Letters

Not all scabs

Having just read your article, ‘Good pictures, wrong conclusions’, I would like to take this opportunity to put the record straight (Weekly Worker March 11 2004).

As a Nottinghamshire striking miner and someone who was born and bred in Notts, I can tell you that the majority of the miners who worked through the strike in Notts were from Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Scotland, Tyneside and Wales, so I find it offensive when all Notts miners are referred to as scabs.

Not all scabs

No to controls

On January 28 there was a conference in Manchester opposing section 9 of the 2004 asylum legislation. This provision allows for the eviction of people seeking asylum whose initial claim has failed and therefore the possibility of their children being taken into care. It is also part of a process of drawing social workers into the enforcement of immigration controls.

The conference passed a resolution in support of opposing section 9 within the context of opposition to all immigration controls. This was the majority view of those present - refugees, trade unionists, lawyers, social workers and others. It is also our view. However, we think there was and is needed a more concrete discussion about how to defy controls. We also think the resolution could have been far sharper and more concrete in the following ways. We think these ways might have resulted in an even larger majority.

There is now a distinct possibility - because of the Sukula family campaign in particular - that the government may not so much repeal section 9 as ignore it. This will not be the end of the matter. It may be replaced by something just as bad. This is the scheme of ‘humane alternatives’ proposed by the Association of Directors of Social Services. What they propose is:

l more asylum-seeking families are placed in detention;

l NASS benefits to those families left in the community will be reduced below the existing 70% of income support if they do not cooperate in their own deportation.

This is an effort by the ADSS to keep its hands clean whilst attacking refugees and their children. It will also mean social workers are no longer in the role of having to perhaps enforce this particular legislation (through taking children into care). Only by opposing all controls and all aspects of control is it possible, in a principled way, to switch opposition to section 9 into opposition to the new proposals.

There will be other ways social workers remain implicated in immigration controls. For instance, most community care entitlements are now linked to immigration status - with social workers being responsible for this. And other workers are responsible for assessing and providing other areas of welfare and health treatment linked to immigration status. In all cases we support workers who defy the legislation and we think a fight should be waged to ensure their unions support this defiance. We are against workers becoming agents of the home office.

A position against all controls is not abstract. It is not ‘purist’. In fact it leads to very concrete demands in respect to how immigration controls directly affect trade unionists in their workplace in addition to ‘defiance, not compliance’:

l Since 1996 employers who hire labour without the ‘correct’ immigration status have been penalised. Employer sanctions are about to be strengthened by the latest Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill. What this law does is to make bosses agents of control - by vetting immigration status and reporting the ‘undocumented’ to the home office. It also requires trade unionists working in personnel departments to collude in this. We are opposed to employer sanctions.

l Immigration workers are mainly organised in the Public and Commercial Service Union. These include ‘snatch squads’ who descend on the homes of refugees at dawn. Trade unionists are used by the home office to arrest, detain and deport other workers. We think the PCSU should at the very least consider how its members can refuse to implement this role.

l Unions are powerful bodies. This is why we think there should be a campaign to unionise undocumented workers and for the unions then to fight for their right to remain.

l Equally we think there is an urgent need for unions to fight for equality of wages and conditions of migrant and undocumented labour. This is in the interests of all workers, whatever their status. Section 10 of the 2004 legislation allows all support to be withdrawn from some people seeking asylum whose claims have failed, unless they embark on ‘community services’ without pay. This reduces these refugees to slaves. As trade unionists, we oppose section 10 as much as section 9.

The present Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill has provision for detained asylum-seekers awaiting deportation to work below the agreed national minimum wage.

As trade unionists, we support the position of opposition to controls, as passed at the last national conference of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education. It is a demand which can unite us all. Any lesser demand is divisive - as it will leave all those not covered vulnerable to the snatch squads.

No One Is Illegal have produced a trade union programme - Workers’ control, not immigration control. This also includes a model trade union resolution which is both politically opposed to all controls and yet presents concrete trade union demands within this context.

No to controls
No to controls

Carry on camping

So, the Blair government has permitted another Stop the War march on March 18. Permitting it to take place is necessary to maintaining the facade of an ersatz democracy.

At least one million people protested against UK participation in the invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair took absolutely no notice whatsoever and sent the British troops into an illegal war. Why didn’t Tony take any notice? Mainly because the protest was no more than a token gesture. Okay, so a million people hit the streets in London alone and were joined by many millions more in towns and cities around the world, but it was still no more than a token protest.

Protest marches that take place at the weekend are of minimal consequence. Police and other emergency service personnel benefit from a few hours of overtime; the train, bus and coach companies make a few extra bucks because a million people want to be in London; food vendors do very well; but in terms of overall effect, the impact on government is zip .... zilch ... nada (for government read Tony Blair - the cabinet is inconsequential). Everybody has a great day and feels good that they made the effort to join the march, but in the overall scheme of things it matters not a jot.

So how do we change this? Whether 10,000, 100,000 or one million people turn up to protest in March (by this time the attack on Iran will be imminent), they need to be prepared to stay there - until Tony takes real notice. Go with backpacks loaded with sandwiches, snacks, fruit and water - as much as you can carry.

Be prepared to share what you have with your fellow marchers, but be ready to stay for two, three, seven, 10 days - and then some. Stay in London for however long it takes. Imagine this scenario repeated across the world. Do you think that it might get some attention?

Alternatively, have a nice day out in London … then go home and watch the neocon psychopaths and puppet Tony launch another illegal war - in your name and in the name of freedom and democracy.

Two million people took to the streets of Madrid after the bombings on March 11 2004. An estimated 10 million took to the streets across Spain. The incumbent government was defeated in the general election that followed shortly afterwards and Spanish troops were subsequently removed from the coalition of the (un)willing. Peaceful protest can make a difference and the difference will be directly proportional to the determination of the people to make their voices heard.

Please also bear in mind that due to the determination of Tony Blair to continue with his quest to introduce more and more restrictive legislation, this may be one of the last chances that the British public has to express the strength of public opinion via the medium of peaceful protest.

Ten thousand-plus camping in the London parks on Monday March 20 - and beyond - might just get some attention. Spread the word.

Carry on camping

Shame on you

Shame on you, Andy London. You not only fail to say anything of substance or intelligence, but also distort everything I said in my last contribution.

If you actually read it (and not the misleading title your editor gave it) you will see I was referring specifically to late abortions - third-trimester ones, to be precise. Killing a child a day before it is born is not ‘controlling your own fertility’: it is murder. If opposing such a policy makes me ‘religious’, then I am proud to be so.

Most women, although they favour legal abortion, do not support the so-called ‘right’ to kill a child the day or a week before its birth. Such a demand has no long and proud history. Not all socialists have supported abortion, nor have all feminists, as I have long stressed. Contraception is controlling one’s fertility; abortion is the sign of the lack thereof. It is an old and tired demand (as are all ‘pro-choice’ slogans).

Women realise abortion is not the liberating experience it was sold to us as. The slogans that the likes of the CPGB repeat parrot-fashion were invented by cynical PR men whose primary interest was money for the abortion industry - an industry that preys on women.

Manna Begum’s father, after arranging the honour killing of her fiancé, forced her to go to Spain to have a late, possibly illegal, abortion. The doctor asked no questions and there was no counselling given. This is abortion on demand put into practice - something the CPGB supports and fights for. How anti-feminist to condone such things, which not only risk women’s health but are acts of infanticide.

Shame on you

Police action

In Katherine Quinn’s article on Hamas, she fails to mention that those who, unlike her, might wish to celebrate Hamas’s election victory would actually be breaking the law in this country, as Hamas is a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000.

You had no problem supporting the Kosova Liberation Army, but then again neither did British imperialism. Yet another example of the Weekly Worker policing the British left in the interests of British imperialism.

Police action
Police action

Strange omission

In reply to Tina Becker’s article (‘Rein in Galloway’, February 2), if Galloway went on Big brother for political reasons his performance should be judged by its political content.

His comments on the war may have been censored by producers, but two words are strangely missing from this article: racist and sexist. Galloway’s performance on Big brother was both and he should be politically condemned for it. He had an opportunity to take a stand during the attacks on a black woman who had raised the issue of racism in Britain. Instead, he chose to join in the attacks.

The crime of the Socialist Workers Party’s mealy-mouthed excuses for Galloway is that this organisation has not once made any political criticism of these aspects of his conduct in the Big brother house.

Strange omission

Only human

After reading your account of the SWP’s witch-hunting of its own members, I can only conclude that the SWP central committee make capitalist human resource departments look positively human (Weekly Worker January 26).

Only human

Clear stand

In regard to the interesting coverage of Hamas (Weekly Worker February 2), I feel this once again illustrates the left-reformist politics of the SWP.

I would have only one criticism of your standpoint. You say we must take a clear stand against the reactionary anti-imperialism of Hamas. I think that it is mistaken to see Hamas as being anti-imperialist. It may use anti-imperialist rhetoric, yet its actions, being rooted in the Palestinian petty bourgeoisie, are nationalist and pro-imperialist, in the sense that when Hamas comes to power it will happily make deals with one of the imperialist powers and attempt to crush any attempt by Palestinian workers to organise independently.

Hamas’s victory is not the way forward for their struggle.

Clear stand

Lost the plot

In his latest contribution to the debate on Venezuela Paul Hampton collapses into confused bluster. In response, I wish to make three points of clarification.

First, comrade Hampton bewilderingly accuses me of “continual abuse of Trotsky”. I can only assume this refers to my discussion of Trotsky’s theory of a “special case” of Bonapartism, which Trotsky applied in particular to Latin America. Although Trotsky’s concept is worth pursuing, I have commented on a couple of occasions that it is relatively undeveloped in his writings. For instance, no discussion of the role of the military or of political repression. And Trotsky subsumes under the same heading two very different responses by bourgeois regimes to the particular conditions in Latin America.

Now I could be wrong. Maybe Trotsky’s writings on Bonapartism in Latin America are a model of succinct exposition. But, even so, do my reservations qualify as “abuse”? And, any-way, aren’t mature Marxists supposed to subject the works of the Marxist tradition to critical examination and interrogation?

After all, Paul Hampton’s comrades in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have broken with Trotsky’s assessment of Stalinism - another example, as it happens, of Trotsky applying the theory of Bonapartism. Should we picture Hampton jumping up and down at AWL meetings whenever ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ is mentioned to damn his comrades for apostasy?

Second, as for Mexico and the role of the PRI, Hampton has either lost the plot or is being purposely disingenuous. When have I argued that the PRI was not politically repressive? It has been my contention all along that political repression is a key feature of Bonapartism. The question at stake was whether the PRI qualified as a civilian regime. Admittedly somewhat tangential to the assessment of Chávez’s regime in Venezuela, but then it was comrade Hampton who chose to contest my observation that Bonapartism served as a useful theoretical framework for analysing civilian one-party states - including that of the PRI in Mexico. As well, of course, as classical Bonapartist regimes where the military had directly seized political power. Is Hampton throwing up a smokescreen to hide his retreat?

Third, when it comes to Venezuela, comrade Hampton appears unable to grasp that there might be contradictions within the process known as the Bolivarian revolution - that a dialectical struggle is being played out. The fate of socialists and working class independence under the PRI in Mexico does serve as a warning of what may happen if the working class does not take charge in Venezuela. But, so far, the working class has been neither repressed nor coopted.

Indeed, it is only as a result of the struggles of the last seven years that the working class - both in workplaces and in the shanty towns - has won its current degree of independence and social strength. US intervention and the victory of the bourgeois opposition would crush the emerging working class movements. That is why socialists in the PRS and activists in the UNT, while fighting against bureaucratic and clientelist elements to transform the Bolivarian revolution, are not neutral in the struggle between Chávez and his US and bourgeois opponents.

Lost the plot