SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY EUROPEAN ELECTION RESULT

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ends.

Scroungers, Parasites & the Crisis of Capitalism.

A Comment by Ian Johnson 

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

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “I want to apologise on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties, for what has happened in the events of the last few days.”

The last few days? As we now know this scrounging from the public purse has been going on for years!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background

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

The MPs expenses scandal was exposed by the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph had hold of this story for some time, yet it chose to publish it in the run-up to the European elections when it must have been fully aware of the damage it would cause to all the main three political parties. 

The Daily Telegraph is a right-wing newspaper; historically it has always displayed a sharp ruling class consciousness and has close links to the machinery of the state itself. Why then would it publish at the time it did?

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

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

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

However, why does the Telegraph and the section of the ruling class it represents feel a more authoritarian government is needed merely to sort out a group of grubby, parasitic MPs?

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

No Recovery

Recent statements by Chancellor Alistair Darling and Mervyn King of the Bank of England, in relation to economic recovery have been ridiculed by the IMF and World Bank, who are predicting that the UK will be the hardest hit of all developed nations as the crisis gathers pace.

Already within the European Union suggestions are being made that only emergency cases should be treated under the NHS, while all other treatments should be paid for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Johnson is General Secretary of the Socialist Labour Party.

VOTE  SLP

May 2009.

SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY TO STAND IN EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

 

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

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

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

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

The SLP is the only party that is offering such an alternative.

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

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

Vote us in to get us out!

 ENDS.

Socialist Labour contests 2009 European Elections

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

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

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

 

Vote Socialist Labour Party on June 4th 2009

Blacklisting

Blacklists, we have continually been told, no longer exist, if indeed they ever did, and accusations of their existence are simply paranoia.

 

 

Probably the most well known blacklist was the one operating in the 1940s through the 1950s in the United States entertainment industry, better known as the Hollywood blacklist, which denied employment to a host of film directors, screenwriters, actors and actresses because of their assumed political beliefs. Artists affected included the actor and singer Paul Robeson, composer Leonard Bernstein, singer and actress Lena Horne and actor, director and producer Charles ‘Charlie’ Chaplin alongside many, many more. Most were blacklisted for alleged membership or sympathy with the American Communist party, or with liberal causes that could be associated with communism, even though the American Communist party was a legal organisation.

 

It is also worth noting that participants in the entertainment industry who had right-wing or fascist sympathies faced no such harassment or persecution.

 

However, less well known but just as effective were blacklists that covered other industries and these, like the Hollywood blacklist, were never officially acknowledged, even though blacklists have been an ongoing weapon used by big business against workers over many decades.

 

From the end of the First World War for a period of seventy-five years the Economic League operated a blacklist in the UK which not only contained names of active trade unionists but also the names of any worker who might have association with left-wing groups or CND. When the Economic League terminated in 1993 other organisations filled the void.

 

Today, in the building industry we find that a firm called the Consulting Association, which operated a blacklist, is being prosecuted on the grounds that it failed to register as a Data Controller under the Data Protection Act.

 

According to newspaper reports the firm was run by Ian Kerr, a former Special Branch officer, which would link the operating of blacklists to the intelligence services of the state. 

 

Although the construction companies’ publicly insist that no blacklists ever existed, it has been revealed that all the major companies subscribed to the Consulting Association, paying an annual fee of £3000 and then a smaller sum for each new enquiry made.

 

Consulting Association had subscriptions from around forty construction companies who would draw on the information collected on workers deemed ‘militant’ or who had been involved in trade union disputes or simply workers who would be likely to complain over health and safety issues, or workers who had any left-wing associations.

 

We have been able to acquire a copy of the file which was held by the Consulting Association on an SLP member.

 

Although some of the report has been blanked out we can see that the data in the file included the name, address, date of birth and National Insurance number of our member. (All the information you would need for identity theft!) Also included was work history and occasional  ‘observations’.

 

It also included notes on trade union activities and any petitions he may have signed, for example the petition against the witch-hunt of rank and file Labour party members in 1985, and it noted when he stood as an SLP candidate in elections.

 

What should be stressed in regard to the above is that none of our member’s activities were in any shape or form illegal; all were conducted in an open and democratic manner.

 

Alas, democracy really does not interest big business. If any worker defends their democratic rights and civil liberties then they are prime targets for blacklisting. As the Economic League used to claim; anyone opposing the interests of ‘free enterprise’ is engaging in an act of subversion.

 

The ending of the Consulting Association will in no way mean the end of similar organisations, particularly given the deepening economic crisis when attacks on jobs, wages and conditions will increase dramatically.

 

 

 

Ends.

‘We could surrender – or stand and fight’

Guardian 7th March 2009 by Arthur Scargill

Twenty-five years ago, the Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher declared war on the National Union of Mineworkers. The Tories had been preparing for a showdown with the NUM since before the 1979 general election.

They could not forget the victorious miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, the second of which had brought down the Tory government in a general election.

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

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

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

It became clear that the union would have to take action, but of a type that would win maximum support and have a unifying effect. The NEC accepted a report from me recommending that we call a special national delegate conference, and link our opposition to the pit closure plan with a demand that the coal board negotiate the union’s wage claim. The NEC agreed, and the special conference was held on 21 October 1983. Delegates from all NUM areas were given a detailed report so that they could vote on what action – if any – should be taken. Following a full debate, they agreed to call a national overtime ban from 1 November – until such time as the NCB withdrew its closure plan and agreed to negotiate an increase in miners’ wages with the NUM.

Over the next four months, the overtime ban had an extraordinary impact. It succeeded in reducing coal output by 30%, or 12m tonnes, thus cutting national coal stocks to about the same level as they had been during the miners’ unofficial strike in 1981.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scotland and Yorkshire NUM areas did vote to seek endorsement from the NEC for strike action, and at the NEC meeting on 8 March were given authorisation under Rule 41. South Wales and Kent then also asked for authorisation. The NEC agreed, and confirmed that other areas could, if they wished, do the same. We realised that the NCB announcement on 6 March had amounted to a declaration of war. We could either surrender right now, or stand and fight.

A question that has been raised time and time again over the past 25 years is: why did the union not hold a national strike ballot? Those who attack our struggle by vilifying me usually say: “Scargill rejected calls for a ballot.”

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

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

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

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

Our special conference was held on 19 April. McGahey, Heathfield and I were aware from feedback that a slight majority of areas favoured the demand for a national strike ballot; therefore, we were expecting and had prepared for that course of action with posters, ballot papers and leaflets. A major campaign was ready to go for a “Yes” vote in a national strike ballot.

At the conference, Heathfield told delegates in his opening address: “I hope that we are sincere and honest enough to recognise that a ballot should not be used and exercised as a veto to prevent people in other areas defending their jobs.” His succinct reminder of the situation we were in opened up an emotional debate to which speaker after speaker made passionate and fiercely argued contributions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scene was set for the battle of Orgreave.

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

Contrary to popular mythology, Orgreave was closed twice: first on 27 May 1984, when together with dozens of others I was injured on the picket line. Second, on 18 June, when 10,000 pickets faced 8,500 riot police in a scene reminiscent of a battle in England’s 17th-century civil war.

So fierce was the conflict on 18 June that dozens of pickets were hospitalised (including me), but the picketing resulted in British Steel’s chairman sending a telex closing down Orgreave on a temporary basis – exactly as had been the case at Saltley coke depot in Birmingham 12 years before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ends

Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter dies at 78

By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer

 

LONDON: Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.

Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

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

The Nobel Prize gave Pinter a global platform which he seized enthusiastically to denounce U.S. President George W. Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to Stockholm .

“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?” he asked, in a hoarse voice.

Weakened by cancer and bandaged from a fall on a slippery pavement, Pinter seemed a vulnerable old man when he emerged from his London home to speak about the Nobel Award.

Though he had been looking forward to giving a Nobel lecture ”the longest speech I will ever have made” he first canceled plans to attend the awards, then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor’s advice.

Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, “The Dwarfs,” in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays including “The Quiller Memorandum” (1965) and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1980). He admitted, and said he deeply regretted, voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.

Pinter fulminated against what he saw as the overweening arrogance of American power, and belittled Blair as seeming like a “deluded idiot” in support of Bush’s war in Iraq .

In his Nobel lecture, Pinter accused the United States of supporting “every right-wing military dictatorship in the world” after World War II.

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” he said.

The United States , he added, “also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain .”

Most prolific between 1957 and 1965, Pinter relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and turned the conversational pause into an emotional minefield.

His characters’ internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives are set against the neat lives they have constructed in order to try to survive.

Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words. Gradually, the layers are peeled back to reveal the characters’ nakedness.

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

Pinter once said of language, “The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”

Pinter’s influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet and throughout British literature.

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

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

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

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

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

In “Silence and Landscape,” Pinter moved from exploring the dark underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that equally occupy the individual.

In the 1980s, Pinter’s only stage plays were one-acts: “A Kind of Alaska ” (1982), “One for the Road” (1984) and the 20-minute “Mountain Language” (1988).

During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as “a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility.”

In March 2005 Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, “Voices,” that was broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday.

“I have written 29 plays and I think that’s really enough,” Pinter said . “I think the world has had enough of my plays.”

Pinter had a son, Daniel, from his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, which ended in divorce in 1980. That year he married the writer Fraser.

“It was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years. He will never be forgotten,” Fraser said.

Ends.

Harold Pinter

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

HaroldPinter.org

International Disabled Persons Day

A report from Teresa Rayner.

Wednesday 3d December 2008 was International Disabled Persons Day; how many people would have known that? 

I would not have known had I not been involved with the disabled people’s Direct Action Network (DAN).

 

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

I chose to go to Sheffield, manly to make sure I could get to an event and get back the same day.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Meanwhile the disabled people who went to demonstrate in London seemed to have had quite an eventful day.

The disabled people’s Direct Action Network protested and blocked the traffic outside Downing Street, to object to welfare reforms proclaimed in the Queens speech. 

 

Instead of celebrating International Disabled Persons day they decided to demonstrate against the government’s ‘Employment Support Allowance’ and the ‘Work Capability Assessment’, which is replacing Incapacity Benefit. They claim that this punitive economic attack will hit out at some of the poorest in society, forcing them into even further poverty and a discriminatory job market, while thousands more are losing their jobs due to the deepening recession. 

They claim that they are sick and tired of politicians who attack minorities that they see as easy targets for public spending cuts and biased media/press coverage that negatively portrays disabled people as lazy scroungers and benefit cheats.  Also lack of meaningful education and training leads to lack of qualifications and job skills. 

 

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

 

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

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story

by Michael Parenti

Global Research, December 4, 2008

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

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

Some Real History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ends.