Preparing for the showdown

AS THE 30 November public-sector strike looms, the question on the lips of activists in the labour movement is: what next?

Will the strike succeed in pushing the government into a humiliating U-turn on pensions and the cuts programme as a whole?

If so, will this lead to the toppling of the Con-Dem coalition and a general election - as in 1974 during the miners' strike (see article on page 24) - and the defeat of David Cameron and co?

On the other hand, will the unions and labour movement suffer setbacks, as in Greece, or a standoff, like the workers of other countries?

These are burning questions confronting all trade unionists, young people and the working class generally.

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Capitalism IS crisis - Fight for a socialist alternative

Paula Mitchell

Capitalism IS crisis. These are the words sewn on a huge green banner stretching over the tents outside St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Hundreds of people visit the Occupy LSX (London Stock Exchange) tent city each day to show support and to enable this anti-capitalist protest to continue. The huge anger against the 'banksters' is palpable.

The overwhelmingly positive response they get from visitors is because they touch on that core feeling shared by thousands upon thousands of people - that we are very far from 'all being in this crisis together' as the government says - that the rich are laughing all the way to the bank while we're expected to lose our jobs and our services and our homes and just take it lying down.

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Construction protests continue and Unite declares strike ballot

This week's protest at Blackfriars Balfour Beatty site in London began in full darkness at 6:30am this morning (19.10.11).

Along with the cold weather it was a sign winter is just around the corner. Despite the chilly weather though, the struggle betweenconstruction workers and the 'big seven' electrical contractors rages on as hot as ever.

These companies want to withdraw from the JIB national agreement. Balfour Beatty has been targeted because over 1,600 of their electricians have been given notice that the new inferior BESNA contracts will be imposed on them. This could mean a 35% pay cut.

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How Can We Stop the BNP?

The BNP experienced a wipe-out at the last local government elections losing 11 of their 13 councillors, including all 5 of their councillors in Stoke-on-Trent. Their hopes of establishing a foothold with the election of Nick Griffin as MP in Barking were dashed as he came third. However this does not mean the BNP or the threat they represent is finished.

Racist Party

Until the courts forced them to change their rules, only people of "Caucasian origin" were allowed to join the BNP. To give another example, the councillors in Barking and Dagenham voted against congratulating British athletes on their success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They do not consider athletes such as Amir Khan and Kelly Holmes to be British!

The BNP, despite its neo-Nazi and openly pro-Fascist past, for a whole period has attempted to present itself as a respectable defender of the ‘white working-class’. They tried to fill the vaccuum New Labour left after its sharp turn towards big business. While arguing that the source of most problems facing the British working-class is immigration, the BNP also appeal with left-wing arguments in favour of nationalisation of the rail and gas industries for example.

They were able to do this because New Labour, over the 1990’s jumped to the right, destroying internal party democracy and any voice for rank-and-file working-class members, embracing capitalism and everything that went with it: privatisation, flat-lining or falling wages, casual work and so on. The trade union movement was also stunted from the top down by a leadership that merely 'managed the decline' instead of fighting for members pay and conditions.

The BNP and their far-right ideas are not spread mainly by their members and representatives. The media and many ‘mainstream’ politicians are responsible for peddling the divide and rule line, with one-sided and often factually incorrect lies about immigrant families or individuals, preying on people’s prejudices to deflect anger away from the government and big business.

Immigration

The BNP argues that halting immigration in Britain would solve the housing crisis, unemployment (especially among youth), halt the ‘race to the bottom’ in wages and conditions for workers and free up more money for squeezed public services.

However unemployment has rocketed as a result of the economic crisis caused by the bankers and big businesses that now have no qualms about lowering wages and sacking workers to protect their profits. Public services have been steadily parcelled out to the private sector under first the Tories, New Labour and now the present ConDem government, placing the pursuit of profit above providing decent public services to everyone.

In fact the bosses use immigrants to lower wages and conditions for everyone else, in many cases exploiting their fragile status in the country to prevent them fighting for better rights. This simply helps the bosses in making higher profits and forcing wages and conditions further down for everyone else. However the answer to that cannot be getting rid of exploited foreign workers; the bosses would simply turn to another vulnerable group, for example the 1 million young unemployed who the government wants to push onto ‘work for your benefit’ schemes. The answer is to defend the rights, wages and conditions of ALL workers via the trade union movement, to prevent one group being picked on in order to attack everyone.

One example of this successfully taking place was in 2009 at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR). The oil refinery workers understood that the only way they could defend their pay, conditions and jobs was by united action - demanding the rate for the job for every worker, regardless of their national origin. As Keith Gibson, a leading member of the Lindsey strike committee (and a Socialist Party member) put it: "The workers of LOR, Conoco and Easington did not take strike action against immigrant workers. Our action is rightly aimed against company bosses who attempt to play off one nationality of worker against the other and undermine the NAECI [an agreement between the bosses and workers on pay and conditions] agreement.”

BNP Record

However the BNP have a terrible record where they have gained some power at council level and in the European Parliament.

Where the BNP had councillors they consistently supported massive cuts. In Barking they moved an alternative budget, which not only accepted all £14 million in cuts proposed by the New Labour-led council, but added its own cuts of several million - including £0.8 million from the school buildings budget. In Stoke-on-Trent they supported the council budget, which proposed savage cuts in jobs, closures or further privatisation plus an almost 3% council tax increase.

In Kirklees they voted for a huge £400 million worth of cuts over the next five years. A BNP councillor called for public sector jobs to be slashed by 25%, even more than the cuts that the Labour council was proposing.

Housing

Five million people say they want social housing. But as a result of government policy over the last 30 years, there is virtually none available. 20 years ago there were more than five million council homes, now there is barely half that number.

From 1949 to 1954 an average of 230,000 council houses a year were built. The Socialist Party campaigns for a programme on a similar scale now that would refurbish existing stock and build enough new homes to genuinely solve the housing problem for all. But the BNP ‘solution’ (proposed by councillors in Barking in 2009) was to take a council site in the borough and stick 1,000 caravans on it...!

Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, instead of campaigning to defend public services, campaigned to defend the bankers! As a member of the European parliament he argued that the European Commission does not understand "the City of London’s role in world markets and that it is a leading economic and commercial asset in Great Britain."

Far from being an ’asset’, the rich bankers in the City of London bear responsibility for the dramatic increase in public debt. Deregulated under the Tories and then New Labour, the City enjoyed a massive party of profits. When the hangover came, it was taxpayers who propped them up. Now the bankers are partying again and our services are being cut to pay the bill.

A real solution would be to demand nationalisation of the major banks - with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need. Instead of being run by and for the profiteers, a nationalised finance sector could be run by and for the mass of the population. The BNP, by contrast, not only opposes nationalisation, but even demands increased deregulation of the City!

Need for a New Workers Party

In the face of the £81 billion cuts agenda of the ConDems and the absence of a determined fighting leadership from New Labour the space for the far-right and even fascist ideas could grow. Effective criticism of the BNP needs to be linked to a positive alternative based on opposing the policies of the main parties and campaigning on the class issues – jobs, wages, defending public services – and opposing racism and other divisive ideas. It needs to reject the policies of big business and capitalism which have alienated many from the mainstream parties. It is important that we fill that gap with a new mass workers party, with the aim of replacing the rotten system of capitalism with a democratically run economy in the interests of the majority instead of the profits of a tiny minority.

Come to Socialism 2011

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Youth must join pensions struggle

Strike together as in France 2010

Jack Poole, Brighton University Socialist Students

The government and their friends in the media will always try, as they did in June, to spread division between workers and service users during strike action. It is important to cut across these lies with solidarity action and unity between young people and workers on strike.

Three quarters of a million teachers and civil servants took coordinated strike action in June against the government's decimation of public sector pension schemes.

This unity between students, young people and workers was shown last year in France, in the struggle against the pension reforms. With the Con-Dem coalition likely to face more strike action over pensions this autumn, it is important to analyse and draw lessons from struggles such as this.

Last October, President Sarkozy's plans to raise the retirement age saw a furious and enormous reaction from the French working class, with massive strikes and demonstrations - at the height of the movement, 3.5 million people demonstrated across the country.

A crucial turning point for the dispute was when young people and students began to take part in the struggle in a large and organised way. Ignoring the lies of Sarkozy's supporters and the right wing media who tried to re-assure young people that pension reform did not concern them, student strikes in solidarity with the workers helped shut hundreds of schools.

The idea that raising the retirement age does not affect young people is a downright lie used to divide the movement. For example, with one million young people unemployed in Britain, it is madness for the government to be forcing older workers to work for longer while these young people waste their talents on the dole queue.

Sarkozy revealed a lot when he was quoted as saying about the strikes, "school and college students...must be watched closely like milk on a stove."

Politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron are right to be frightened of a mass movement of youth and workers opposing their austerity measures! Such a movement would stand a real chance of stopping them and their cuts in their tracks.

Young people and students on their own do not carry the social weight to defeat governments, even weak ones such as the coalition in Britain. However, as last year's student movement in Britain showed, the energy and anger of a movement of young people can give confidence and inspire others in society to fight back. Three months after the last major student demonstration, half a million trade unionists marched through the streets of London.

Combined with the organised working class, which holds the power to make society grind to a halt, this kind of action would stand firmly in the way of the brutal austerity cuts of governments across Europe and beyond.

If more workers take coordinated strike action to defend their pensions, young people and students need to unite with them. We should take our solidarity to the picket lines but also organise walkouts at our schools, colleges and universities and join the protests and demonstrations taking place. Any blow against this government is a step towards a decent future for young people.

Mass workers' movement - the only way to make the super-rich pay

Members of the teachers' union NUT on the 26 March TUC demonstration, photo Suzanne Beishon (Click to enlarge)

"The system [capitalism] produced an ever-expanding flow of goods and services, which the impoverished proletarianised population could not afford to buy. Some 20 years ago...this would have seemed outmoded. But it needs another look, following the increase in concentration of wealth and income." These are not the words of a socialist but Samuel Brittan, the Thatcherite columnist for the Financial Times, giving his summary of Karl Marx's analysis.

In the 19th century Marx explained that capitalism created a trend, with brief interludes of growing prosperity, towards the concentration of wealth and power in an ever decreasing number of hands at the top of society, with increased poverty and misery at the bottom. This has never been truer than today.

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