

At moments like this you can see how the Nazis rose to power. If the negative rhetoric used by groups like UKIP isn’t challenged, it opens the door to more extreme views. UKIP are not fascists but they are a gateway to fascism and that is why we must challenge the language they use.

Along with others I formed a group called Folkestone United to do just that. We came together in January 2015 and did all we could to counter the negative messages being put

FOLKESTONE UNITED COMING TOGETHER TO SUPPORT MIGRANTS

Tunnel terminal. It was a difficult venue for people to reach and it wasn’t a huge protest, but in terms of press coverage it was a great success. News teams from all across Europe covered it and it was the lead story on the BBC and Channel 4 News that night. Since then we’ve had a steady stream of journalists coming to do follow-up stories. We’ve had visits from Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and French news teams, all keen to cover a story about a pro-migrant group.

We’ve now built links with L’Auberge des Migrants, a group working to support migrants in the Calais camps and are planning a solidarity visit in mid-September - taking donated goods and cash donations. The response from people in Folkestone has been overwhelming.

There’s lots more work to do and this is just the beginning. We’re looking forward to the challenges ahead, such as the European elections in 2019. One of our local MEPs is Janice Atkinson who, having been thrown out of UKIP, has joined Marine le Pen’s fascist group in the European Parliament. It is a stain on the name of our town that she represents us. Come 2019, we want to make sure that she is given her marching orders.

And there is work to be done to build tolerance and reduce fear. The damaging myths around migration need to be destroyed. This is not the time to be silent.

out about migration locally. We had stalls in the town centre every Saturday, leafleted, and held days of action.

After the General Election result we decided to keep going. We could see that, although UKIP had failed to convert their growing popularity into significant electoral success, the peddling of anti-immigrant rhetoric was something that wasn’t going away.

That proved to be the case with the growing Calais migrant crisis. . We became increasingly frustrated with the irresponsible tone of the reporting. Stories of two thousand migrants “storming” the Channel Tunnel proved to be false and dehumanising words like “swarm” and “flood’ abounded. The focus of the reporting seemed to be entirely on the inconvenience to holiday makers, and not on the desperate stories of the migrants fleeing violence, persecution and terrible hardship.

When we heard a young teenage boy from Sudan had been found dead on top of one of the Channel Tunnel trains it broke our hearts. We decided that we needed to send a clear message to the migrants in Calais that we stood in solidarity with them, and the way they were being treated was not in our name. We also wanted to speak directly to the media, to tell them that we would no longer accept irresponsible, inaccurate and dehumanising coverage of this issue.

Along with Thanet Stand Up to UKIP we organised an impromptu demo at the Channel

Bridget Chapman, Folkestone United, reports

OUTSIDELEFTAn occasional column which takes an iconoclastic look at the world

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Labour Briefing Sept 2015