Letters

NEC lobby

Supporters of Labour Against the Witchhunt braved freezing temperatures to lobby the March 20 meeting of Labour’s national executive committee, demanding that the ongoing witch-hunt against the left in the party must finally come to an end. Among them were LAW chair Jackie Walker, suspended on trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism; Marc Wadsworth, whose disciplinary hearing takes place on April 25; Stan Keable, expelled for supporting Labour Party Marxists; and Palestine campaigner Tony Greenstein, expelled for being rude.

Most NEC members unfortunately declined the opportunity to speak to us. Most of them used a back door to sneak into Labour’s HQ in Southside.

LAW has welcomed the election of Jennie Formby as new general secretary, which was confirmed at the meeting, and the campaign has critically supported her candidacy. It seems, however, that some think our protest overshadowed her election and “handed the establishment a gift”, as Skwawkbox editor Steve Walker fumes in his heated email exchange with Tony Greenstein (see http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk).

The Skwawkbox had published a rather unpleasant little piece about the lobby, which bizarrely focused on the fact that one person from Brighton and Hove Momentum has now objected to its banner being displayed. We should add that this objection was raised after the fact - local Momentum comrades had agreed to the banner being taken and nobody had objected. Only after rightwing blogger Guido Fawkes picked up on the lobby and published a picture of the banner did the local rightwinger object.

Even more bizarrely, Steve Walker of Skwawkbox then got in touch with Momentum nationally to ask if LAW has “permission to use a banner using its logo”. Can you guess the answer? It was pretty short: “No, they do not.” So let’s get this straight: local Momentum groups have to ask Jon Lansman if they can take their banner to an event or protest? Really? Of course they don’t. Not even Lansman is that much of a control freak.

Walker’s blog has played a largely negative role in the witch-hunt against the left, having ignored much of it. Now he has gone one further by effectively siding with the right. It is not the ongoing witch-hunt against the left in the Labour Party that is the problem - it is LAW protesting against it. Well, we disagree.

This just goes to show that ‘alternative media blogs’ like the Skwawkbox (whose main selling point is that various people and factions find it much easier to leak their unfiltered news and views to Walker than to the bourgeois press) are pretty useless in the fight to democratise Labour.

Jan Wright
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Sick society

James Linney is, of course, right about the destructive consequences of commodification on scientific research (‘Costs of commodification’, March 15). But was it ever different? How many people, for example, can even get access to new knowledge published in scientific journals outside of the academic establishment, short of paying a lot of money. This is knowledge that should be available to all to further human understanding - open access is a start.

However, I was interested in comrade Linney’s article about how we think about depression and the treatment for it. For there must surely be better treatments for depression and other non serious medical conditions than visiting the GP and linking in to a medical industry whose only aim is to make a profit. Johann Hari has just had published an excellent book about his own personal exploration of depression and the pernicious grasp that the pharmaceutical industry has on its treatment (Lost connections: uncovering the real causes of depression - and the unexpected solutions London 2018). For, as James Linney notes, antidepressants have only a minor effect. The thinking is that the problem is to do with the individual. It inculcates a dependent helplessness, which only medicine can resolve.

But, as Hari writes, the problem is social and depression is just a normal psychological response to the society we inhabit. He goes on to show that there are many antidepressant responses - including nature, having meaningful values and socialising. Easier said than done, but Johann Hari shows that the responses and changes in thinking and behaviour to bring about profound change are simple.

A Gallup study a few years ago showed that just over 10% of employees were emotionally engaged with their work. Working 9-5 or more, five days a week, for over 40 years would, of course, make people depressed and alienated. As philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Simon Wells
Manchester

Two ‘lefts’

There are two kinds of left in the UK, each more degenerate than the other:

1. The pro-EU left that thinks that the European Union is the epitome of proletarian internationalism and not a joint project of the imperialist European capitalist classes for the superexploitation of Africa and the Middle East, for war against socialism and the working class and a forum for the mutual ruination of the member-states by the member-states via ruthless and relentless competition.

2. The pro-Putin left, who see Putin as a bulwark against western imperialism rather than as the head of an imperialist gangster kleptocracy, who will excuse virtually any of his crimes in the name of this bogus anti-imperialism - including backing his ally, Assad, in Syria, as he bombed the Syrian people with barrel bombs, tank rounds and chemical weapons, and tortured and starved them to death in prison cells by the hundreds of thousands. They who now try to convince us that the chemical attack in Salisbury was a false-flag operation organised by MI6.

What both these degenerate wings have in common is a complete lack of confidence in the historic role of the working class - and in fact a complete hostility to it, when it actually emerges. Their whole raison d’être is to tie the working class in a subordinate way to hostile class forces in order to oppose the socialist revolution. Both these lefts are the enemy of the future.

David Ellis
Leeds

Dream on

One night I had an extremely vivid dream, so realistic it was still looping in my mind several days later.

Jeremy Corbyn was facing Theresa May at prime minister’s questions: “Mr Speaker, would the right honourable lady agree with those on this side of the house?”he lunged, as if a rock-honed spear was being thrust into the flank of a wounded elephant, then pausing in order to narrow his gaze. “Mr Speaker, does the right honourable lady share the volcanic fury blended with blood-draining horror being experienced by all members on this side of the house when witnessing the situation in Israel? Those who consequently demand the government of Israel immediately cease and desist all apartheid-like attacks upon - not to say sub-Nazi treatment of - their co-citizens. To be precise, those co-citizens we note to be exclusively of Palestinian or other non-Jewish heritage.”

The hunter-warrior paused for a second time, his eyes and mind now so highly sharpened they might as well be carbon steel. Then once again he thrusts with his spear: “I’m referring, of course, to the following list of atrocities and acts of persecution - indeed of state terrorism - those being perpetrated by both past and ongoing Israeli governments, it must emphasised.

“Number 1: the holding in jail of 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whilst she awaits trial on charges of ‘violent conspiracy to overthrow the pristine and shining values of Zion’.

“Number 2: the wholesale stealing of land that was never theirs.

“Number 3: the militarised commandeering for Jews over Arabs of both essential and naturally occurring sources of water.

“Number 4: human beings of African origin rounded up and then thrown into what can only be described as ‘media-friendly/soft-focus’ concentration camps.

“Number 5: policies of racial supremacism (combined with simple evil) in the form of a ‘security fence’ between working class citizens.

“And, Mr Speaker, the list goes on, but maybe suffice to say this. When pointing out to the right honourable lady all such systematic acts of persecution as are endemic in Israel - well, it’s an unbridled as well as uncompromising socialist who’s telling it like it really is ...”

Stepping back as if his energies were spent, our man instead smiled; in African-American footballer style he then ‘took the knee’, raised a fist high to the rafters and loudly sang: “Get up, stand up - stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up - don’t give up the fight!” (If Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara and Bob Marley were still here amongst us, they would have saluted in jubilant pride!)

So that was it - Jeremy Corbyn (in my poltergeist version of the man, at any rate) at last found within himself that dignity, grace and style we on the Marxist left had been hoping to glimpse.

Or was it that other Jeremy Corbyn standing there for PMQs? Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition - freshly blind-sided by a ‘Russian’ nerve agent attack in Salisbury and his Labour Party as a whole smoked out from any hidey-holes of faux resistance; the bulk of his cohorts cheering on, as crude imperialist propaganda - as dark agendas manufactured by power-grasping elites - once again sweep through our land.

Oh, this special and sovereign land of ours - this country of free speech and democracy and optimally fulfilling lifestyles, alongside a thousand other majestic deceptions.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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Tory cuts

Rugby Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has expressed outrage at local MP Mark Pawsey’s support, in the House of Commons, for an income cap to qualify for free school meals.

Last Tuesday, MPs voted on government proposals to deprive around one million children from low-income families of a free hot meal. The Tories and the Democratic Unionist Party joined together to ensure that, from April 1, children from families on universal credit will no longer be eligible if their parents earn more than £7,400 per annum. This is outrageous. At present, all families on universal credit can claim free school meals.

Our treasurer, Julie Weekes, wrote to Mark Pawsey last week before the vote, but in the event he was one of the 312 MPs to vote for the new income cap. She expressed our concerns that over 15,000 children in poverty in Warwickshire alone would lose their entitlement to a free school meal. Julie pointed out that this goes against one of the founding principles of universal credit: to always “make work pay”. The ‘Welfare that works’ white paper that introduced universal credit said that “people will be consistently and transparently better off for each hour they work and every pound they earn”.

However, the new free school meal rules will mean the opposite. If you’re earning just under the threshold, taking on extra hours or getting a pay rise could make you worse off, as you’ll find yourself having to fork out for your child’s lunches. And if you’re earning just over, you could be better off taking a pay cut. Many thousands of families could be caught in this free school meal ‘trap’.

To be fair to Mark Pawsey, he replied the next day. But he didn’t really answer Julie’s points. He said that suggesting one million children would miss out on a free meal was incorrect, because it was based on a hypothetical situation, where all children in receipt of universal credit receive free school meals. He claimed that 50,000 more children will benefit from free school meals than at present. He also claimed that under the government’s “transitional arrangements”, whilst claimants are transferring onto universal credit, nobody currently receiving free school meals will lose their entitlement.

Pawsey is wrong. There is no ‘hypothetical situation’. When launching universal credit, Mark Pawsey’s own government boasted that all children in receipt of it would be entitled to free school meals. Also, Pawsey is wrong when he says 50,000 more children will benefit than at present. As shadow education secretary Angela Rayner pointed out when moving the Labour motion in the Commons, whereas under the government’s ‘transitional arrangements’ those one million children would be entitled to free school meals, they would no longer be so entitled, once the new £7,400 cap was enacted. That is the crux of the argument. The Tories are definitely not extending the entitlement to free school meals to more disadvantaged children, as Mark Pawsey claimed in his response.

The Tories are using universal credit to cut the welfare bill, and they don’t seem to care if that pushes more and more families into poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that, by 2022, 37% of British children will be living in relative poverty, the highest percentage since modern records began in 1961. That will be 5.2 million children, despite Britain being the fifth wealthiest nation in the world. These figures tell the real story: poverty is massively increasing in Tory Britain, partly because of decisions made about universal credit, as it is being implemented, such as this attack on free school meals.

Pete McLaren
Ruby Tusc

Boycott

Over 130 Palestinian football clubs and sports associations have called on German sportswear giant Adidas to end its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association over its inclusion of football clubs based in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land.

In a letter to Adidas, the Palestinian clubs cautioned that, as “the main international sponsor of the IFA, Adidas is lending its brand to cover up and whitewash Israel’s human rights abuses” and give “international cover to Israel’s illegal settlements”.

The letter notes that “UN security council resolution 2334 denounces Israeli settlements as flagrant violations of international law” and cautions the world’s second largest sportswear manufacturer that its sponsorship of the IFA makes it eligible for inclusion in the UN’s database of complicit companies doing business in or with Israel’s illegal settlements. The Palestinian clubs further warn that the company’s continued complicity with Israel’s settlement enterprise “may expose it to consumer-led boycott campaigns in the Arab world and globally.”

Former Palestinian national team player Mahmoud Sarsak said: “Palestinian footballers are routinely forced to endure Israeli military raids and tear gas on our fields, denied by Israel our right to travel to matches, and have seen our teammates killed and our stadiums bombed.” He himself was jailed for three years without charge or trial and released only after a 96-day hunger strike and worldwide outcry. Palestinian players run this risk every day, as they are forced to go through Israeli military checkpoints. All the while, the IFA holds matches in illegal Israeli settlements, “which rob us of our land, water, resources and livelihoods”, said Sarsak.

Adidas relies heavily on football league and club sponsorships to raise its brand awareness. However, being associated with the IFA, as it tramples Palestinian rights, will implicate Adidas in Israel’s egregious human rights violations, including illegal settlements, home demolitions and land grabs throughout the occupied Palestinian territory.

In their letter, the Palestinian clubs recall the “widespread protests, calls for boycott and government condemnations” of Adidas over sponsorship of Israel’s so-called Jerusalem Marathon, which illegally passes through occupied East Jerusalem. “Adidas rightly ended its sponsorship” of the marathon, they say, and must now withdraw sponsorship of the IFA.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was initiated in 2004 to contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality. PCACBI advocates the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, given their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights.

PCACBI
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