unity!
communist-party.org.uk
March 2016
Solidarity with the hospital doctors . . . because this attack on the working conditions, pay and hours of work of our fellow professionals is part of the neo-liberal offensive designed to protect profits, promote privatisation and roll back the post-war welfare state.
by Anita Halpin GENERATION AGO Jacques Delors told TUC delegates that the ‘European project’ would guarantee jobs and workers rights and safeguard the postwar ‘welfare state’ settlement. It was a con trick. The Maastricht Treaty jammed open the door to big business to capture public services and utilities in a privatisation scramble that has left mounting energy bills, failing public services and soaraway fares. The free fire zone for big business and the banks has given us an unemployment crisis, youth unemployment tops 60 per cent while millions of women are driven out of the jobs market or suffer forced part time working. Places like Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece suffer huge spending cuts to pay for ‘bailouts’ by the ‘Troika’ of the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank. The European Court of Justice – in the Viking, Laval, Ruffert and Luxemburg ECJ cases – reverses decades of hard won employment rights. continued on page 3
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A Tory budget for the rich by Ben Chacko
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SBORNE’S Budget told us nothing new about the Chancellor or the government. Despite the abandonment of the cuts in disability benefits it represents an acceleration of the Conservative programme to transfer wealth from working people to the rich and to abolish or marketise the public sector. These attacks on some of Britain’s most vulnerable are evidently not because the money is running out, since the Budget was packed with giveaways for big business. Corporation tax is to be cut to 17 per cent by 2020 even though the UK’s 20% rate is
already the lowest in the entire G20. Osborne’s supposed willingness to introduce measures to clamp down on tax avoidance by transnational firms will hardly make up for this largesse if his record on Google is anything to go by. Capital gains tax is also to be cut — the headline rate from 28 per cent to 20 per cent and the basic rate from 18 to 10 per cent in another bonanza for the richest. Business rates are to fall, with calculations switched from CPI inflation to RPI inflation, and Osborne says he will continue his attack on local government funding with “all council funds to be raised locally.” How councils will make up for the resulting losses
without far greater revenue raising powers is not mentioned — because they won’t. Cue more bed-blocking in hospitals as elderly patients cannot be safely released due to gutted local care services, more library and youth club closures, more women’s refuge and children’s centre closures — the further destruction of communities across the country. The great ideological experiment rolls on. From outlawing ethical investment by local authorities to gerrymandering parliamentary constituencies to attacking opposition funding and seeking to cripple trade unions, this government is dismantling democracy. continued overleaf
continued from page 1 This is what we have come to expect. But if the “same old Tories” mantra still applies, British politics has changed. This was the first Osborne Budget to be answered by a socialist leader of the Labour Party. The rejection of the entire austerity programme stood in stark contrast to five years of mixed messages from Labour over the lifetime of the coalition government.’ The developments of Labour economic policy over recent months and weeks has seen a renewed emphasis on public and co-operative ownership.’ And John McDonnell’s fiscal rule, while clearly an act of positioning to challenge Tory myths that Labour spending broke the economy, allows the party to move beyond Keynesian inspired sticking plasters and to look at the fundamental causes of injustices and inequalities in the British economy — which are not about how much money we have but about who’s got it. The Labour leadership remains fragile, with significant hostility within the PLP, and the labour movement has yet to understand the scale of the task that faces it — or the severity of the consequences if it fails. It is time we took on this challenge. We must place ourselves at the heart of community struggles to resist the austerity of Osborne and build the People’s Assembly, which must become the street wing of a labour movement that recognises the true potential of the Corbyn revolution. We must mobilise for the April 16th demonstration and play our part in ensuring a positive showing for Labour in the May elections acts as a springboard for further advance. Ben Chacko is editor of the Morning Star
A new type of union by Gawain Little
and Conditions Document (still followed by the vast majority of SBOURNE’S BUDGET academies) and all collective agreements, and replacing these statement and the education white paper with chain by chain negotiations which quickly followed set out in a fragmented, privatised the latest and most drastic system. assault in the 40-year war But it goes much deeper than that. The reconfiguring of against state education. From 1976 onwards, public discussion education as a narrow economic of education in Britain has been process, and its conversion into dominated by what Stephen Ball a market commodity, is an essential part of the refers to as a “discourse of restructuring of society along derision” about teachers and neoliberal lines. And, as David teaching. This was made Harvey has argued, concrete in policy terms by the neoliberalism is and always has 1988 Education Reform Act been, “a project to achieve the which set the trend, consistent restoration of class power to the throughout Tory, New Labour richest strata of the population”. and Coalition governments, Nelson Mandela said, towards the announcements of “Education is the most powerful recent weeks. Every school is to be forced to weapon which you can use to become an academy and parent change the world”. Our enemies governors will be removed from are well aware of this and are governing bodies, where these acting accordingly. still exist. The scale of the battle, The impact of this on and of what is at stake, teachers’ terms and conditions therefore dictates the will be severe, essentially nature of our response. ending the School Teachers Pay This is an attack on the
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whole of the class and we need to be able to mobilise the whole of the class in response. That means restructuring our unions to genuinely engage the mass of the membership through being rooted in every workplace up and down the country. It means overcoming the divisions that have weakened the cause of education and creating a single education union, fit for the twenty-first century. It means creating strong and lasting alliances with parents and the wider trade union movement, and establishing a strong base in every local community, taking up not just ‘trade union’ issues but wider social justice concerns as well. This perspective of social justice should guide everything we do, as trade unionists, as educators. We face the most virulent of attacks but we have a world to win. Gawain Little is a member of the NUT National Executive
Building an economy for the people An alternative economic and political strategy £6.95 (+£1 p&p) Global education reform Edited by Gawain Little, foreword by Christine Blower General Secretary National Union of Teachers £7.99 (+£2 p&p), 126 pages,
Singh, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education. He emphasised that ‘Education is a social responsibility. Civil organisations and the intellectual community, as well as students and parents, must be encouraged to safeguard the right to education against the forces of privatisation’. ‘Because of these dangers it has become critical to develop a by Robert Wilkinson access to and in the quality of regulatory framework that education, particularly for the controls privatisation, with HE NUT delegation to socio-economically sanctions against abusive the Education disadvantaged, and that wealth, practices. Such a framework International conference gender, ethnic and geographical should be prescriptive, in Canada last July endorsed the inequalities are deepened by prohibitive and ban private Resolution on Privatisation and privatisation, further providers of education from Commercialisation in and of marginalising and excluding employing unqualified teachers’. Education. groups from access to and However this argument It deplored the fact that participation in education. ignores another Resolution of many governments have It was made obvious that the EI conference on stopping abrogated their responsibility to England and Wales were not TTIP, TiSA, CETA, TPP and ensure the right to education for unique by any means in facing other similar trade and all through a fully accountable increased class sizes, a reduction investment agreements. This free quality public education in services provided for children, Resolution recognised that the system, and are increasingly the use of unqualified teachers Transatlantic Trade and turning to, and partnering with, and the casualisation of the Investment Partnership or subsidising private actors to terms and conditions of being negotiated deliver education. employment of educational between the EU The Resolution observed personnel from pre-school to Commission and that education privatisation and higher education. the USA posed a commercialisation has created Last December The Teacher direct threat to the and exacerbated inequalities in carried an article by Kishore provision of quality
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continued from page 1 European TUC leader Bernadette Ségol said, EU policies attack industrial relations system and put pressure on wages, weaken public services and weaken social protection “ ...the core aspects of the social model”. In the ‘real politik’ of the EU it is not the Eu parliament but the Council of Ministers and the shadowy world of corporate lobbyists where real decisions are taken. This referendum is of great political importance. It is vitally important that anger at Tory government policies and the hopes generated by Labour’s resurgence does not end in a blind alley of unprincipled alliance with banks and big business. Real opposition to a big business-dominated antidemocratic EU cannot come from UKIP and the hedge fun
lobby which supports privatisation and attacks on workers rights alongside a raft of policies which working people decisively reject. With our ruling class divided on EU membership Labour and the unions should be mobilising against this enforcement arm of neo-liberalism. Where the left, communist parties and trade unions challenge the EU – as in Portugal and Greece – and increasingly in Spain and Italy, so the right-wing parties are challenged. Where socialdemocratic, left and trade union bodies swallow the myth that a ‘social Europe’ is possible through reforming the EU, then the far right have an open goal. It is instructive that the Blairite right wing in Labour – the people who would have taken us into the euro – want Labour to give political cover to
public services including education, in particular through restricting governments’ capacity to regulate in the public interest, encouraging further liberalisation of services and expanding the rights of multinational corporations. It drew attention to a ‘ratchet clause’ as a device to ensure that parties to the agreements ‘automatically bind any autonomous liberalisation’. This means that if a government were to experiment with liberalising the education sector in whole or in part, future governments would be unable to undo this without paying significant compensation. Whatever hopes we might have for reversing the tide of privatisation of education would prove fruitless if we continue to underestimate the likely consequences of the TTIP agreement. This is the elephant in the room that cannot be ignored any longer. Robert Wilkinson is a former NUT National Executive member and a member of the Communist Party EU Commission
Cameron and Osbourne in the referendum. But millions of people – including many of the three million Labour voters that Blair and Brown lost – remain suspicious. A clear majority of British manifestopress.org.uk people reject the Tories’ austerity policies. But this universal sentiment means little unless we reject EU treaties that underpin austerity, curtail democracy, compel privatisation and lead directly too the privatise our transport and postal services. The proposed EU-US Trade Agreement threatens the existence of our NHS. A vote to leave the European Union is a yes to a publiclyowned, socialised health care service free at the point of use. The Empire and Ukraine the Ukraine crisis in its context Anita Halpin is Unity! by Andrew Murray editor-in-chief £11.95 (+£1.50 p&p) 138 pages
Books@ manifesto
Organising for unity by Hank Roberts HE BRITISH trade union movement was once the strongest in the world. It saw off legislation attempting to shackle the unions (In Place of Strife and the Industrial Relations Act) and their threat of a general strike forced the release of the imprisoned dockers. We are now halved in numbers and the assaults on our ability to defend ourselves, never mind advance, is in my lifetime at an all-time low. What to do? In truth, our organisations, from our unions to the TUC, are not yet fully fit for purpose. Look at education and their plans. All schools to be turned into academies and following with certainty their being opened up for private profit. Plus all the other outrages teachers know so well, complain about, but still in the main, tolerate. Having 6 unions assists this process by a non-united response enabling the Government to get away with divide and rule. None the less, education being the most unionised profession puts us in the forefront of the Government’s attack, because their true aim is to destroy not just effective trade unionism, but trade unionism per se. This requires that we unite our forces. The prospect that this could occur between ATL and NUT is wonderful; a breath of fresh air. We will urgently need to address the task of uniting all in education – teachers, lecturers and support staff – to counter attack on a united front. Long term I think it should go further – the US model, ‘If you’re in the building you’re in the union’. We in education can give a lead. But the process must extend across the TUC. We need a coherent structure. Competition between unions for members is not just a waste of our
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THE BATTLE FOR THE LABOUR MOVEMENT ÂŁ2 from morningstaronline.co.uk
money and resources but a complete misdirection of our effort and activity, so vitally needed to confront our enemies. In addition to restructuring our army – the TUC and constituent organisations, we need to do vitally two other things. We need to become social movement trade unions. The wrongs we face are not facing just our sector. They face the whole of society, or rather the whole of society excluding the tiny ruling elite. We are, as unions and workers, all under massive attack on multiple, but totally interconnected fronts. Government actions in one area have connotations to and repercussions in, other areas. So we must understand, act and fight as one. Next, because in relative terms at the moment we are weak and they are strong, we have to concentrate our forces. Strategically one against 10: tactically 10 against one. We have to choose one issue at a time. Pick their weakest point. Pick an area we can win on and unite our forces to achieve it. Where we have the strength because we have control, we can do it. We’re not forcing them to concede something (as we have to do with pay for example). No, we can simply not implement it; a good example Baseline assessment. We need guerrilla struggles in workplaces, making advances one at a time on the basis of what the members prioritise and is achievable to build our strength. If ATL and NUT form a new union fit for the 21st century from that moment attention must be turned to widening this process to encompass all in education. Acting in unity through one united organisation at workplace level is an absolute necessity in the present situation to save our state education system and indeed our country. Let’s get to it Hank Roberts is Organising Secretary of Unify