Red Scare WInter 2011

Communist Party

PCS Left Unity was to meet at a key time in the developing campaign against the cuts. The election of a progressive Unite general secretary must be welcomed and Len McCluskey’s statement that all Unite area committees will be instructed to prioritise anti-cuts fights will add much needed resources to the cam p aign.

TheCoalition of Resistance conference supported by the People’s Charter agreed a wide range of activities and showed that national coordinated mobilisation is possible and popular. Communists welcome unreservedly, the joint statement with Unison and the valuable opportunities that creates to

work meaningfully with the country’s largest public sector union.

Already we have seen hundreds of local campaign groups and public sector alliances spring up, many based around local trades union councils which should be our basic building block and vehicle of choice for delivering local resistance. Many trade unions, including PCS, are actively considering how and when protests, demonstrations and media interventions can be complemented by industrial action to directly defend members' jobs and terms and conditions. The Communist Party will press for this action to be joined up and rooted in the membership.

The students’ protests add a new, refreshing and vital

Winter 2011

dimension - we cannot leave them to fight alone. PCS needs to come out firmly in favour of the National Union of Students (NUS) and school students - we should support the occupations as a shining example of courageous, grass-roots, direct action in opposition to the class brutality being meted out by the Westminster branch of the Bullingdon Club.

The experience of Ireland and sovereign nations elsewhere in Europe emphasise a further dimension - that of the European Union (EU) and the Single Currency. Any on the left who still believe that the EU and the Commission is a force for social good, now have a bracing reality check, while we all have confirmation – if any were needed – that their “Stability and Growth Pact” is a

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THE PIRATICAL Israeli interception of the Gaza aid convoys has brought home to millions that Palestinians live in an Israeli prison house. Palestinians cannot leave Gaza or the West Bank unless the Israeli military permits them. If they leave they have no right of return and many have been prevented from returning to their homes, families and jobs.

But many Palestinians also experience the inside of Israeli prisons. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories following the 1967 war over 650,000 Palestinians – one in five of the population – have been imprisoned by Israel.

At the last count Israel held over 7,000 prisoners.

Around one in twenty are children and there are dozens of women in captivity. Over three hundred are detained ‘administratively’. The Israeli jail population includes 25 members of the Palestine Legislative Council.

More than two hundred prisoners are from East Jerusalem, near two hundred from territories annexed in 1948 and over seven hundred from Gaza.

Marwan Barghouti is a key

Free Marwan Barghouti unifying figure in Palestinian politics, an elected MP – supposedly with diplomatic immunity – illegally arrested by the Israeli military in territory over which it has no jurisdiction and held in prison.

Just nine years old when Israel invaded the West Bank he became a courageous opponent of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and was first imprisoned as a schoolboy. He completed his high school diploma in jail.

As the dynamic leader during the first 1987 Intifada uprising he was eventually imprisoned and then deported, only returning to his homeland following the Oslo peace accords.

In the Second Intifada – as Fatah’s West Bank leader and chief of the Tanzim combat organisation – courageously leading mass demonstrations at

Israeli control points – he become a target for Israeli assassination squads.

Arrested in April 2002 he was indicted for murder and attempted murder stemming from clashes between the Israeli army and the al-Asqua Martyrs’ Brigades and sentenced to 40 years in jail. He refused to defend himself and challenged the legitimacy of the Israeli court.

An international campaign for his release has wide support.

But Israeli fears his ability to unify Palestinian society and strengthen the challenge to its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper wrote that Barghouti “is seen by some as a Palestinian Nelson Mandela, the man who could galvanise a drifting and divided national movement if only he were set free by Israel.”

Marwan Barghouti in his own words “And while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbour, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom” “I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.”

Washington Post 2002

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★ Stop the cuts in public services and welfare benefits, replace tuition fees by student grants. ★ Invest massively in public sector housing, public transport and non-nuclear renewable energy. ★ Boost economic demand and production through higher wages, pensions and benefits. ★ Enforce equal pay for women and end minimum wage discrimination against young workers.

The Communist Party’s Economic Committee responds to the plans of Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

The unemployed have joined the lengthening list of ‘the enemy within’, alongside striking workers, housing and incapacity benefit claimants and students.

They and their dependants— including children—are to be punished if they don't rush to do unpaid menial work, or jobs once done by properly paid council employees with a pension scheme.

The Con-Dems are raising a new conscript army of cheap labour, as part of their drive to boost big business profits by dragging down wage levels.

The new scheme unveiled by Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has to be seen as the latest in a barrage of attacks on the unemployed, the sick and the incapacitated.

It follows on from the programme of ‘social cleansing’ which will drive housing benefit claimants from middle class and inner-city areas. Its architect is the arch-Thatcherite who tells the unemployed to ‘get on the bus’ to spend three hours a day travelling to and from an eight hours a day job.

It is as though the

unemployed—rather than the bankers, speculators and profiteers—are responsible for the recession. They must pay for this government’s refusal to tax the rich and big business, fund public services and benefits and to direct capital into productive industry.

Furthermore, the whole scheme rests on a cruel hoax— that there are jobs for most of the unemployed to do.

Currently there are 1.6 million people on Job Seekers Allowance who will be dragooned into the proposed new programme. The government also believes that one million claimants of incapacity benefits should be suited for work of some sort.

That’s 2.5 million people to be driven into ‘employment’ under the threat of losing their benefits.

Yet the number of job vacancies in Britain stands at 459,000 and falling, especially in construction and the public sector as the direct result of Con-Dem and New Labour cuts.

That’s five conscripts for every available job—leaving aside the massive mismatches of location, aptitude, skill and qualification.

But even this is not the whole picture. Another 900,000 people are registered as unemployed but not in receipt of JSA. Some 2.4 million people are

How could such policies be financed? ★ Impose a Wealth Tax on the super-rich and close all tax havens under British rule. ★ Levy a windfall tax on monopoly profits in the banking, energy, retail, pharmaceutical and armaments industries; and a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on financial speculation. ★ Slash government payments to PFI privateers and the European Union. ★ Take the whole financial sector into public ownership and direct capital into housing, small businesses and productive industry. ★ Scrap Britain’s unusable nuclear weapons and withdraw the troops from Afghanistan.

economically inactive but would like to work; 1.2 million parttime workers would like to go full-time.

The idea that private enterprise is going to create 2 million jobs to employ Captain Duncan Smith’s conscript army is preposterous enough, let alone meeting the needs of an extra 4.5 million unemployed or under-employed people.

As the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development warned the Commons Treasury select committee on November 2, government cuts and next January’s VAT rise will destroy 1.6 million jobs over the next five years (900,000 of them in November 11, 2010 the private sector).

It is clear that the Con-Dems have no policy to prevent more mass redundancies and put Britain on the road to full employment. That’s why it wants to transfer attention onto the new ‘enemies within’.

The Communist Party, on the other hand, argues for a LeftWing Programme around which the labour movement can unite: to defend public services, restore full employment, rebuild Britain’s industrial base, promote social justice and protect our environment. ★ Outlaw mass redundancies in The Politics of Britain’s viable enterprises and take Economic Crisis failing fims into public or

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red scare Winter 2011

disingenuous and dangerous misnomer. The Commission and their International Monetary Fund (IMF) cheerleaders have stepped in and told Greece and Ireland what to do (no democracy there then) meanwhile the Commission wants a common foreign policy, the pre-curser to a single state.

Of course, Britain, and public service workers here, are not immune to the vagaries of global finance capital and the PCS NEC has launched a ballot in opposition to the enforced changes to redundancy arrangements and the coalition’s cuts agenda. A decisive win in that ballot is essential in order that PCS members regain the confidence they had at the beginning of last year. This confidence then needs to be used to galvanise members, branches and other internal structures - too many of which appear ill prepared for the testing struggles ahead.

Progressives serious about constructing the widest and deepest resistance, need first to recognise that, though we’re

more advanced than some unions in the public sector in terms of leadership, the impact of falling membership, an ageing (possibly shrinking) activist base and a concerted ruling class offensive in all its manifestations needs to be countered to provide a sound basis for the fight back. The national organising strategy has never been more relevant or important. It must become an active tool central to all activity rather than, as sometimes seems the case – a reference document soon filed away following annual delegate conference.

In the forthcoming period and in the run up to the vital TUC national demonstration on 26 March 2011, all on the left should ask themselves a single and simple question each and every time they approach a piece of union work: "How does what I am about to do help to build the fight against the cuts”?

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Communist Party announces major initiatives for 2011 The Communist Partyhas adopted a Party Cam p aign Plan for 2011 which includes major initiatives.

Includes two national speaking tours and upping the ante on the stru g gle against job loss and the destruction of industry and services.

These include proposals for: • The party's annual trade union and political cadre school on February 26-27 • A national event to celebrate International Women's Day with other Communist and workers' parties domiciled in Britain • A campaigning 'month of action' in March and November on benefit cuts and Palestinian political prisoners • Two national speaking tours in spring and winter on 'Capitalist crisis - the Communist Party's answer' and 'The Communist Party and Britain's Road to Socialism' • Communist Party participation in English local, Scottish and Welsh elections on May 5 • Campaigning against the Alternative Vote in the May 5 referendum • A seminar to be organised by the party's Economic Committee on the dimensions of capitalist crisis • Discussions to formulate 'a major labour movement initiative' against mass unemployment and Using community council referendums against ConDem government cuts (along with other legal challenges) and against LibDem ministers remaining in government.

The following points were adopted in relation to the forthcoming referendum on an AV voting system.

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The Communist Party will Support a No vote on the grounds that: (i) AV is intended to shore up a system of increasingly limited democracy which assists rightwing parties; (ii) AV would apply only to Westminster elections, introducing yet more complexity into our electoral democracy; (iii) we cannot stand aside or support a Yes vote while major progressive labour movement organisations have taken a firm position to vote No; (iv) the ConDem government is in a shaky position and the vote can be turned into a referendum on its policies; (v) the democratic deficit can only really be resolved by STV in multi-member constituencies, which we should argue for during the campaign; and (vi) the critical issue is not the electoral system but the degree to which a mass movement can be developed to demand progressive policies.

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