https://tribunemag.co.uk/feedTribune2024-03-29T12:33:48Zhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/plans-without-the-people/Plans Without the People2024-03-29T12:33:48Z2024-03-29T12:31:08Z<p>Last Christmas I came out of a pub in Manchester city centre with my brother, parents and grandparents early in the evening. I looked up from the base of one of the towers along Great Ancoats Street. 14 stories, 100 or so apartments. I saw four lights on. One supposes this great exodus of the […]</p>
<h3>A new book which draws from Manchester’s radical past to chart a future free from landlordism erases Mancunians from their own story — and leads to political incoherence, writes Sam Wheeler.</h3>
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<p>Last Christmas I came out of a pub in Manchester city centre with my brother, parents and grandparents early in the evening. I looked up from the base of one of the towers along Great Ancoats Street. 14 stories, 100 or so apartments. I saw four lights on. One supposes this great exodus of the new workforce that occurs around the holidays would have been familiar to President Xi when he visited Manchester in 2015, along with much of the rest of the model. Dengism with Mancunian characteristics.</p>
<p>That slightly uncanny feeling came back to me when I read Isaac Rose’s book, <em>The Rentier City</em>. It is part potted Lancashire economic history, part analysis of the admitted strangeness of Manchester politics, and part a series of anecdotes. It ends with a <em>cri de coeur</em> about hope for the future, but seems not to really have any concrete plan for what that future should be, let alone a blueprint for getting there. David Wilkinson has <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-landlords-utopia">praised the book in <em>Tribune</em></a> for putting into the demotic observations otherwise confined to the academic literature, but the whole point of taking those cold arguments to a medium of greater freedom and passion is to give them a human face. And it is the profound absence of the people of Manchester from their own story that is the most bewildering. One gets the sense that they fall rather short of the author’s expectations.</p>
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<h2>Ignored History</h2>
<p>To get mentioned in this book, one seemingly needs to be, in the author’s eyes at least, not just a victim — but <em>cool</em>. We get a reference to Manchester Jewry if they’re refugees wrestling with Marxist theory, but not if they’re the older mercantile community who sang God Save the Queen in the Great Synagogue under the Union Jack. The Irish are a loveable roguish chorus to the Peterloo Massacre, but the mass Catholicism that welded a political allegiance well into the late twentieth century doesn’t get a line.</p>
<p>LGBT people receive brief mention around Section 28, but there’s no analysis of how the community pioneered city centre living in Manchester — of the specific housing policy of giving flats to homeless gay teenagers — and the social and economic effects of this (which is odd for a book with a focus on city centre housing). The complete absence of the city’s South Asian population (not least Cllr Nilofar Siddiqui from the list of women who broke barriers in the 1980s) is odd for a book that apparently holds a decolonising historiography.</p>
<p>Linked inextricably to this idealisation of specific, sympathetic silos of Manchester is the omission of that most uncool and unhelpful breed: Mancunian Tories. I don’t just mean Conservative voters, though there were many in Manchester until Thatcherism, but those who expressed their opposition to Manchester Liberalism, to the single unconscionable freedom of free trade and the rapaciousness of their employers, through aspects of faith, place and community.</p>
<p>The author mentions the Aliens Act — a brutal, antisemitic piece of anti-immigrant legislation. One is led into an entirely anachronistic conclusion that this was imposed by faraway Tory MPs on our progressive city. In fact, the Act followed a delegation of unionised ‘working men’ from Manchester to their MP in Manchester East, raising what they saw as the undercutting of textile industry rates by immigrant labour. That MP was the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, the last PM to hold a seat anywhere in the conurbation.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most glaring omission of the broader forces of communitarianism (after missing out the fact that the legendary Ewan MacColl was a folk singer — perhaps an issue of taste) is the complete absence of the Co-operative movement. Founded just to the north of the city in Rochdale and swiftly embedded in Manchester’s heart, it was central to the development of the city, incredibly impactful as an articulation of proletarian self-help and of the peculiarly English socialist accommodation with emergent capital. It has featured as a partner in most of the city’s ventures, including the NOMA development just before the 2008 recession, and most recently with the major Co-op Live development in East Manchester and the Co-op Academies across the city. There are few easier threads one could follow.</p>
<p>These enforced blind spots to what the people of Manchester might actually want create two key problems for the book. The first is a problem of understanding. The constant references to an undefined ‘municipal capitalism’ miss the extent to which Manchester Corporation (and later the Council) was an attempt to control the forces of capital unleashed upon the city within a framework people could understand. The Corporation became the new aristocrat, displacing the sclerotic Norman families — the Mosleys, Wiltons, De Traffords — and taking up their rents and duties, building, owning and running services like the old baron would a village mill, and with a whole army of retainers decked in its livery as it expanded its demesne. This is what allowed it to act at such scale.</p>
<p>Manchester’s recent troubles are not down to its current leaders being less socialist than Abel Heywood’s band of Reform Club freemasons, it’s that the city itself is a beggar prince. Since 1979, its wealth has been ripped from it by successive Westminster administrations that seek to oppose alternative structures of power that may undermine their own ambitions. The compensatory stipend Manchester received from central government was ended by austerity. In awed tones, Roses discusses Manchester Life, the city’s deal with Abu Dhabi, with its £400 million in assets. But it fails to mention that, if given its 2010 budget back, Manchester Council could buy that in cash this year. Indeed, since 2010, the council has seen some £5 billion lost in real terms cuts — enough to build, at a conservative estimate, 25,000 council homes. Money is power.</p>
<p>Yet it goes beyond the money. The lesson of Manchester’s great trauma of 1985 — the collapse of the rate-capping rebellion — was not just that you would get less money from the government, it’s that if you ever did anything at the local level that national government found to their distaste, they would take it off you. Despite a labyrinthine structure, much of the council’s activity is not to do with hiding things from redoubtable citizen-activists (though I’m sure some parties don’t mind the side effect) — it’s about making it incredibly difficult for government to sanction you efficiently. The wider goal of an increase in population and in the economic capability of that population is an attempt to get to a stage where you can sustain at least basic services off your own resources because anything else has been proven unreliable. Again, President Xi would know what he was seeing.</p>
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<h2>Whose Manchester?</h2>
<p>This second problem — courage — is more fundamental. At various points in <em>The Rentier City</em>, the author can clearly identify contradictory, overlapping claims to Manchester, but refuses to work through the actually interesting questions because they may force him to take a side.</p>
<p>A gem in the book is a discussion with Jamil Keating, an Ardwick local. When Keating spoke of feeling ‘invaded’ as he spoke about Ardwick’s transformation, I felt a guttural agreement. My first home was my nana’s council house there, on the Swinton Grove estate. Leaving aside the historical point that the area was originally a rich suburb, there’s a deeper question. Keating’s opposition is to people in now high-rent Ancoats who want to live near the city centre for work and are looking for somewhere they can afford. They are moving to Ardwick and creating sufficient demand that new developments are popping up. Why should current residents of an area get to veto the provision of more housing so that other people can move to and also live in that area?</p>
<p>Rose goes into great detail about how Manchester’s working-class has always been cosmopolitan, and none of us have been here more than five minutes. But if we’re all just citizens of nowhere, then one has no claim to the place and no grounding to object to newer people moving in. Even addressing that point, there’s a further question. Manchester gains 8,000 new residents each year and has a 14,000-strong social housing waiting list backlog. Under the best plans ever devised, material reality means there will be a period of prioritisation for a decade or more. So should local people who have lived in an area for generations be prioritised over, say, refugees, or economic migrants, or indeed anyone for that matter? Why or why not?</p>
<p>There is a similar point on heritage buildings. If the Victorian facades of central Manchester are simply monuments to slavery and the zero-sum accumulation of Empire, as Rose implies elsewhere, then one should surely celebrate their destruction as one might Edward Colston’s statue taking a swim in Bristol Harbour. From that perspective, Richard Leese’s preference for letting the Venetian-pastiche monuments to mill owners collapse to be replaced with Bauhaus architecture looks rather apposite conduct for Leese, that veteran Trotskyist.</p>
<p>And who are the people in those shiny new towers? Are they Manchester’s new workers, asset-poor renters seeking the embrace of a city where they can be themselves? Then why do you object to building accommodation for them? Or are they the professional managerial class settlers sneering over their £5 tumeric macha? In which case, why on earth did you want to spend £75m giving them a park?</p>
<p>These questions go unanswered. But perhaps this is because when Rose does attempt to rationalise, the results are worse. At one point, the book claims that these supposed ‘new clearances’ might bring to mind what happened in the post-war era. Incredibly, his response is to exculpate the overseers of the post-war slum clearances — far bigger and more brutal than anything happening in Manchester today — with the idea that because the homes built were council-owned and built in the name of the working class, it is okay. We end in the bizarre position that ripping apart communities and landlordism are acceptable as long as the landlord is the council and the housing committee head is a shop steward.</p>
<p>There have been a recent surge in books looking at Manchester, ranging from the journalistic to the scholarly; they are both welcome and necessary. But given the sheer scope of the subject, they need tight focus or clear messaging to not get lost. The motto of the oldest school in Manchester is, ‘<em>sapere aude</em>’. A rough translation would be, ‘dare to know’. This book does not know. It doesn’t dare to.</p>
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Sam Wheelerhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/its-a-death-zone-how-israel-destroyed-gazas-healthcare/‘It’s a Death Zone’: How Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Healthcare2024-03-28T16:35:24Z2024-03-28T11:54:39Z<p>‘It’s a death zone,’ said Athanasios Gargavanis, a trauma surgeon for the World Health Organisation, upon reaching the now defunct emergency department of Nasser medical complex. There were dead bodies in corridors, no tap water at all and no electricity beyond a small backup generator. At least eight patients had died due to a lack […]</p>
<h3>Medics tortured and executed, operations without anaesthetic, patients dying from starvation. Gaza's medical workers speak to Tribune about Israel's apocalyptic war on healthcare.</h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘It’s a death zone,’ </span><span style="font-weight: 400">said</span> <span style="font-weight: 400">Athanasios Gargavanis, a trauma surgeon for the World Health Organisation, upon reaching the now defunct emergency department of Nasser medical complex. There were dead bodies in corridors, no tap water at all and no electricity beyond a small backup generator. At least eight patients had died due to a lack of oxygen.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This was the grim outcome of Israel’s brutal siege on the barely functioning hospital in the Southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. Two weeks earlier, 14-year-old Ru’a </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Atef Qadeeh was shot dead by Israeli snipers in front of the Hospital gate while desperately trying to fetch water from a nearby location. A further twenty-one Palestinians in the vicinity of the besieged hospital were killed by Israeli snipers in the days that followed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">During a raid on the hospital, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">medical staff were interrogated, and more than seventy healthcare workers were reportedly detained by Israeli forces.</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> ‘I have lived three days of hell, along with my patients’, said one surgeon. ‘What happened to doctors, patients and internally displaced people here is unbelievable, even in your worst nightmares.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Doctor Ahmed Moghrabi, who was forced to leave Nasser Hospital in the middle of the night with his family, described families being chased by Israeli military dogs as they evacuated. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he detailed how the Israeli military abducted his head nurse, demanding that he take off his clothes. ‘At midnight, it was cold… He was screaming because they used to beat him.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Gaza Medic Voices, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">an organisation set up by international medics to provide first-hand accounts from Gaza, shared the following testimony from a nurse at the time:</span> <span style="font-weight: 400">‘They tied our hands behind our backs, on our knees, our heads on the floors…thirteen hours without food, water, or the bathroom even.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Far from being an isolated incident, Doctor Rebecca Inglis, an intensive care doctor and co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices, says that the attacks on healthcare workers are systemic. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">‘The use of violence and degrading treatment against doctors, nurses and paramedics are recurring themes in the testimonies we have collected.’ Inglis says detainees are being denied family contact, medical care and legal counsel. ‘There is a complete lack of transparency regarding their whereabouts. This is in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">She </span><span style="font-weight: 400">describes horrific examples of torture and doctors being ‘specifically targeted’ by Israeli forces. ‘</span><span style="font-weight: 400">They were forced to strip. There were a variety of forms of humiliation. They were getting hit in the face, there were dogs involved, there was electricity involved </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> absolutely horrendous things were happening,’ she says. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Inglis says she has been in contact with a colleague who was held in detention alongside the head of Al-Shifa Hospital, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Doctor Mohammad Abu Silmiyeh, who</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> was abducted while supporting the transfer of ambulances and buses of patients from the hospital to southern Gaza. ‘He described all of [</span><span style="font-weight: 400">Abu Silmiyeh’s]</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> limbs having been broken. They forced him to crawl on the ground with a chain around his neck and eat food off the floor in front of people like a dog. Naked.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Since last Monday, Al-Shifa has once again been targeted by Israeli forces, and the same tactics are being used. IDF soldiers reportedly undressed the male medical staff and left them in the cold for hours. Many were arrested and taken to an unknown place. Soldiers assaulted medical staff and left them without food or water during the month of Ramadan when they were fasting.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Preliminary reports indicate that at least 200 Palestinians have been killed since last Monday’s assault on the hospital, many of whom were extrajudicially executed. Survivors from the hospital siege and its vicinity have been sharing horrific testimonies indicating that the Israeli military conducted executions and killings against Palestinians, including some being run over by tank treads. One survivor said Israeli forces detained him and another eight Palestinians at Al Shifa for around three hours before they shot and killed all the group, including his father, brother, and a 67-year-old man. Another witness said he saw Israeli forces taking around ten Palestinians into the hospital’s morgue area before he heard heavy gunfire and saw the Israelis leaving without any Palestinians.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Earlier this week, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported that Al Amal Hospital was taken out of service after Israeli forces forced hospital crews and the wounded to evacuate and closed its entrances with dirt barriers. The hospital was besieged for more than forty days and shelled several times. The same fate befell Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City, which was taken out of service a few months ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today, there are no functional hospitals in Gaza. Just twelve remain partially functioning and they and the staff who work in them remain under constant attack.</span></p>
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<h2>Medics under siege</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Before embarking on a medical mission in Rafah last month with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), anaesthesia specialist Doctor Birsen Gaskell</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> was briefed about such dangers. ‘I was told [by MSF] that I might be hit by shelling or be a victim of an explosion,’ she recalls. Birsen was also told multiple times that she could ‘change [her] mind’ and leave the two-week mission even after she’d crossed the border into Rafah. ‘This increased my anxiety levels,’ she says.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Approaching the border, Birsen could hear the explosions and see clouds of smoke just a few kilometres away. When she arrived in Gaza, Birsen says her ‘whole reality changed’. ‘I’d mentally prepared, but when you see it in real life, it’s a lot more intense than you expect.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘There is no clean water. There is no sanitation. There is no electricity. There is no schooling </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> kids are everywhere. There is no vaccination. There is no primary health care,’ says Birsen. ‘The order of life as we know it has just completely collapsed’. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">As they endeavour to treat patients in these catastrophic conditions, medics say they feel especially vulnerable to attacks. Birsen had to treat two of her colleagues who’d been attacked in the hospital that they worked in, leaving them severely wounded. ‘They had limb fractures, head injuries </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> one of them had lost an eye,’ says Birsen. The staff were then arrested </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> one for forty-five days, the other one for two months </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> during which time they had received no treatment other than paracetamol tablets. When they reached the hospital, Birsen said that they had ‘severe complications.’ She is unsure if they will survive.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Like Gaskell, Professor Nick Maynard, who travelled to Gaza with Medical Aid for Palestinians in December last year, found things to be ‘inestimably worse’ than he could ever have imagined. A British consultant surgeon, Maynard had made numerous visits to Gaza since 2005, working in all the major hospitals. But, he says, none of that experience could have prepared him for the horrendous scenes he witnessed recently. ‘Some of the horrific things we saw will stay with me till my dying days,’ he tells </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Tribune</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Maynard saw the most horrific burns in young children </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> often so bad that they had no chance of survival. The intensifying siege meant his team often had no pain relief to give those suffering in pain. And hospitals were so overcrowded that there was nowhere for them to die with dignity. ‘They were literally lying on the floor of the emergency department dying.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">His colleague, British Palestinian surgeon Dr Khaled Dawas recalls one particularly harrowing incident where he and Maynard noticed a 5-year-old child lying on the floor of the emergency ward they were working in. ‘ Both his parents had been killed. He had a horrible hole in his chest from shrapnel. But when we dealt with that, we noticed he had a hole in the back of his head.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘There was no triage system at all,’ adds Maynard. ‘No one had seen him. He’d just been dumped there,’ adds Maynard. ‘The first thing we saw was an open chest wound. We just saw bubbles of air coming out.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">As they took him to the recess room, they noticed his sister, just a few years older, was on the floor awake with a fractured leg. ‘I’ll never forget seeing her face when the orthopaedic surgeon had to come and straighten her leg out without any anaesthetic,’ says Dawas. ‘We were all horrified.’</span></p>
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<h2>Deliberate Destruction</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Under a brutal siege for over sixteen years, operating in Gaza with limited resources has always been a challenge. Israel controls the electricity going into the strip and can therefore cut off the supply when it chooses, leading to frequent </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/03/gaza-health-system-collapse-electricity-crisis-threatens-total-blackout"><span style="font-weight: 400">power outages in hospitals</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">. It also limits medical supplies reaching Gaza. At the end of 2021, 40 percent of essential drugs and 19 per cent of medical disposables were reportedly at ‘zero stock’, meaning less than one month’s supply was available at Gaza’s Central Drug Store. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Since October 7, these conditions have worsened ‘a thousandfold’, says Maynard. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Gaskell was given ‘limited’ anaesthetic to use on patients. ‘The kind of anaesthetic care I was given is sub-optimal; if I did that here [in the UK], I’d be sacked on the spot,’ she says. She describes almost having her patients die on multiple occasions as a result of losing airway (this can occur when the anaesthetist is operating without full monitoring and anaesthetic equipment). ‘The pain management was just not acceptable.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Medical supplies and facilities, along with basic resources, are extremely limited. Maynard says he has had to use blunt tools to operate on patients, and recalls one occasion where he had no access to running water, meaning he couldn’t scrub up. ‘[Me and my colleague] just had to use alcohol gel on our hands to try to clean them,’ he recalls.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Giving blood transfusion was ‘almost impossible’, says Gaskell, due to there being no blood bank. ‘The only way we could give someone a blood transfusion was if we could send a relative of theirs to the local hospital to give the blood there and bring it back to us,’ she says. ‘This could take two days </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> and not everyone had a relative.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Medics in Gaza are also contending with severe overcrowding: there are </span><span style="font-weight: 400">reports that some hospitals in southern Gaza are operating at over 300 percent of their bed capacity</span><span style="font-weight: 400">. ‘[Patients] were literally put on the floor in the corner of the emergency room and left to die because there was nowhere else for them to go,’ says Maynard.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">According to Birsan, the aim is always to ‘discharge patients as quickly as possible’ to create more space in the hospital. ‘Almost all the patients we tried to discharge had nowhere to go, and we felt extremely bad doing this, because a lot of them still needed a lot of care,’ she says. This included patients who’d had an amputation or were in need of dressing changes for their wounds. ‘They would tell me: “I don’t have any place to go. I don’t know anyone here”. And we would just let them out on the street.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The overcrowding in medical facilities is contributing to the soaring rates of infectious disease in Gaza. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">The World Health Organisation has reported at least 369,000 cases of infectious diseases since the war began </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> a staggering increase from before October 7.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Along with infectious disease, medics are now increasingly having to treat malnourished patients. Starvation is being used as a weapon of war, with the</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) forecasting imminent famine in northern Gaza</span><span style="font-weight: 400">. Birsan says that during the two weeks she worked in Gaza, three of her patients died of starvation. ‘Most of my patients, especially children, were definitely malnourished’. According to Birsan, MSF couldn’t supply food, but the NGO World Kitchen fed staff and patients once a day. This was just rice, occasionally with some sauce. ‘It was definitely not adequate; not a nutritious meal,’ she says.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The scarcity of food poses additional risks for patients recovering from burns and trauma injuries. ‘They need a lot more calories in order to heal because they need to regenerate skin,’ says Birsen. ‘Maybe more than half of [the people we were treating] actually had old injuries, but they were just not healing well, and we were just treating the complications.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Another major problem is reaching medical care. Medics say that Israel is directly and systematically attacking ambulances in a clear contravention of international law. In addition to being bombed, ambulances are blocked from accessing areas because it’s too dangerous for them to reach. ‘It means that many people are being brought to hospital by donkey cart or being carried in or wheeled in on wheelbarrows,’ says Dr Rebecca Inglis.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Inglis sees the torture of medical staff as part of a wider, deliberate effort to restrict life-saving care for Palestinians in Gaza. ‘The systematic destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza appears to be a central tenet of the Israeli government’s military strategy,’ she says. ‘In the words of a doctor from Al Shifa when asked why he thought the hospital was being targeted: “Al Shifa Hospital is the heart of Gaza’s healthcare system. You stop the heart, and starve the population, you kill Gaza.”’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Birsen says that leaving Gaza left her with immense guilt. ‘It was very difficult: on the day I left, I was very, very sad,’ she says. Now watching the horror unfold from the UK, Gaskell feels the most important thing she can do is to continue talking about Gaza. ‘I feel morally obliged to speak out,’ she says. ‘It’s our individual responsibility. If we don’t talk about it, we are complicit.’</span></p>
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<p>Medical Aid for Palestinians is responding to the emergency situation in Gaza. Please consider donating <a href="https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donation-details/484">here</a>.</p>
Taj AliDaisy Schofieldhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/shapurji-saklatvala-labours-first-mp-of-colour-3/Shapurji Saklatvala: Labour’s First MP of Colour2024-03-28T07:30:50Z2024-03-28T07:30:50Z<p>Shapurji Saklatvala was the Labour Party’s first MP of colour. A largely forgotten figure today, he was a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party and champion of both colonised peoples and the global working class. Sitting awkwardly in the history of the British left, Saklatvala offers an example of an anti-imperialist parliamentarian agitating at the heart of empire. A […]</p>
<h3>In 1922, Shapurji Saklatvala was elected as Labour's first MP of colour. He was a fighter against colonialism and war — and for an international socialism that could unite the world's working-class.</h3>
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<p class="p1">Shapurji Saklatvala was the Labour Party’s first MP of colour. A largely forgotten figure today, he was a card-carrying member of the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/eric-hobsbawm-historian-marxism-communist-party-third-reich-stalingrad"><span class="s1">British Communist Party</span></a> and champion of both colonised peoples and the global working class. Sitting awkwardly in the history of the British left, Saklatvala offers an example of an <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/winston-churchill-british-empire-colonialism"><span class="s1">anti-imperialist</span></a> parliamentarian agitating at the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/british-empire-kenya-oman-ireland-state-secrecy"><span class="s1">heart of empire</span></a>.</p>
<p class="p1">A lone voice in the halls of Westminster, Saklatvala saw no contradiction between the interests of British workers and those elsewhere. The achievement of socialism depended on the victory of both. “Of course, socialism means the destruction of the British Empire,” Saklatvala wrote in a pamphlet from 1926. As the ghost of the colonial past continues to cast its shadow on Britain’s political and cultural life, Saklatvala’s example offers lessons to new generations of socialists intent on reimagining Britain’s place in the world today.</p>
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<h2>Path to Parliament</h2>
<p class="p1">Sharpuji Saklatvala was born in Bombay on March 28, 1874, the son of a wealthy Parsee merchant. His uncle was Jamsetji Tata, the owner and founder of India’s largest commercial empire. Clashing with his family over the direction of the business and with a growing political consciousness, he was forced to depart for Britain in 1905.</p>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala slowly became more politicised, joining the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1909. Rajani Palme Dutt — one of Britain’s leading twentieth century black British intellectuals — described his friend’s conversion to international socialism:</p>
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<p class="p2">Traveling all over England, he saw the slums and unemployment, the ruthless exploitation of the industrial and agricultural workers … he came to realise that poverty was not just an Indian problem, but an international problem of the workers all over the world, and that its solution required the international fight of the working class against class society and for socialism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="p1">The horrors of the First World War and the aftermath of the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/the-russian-revolution-at-100"><span class="s1">Russian Revolution</span></a> drove Saklatvala into full-time political organising. After becoming a prolific activist and orator in the ILP, Saklatvala was adopted as the Labour candidate for the London constituency Battersea North in 1921. In same year, he joined the nascent British Communist Party. His candidacy was supported strongly by both the local labour movement and by many of his former ILP comrades — such as Ramsay MacDonald — who were now in the leading ranks of the party.</p>
<p class="p1">At the time, there wasn’t a proscription on individual communists having membership of the Labour Party. As long as he accepted the Labour “whip” (the internal discipline expected of MPs in parliament), Saklatvala was able to fight in the 1922 election under “Labour’s United Front.” He fought the campaign on Labour’s manifesto of widespread nationalisation, state-led house building schemes, increases to welfare benefits, women’s rights, and full adult suffrage. It was the first and only time that the Labour Party endorsed a Communist Party member for a parliamentary seat.</p>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala doubled the vote of the previous Labour candidate in the constituency, winning over 50 percent of the vote. He was reelected as a communist in 1924 with the backing of the local Battersea Labour Party (though without national endorsement), retaining his seat until 1929. After his electoral defeat, he committed himself completely to the communist and anti-colonial struggle until his death in 1936.</p>
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<h2>Rebel in Westminster</h2>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala did not fit the mould of a revolutionary in parliament. Like <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/tony-benn-1925-2014"><span class="s1">Tony Benn</span></a> after him, he came from a wealthy family and attended an exclusive private school in Bombay. Living in a large house overlooking Parliament Hill Fields in Hampstead, he had little or no direct experience of working-class life or industrial militancy. Compared to the thoroughly proletarian intake that characterised the early Parliamentary Labour Party, his family and educational background made him culturally much closer to <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/jeremy-corbyn-campaign-media-manifesto-theresa-may"><span class="s1">the Tories</span></a>.</p>
<p class="p1">Being born into wealth and privilege, however, didn’t stop Saklatvala identifying with the historic mission and creative potential of the oppressed. A renegade from his class, Saklatvala was driven — like Benn — not by material necessity, but by moral conviction. Never haughty or patronising, Saklatvala refused either to talk down to those without his privileges or see working-class struggles as a vehicle for his own personal advancement.</p>
<p class="p1">In his letter of resignation from the ILP published in <i>Labour Leader</i>, Saklatvala criticised “the new life on which the ILP members are launching out, namely of seeking municipal and parliamentary advantages at the sacrifice of the spirit of true socialism.” Instead, Saklatvala chose an ethic of service. He chose to fight with rather than simply in the name of the <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/06/jeremy-corbyn-labour-theresa-may-snap-election-radical-politics"><span class="s1">working class</span></a>. One of Saklatvala’s Liberal opponents in Battersea recounts Saklavala’s political ethic:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="p2">[He would] turn up at a street corner meeting on the coldest of nights and by sheer personality and his wonderful eloquence, would rivet the attention of the audience so completely that they soon forgot their discomfort. One of the great secrets of his success was the humility of mind he displayed to the humblest member of the audience.… He knew how to time his arrival at a meeting to the minute and, with a few witty sentences and excruciatingly humorous remarks, very quickly had his audience spell-bound by his oratory.… His rage on the platform could be frantic in its expression if he found himself discussing any piece of legislation hostile to his ideals. Every fibre of his frail body seemed to quiver with an overwhelming indignation which, irresistibly seemed to transmit itself to his audience.… He never indulged in personalities nor did he ever hit below the belt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="p1">Although always polite and humble even to his most bitter opponents, he became the bane of those who took seriously the pretences of parliament. While other Labour MPs were enchanted by the gentlemanly culture of their bourgeois-aristocratic surroundings, Saklatvala remained unperturbed. He was the first (and possibly the last) to call the Speaker of the House of Commons “comrade” and regularly lampooned the monarchy.</p>
<p class="p1">In a parliamentary debate discussing a £2,000 grant for the Prince of Wales to visit Africa and South America, Saklatvala mocked the hollow Labour criticism of the proposal: “If they want an Empire and a ‘Royal nob’ at the head of it [Loud cries of ‘Order’ and ‘Withdraw’]…The Royal head, I mean.” Years later, Nye Bevan described the mesmerising power of parliament on MPs from proletarian backgrounds as like “a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent.” Ahead of his time, Saklatvala’s position as a Marxist MP of colour allowed him to question the parliamentary procedure and aristocratic sensibilities that others took for granted.</p>
<p class="p1">Cutting against the grain of twenty-first-century parliamentary culture, Saklatvala refused to see the primary role of the MP as that of a representative of his local constituency. In an interview to a local newspaper before the 1924 general election, he pledged to “not devote himself to the welfare of the local cricket club.… Local affairs, he holds, are for local bodies. Parliament’s concern is that of nation and empire.” As MP, he largely ignored his local authority and never raised borough-wide council issues.</p>
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<h2>Anti-Colonial Struggle</h2>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala followed Marx in linking Britain’s role as a colonising power and the weakening of the “native” working class. In an 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt, Marx describes how the antagonism between English and Irish proletarians was “the secret of the <i>impotence of the English working class</i>, despite its organisation.” For Saklatvala, like Marx, the question of Irish freedom was not some ancillary question to the British workers’ movement: it was a condition for their own emancipation. Saklatvala was only one of two MPs to vote against the partition of Ireland, arguing for a united country free from British control. He spoke up for Irish men and women who had been deported back after the troubles following the Treaty, predicting that the new accords would not bring peace. As Saklatvala wrote in a letter to Gandhi in 1927:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="p2">I was just walking down the main street of Dublin last night. I saw around me a new Ireland with a new Irish soul arising out of the ashes of their 1916 rebellion for independence. I can send you no better message from the Irish heart than the one that I saw in this street, carved on the Parnell monument, and once uttered by Parnell himself: “No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country, ‘Thus far thou shalt go and no further.’ We have never attempted to fix the <i>ne plus ultra</i> to the process of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="p1">Arguing against the Irish Free State Constitution Bill in 1922, Saklatvala predicted that “it will be the Labour party sitting on those benches which will have to afford real freedom to Ireland.” The failure of the 1924 Labour government to take these internationalist political principals seriously — failing to institute any political, civic, or even labor reform in the colonies — led to his increasing break with the party.</p>
<p class="p1">Although he was one of a tiny number of Labour Party members to know even a cursory amount about the empire, his expert advice was rarely listened to on the three Labour Party Advisory Committees of which he was part. The “dogmatic” loyalty of the Labour Party to the British parliamentary system noted by <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/10/the-miliband-affair"><span class="s1">Ralph Miliband</span></a> also involved a commitment to maintaining the British Empire and its underpinning ideology of peoples “fit” and “unfit” (or “not yet fit”) to rule.</p>
<p class="p1">For Saklatvala, the logic justifying imperialism and colonialism was the same which the ruling class used to justify their rule at home. To struggle for socialism and against racism both in Britain and the world implied the total rejection of the myth that there are those born to rule and those born to obey. In its place, socialism contends that workers of all lands can manage the world themselves. As Saklatvala remarked in a 1928 parliamentary address, edited into a pamphlet titled <i>Socialism and “Labouralism”</i>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="p2">The workers in Great Britain should realise that God has not created man to be ruled dictatorially and autocratically by another man. Through self-determination and mutual consent we should elect somebody to rule who is not a socialist boss, but a helper and adviser. If that is our essential belief, how can the people of this country believe that God has created the British Labour Party to rule the Indians and the Chinese, “We are ruling you; we are sending Commissions to your countries because you are less experienced and we are more experienced, and we want to be kind to you and tell you how you should live your lives.” That is exactly what the capitalist masters and bosses are saying to the workers in this country. They say to them, “We are more experienced in directing industry than you are, and we keep an Army, a Navy, and an Air Force to protect you, because you are less experienced than we are.” Socialism believes that that sort of incapacity is not inherent in human nature. How can the Labour Party say that they are preaching socialism and collecting the majority of voices in favour of socialism when they are pursing such a policy as I have described? The Labour Party supports expeditions to China, the Colonies and the Gold Coast.… How can those things go on?</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="p1">For Saklatvala, appeals to internationalism were not just empty rhetoric. Fighting for socialism meant actively challenging national-chauvinist attitudes existing inside the labor movement. After the unsuccessful Bombay Cotton Strike in 1923, Saklatvala sought to link the struggles of competing jute workers in the factories of Bengal and Dundee. Addressing the Scottish TUC, Saklatvala argued that “unless there was a uniform standard of wages in the Jute Industries of Bengal and Dundee, the black worker terrorised in Bengal would deprive the Scottish worker and his children of the necessities of life.… They must be unions of human beings in the trade without geographical barriers.”</p>
<p class="p1">He asked the delegates to “set aside all their little quibbles and arguments amongst themselves and to understand that International Trade Unionism was not the ultimate development, but the first essential.” E.D. Morel — Labour MP for Dundee — rejected the overtures for common cause and called Saklatvala’s intervention “communist propaganda.” Not afraid to challenge the narrow nationalism of his fellow members, Saklatvala was often left a lone voice for his internationalist politics.</p>
<p class="p1">Given his family background and the centrality of the colony to the British Empire, it is unsurprising that Saklatvala gave much of his parliamentary time to agitating on <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-many-faces-of-the-indian-left/"><span class="s1">the question of India</span></a>. He was so prolific that in 1925 the <i>Daily Graphic </i>referred to him, not unfairly, as the “Member for India.” Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, called Saklatvala “a brave and intrepid soldier of freedom” for his work fighting for India’s independence. As in the case of Ireland, Saklatvala saw the impact of colonialism not solely through its effects on the colonised but on the ability of workers in Britain to act. His presence did much to bolster the nascent labor and anti-colonial movement in an extremely successful speaking tour around India as an MP in 1927. He condemned British rule in India as the lynchpin of “our people’s perpetual starvation, ignorance, physical deterioration and social backwardness.”</p>
<p class="p2">British rule in India means a standing curb on Egypt, Iraq, Persia, and Afghanistan. British rule in India means an overpowering militarism by the British that compels the rest of the world to weigh itself down under the cursed burden of armaments. British rule in India mean the continual menace to the wages, to the work, and the living standard of the British masses, and an actual frustration of their trade union rights and socialist aims. British rule in India means a constant unseen war upon the rapid development of the masses in all the nations of Europe and America.</p>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala’s success did not go unnoticed by the British colonial authorities and the Foreign Office, who successfully agitated to remove his passport to prevent him traveling again. Much to the disappointment of his comrades in India, this was upheld even by the Labour Secretary of State for India in the 1929 government, William Wedgewood Benn — Tony Benn’s father.</p>
<p class="p1">For Saklatvala, the struggle for socialism also meant <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/hilary-wainwright-feminism-socialism-womens-liberation-england"><span class="s1">the liberation of women</span></a>. The first political demonstration he attended was organised by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1908. Minnie Bowles, then secretary for Harry Pollitt and member of Young Communist League, remembered canvassing with Saklatvala when he was beckoned from the top story of tenement building near Battersea Park Road. Confronting a domestic fight, Bowles remembered that “Sak stood inside the door and said, quietly, ‘Now why do you beat your wife. She is not your enemy. You have real enemies. Think of the landlord who charges you rent for this slum; or your boss who pays your wages, hardly enough to keep you alive.’ And he went on in this quiet way until the man was weeping and his wife was comforting him.” The liberation of women was not an afterthought but a necessary imperative.</p>
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<h2>Universalism</h2>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala’s political commitments came at a great personal cost. His electoral opponents falsely accused him of using “terrorist tactics” and denying free speech. Police regularly raided his house and he had his correspondence tampered by the secret services. Crucially for his political interventions, he was banned by the Foreign Office from visiting Egypt, America, Belgium, and India.</p>
<p class="p1">In 1926, he was imprisoned after a speech in Hyde Park at the start of the General Strike. He was sentenced to two months in prison for sedition, having called on soldiers not break the strike. Hours after he had been released from Wormwood Scrubs prison he was again on a tour, addressing solidarity meetings up and down the country. Rejecting all inducements to temper his politics, Saklatvala was offered the Under-Secretaryship for India if he would give up his communist ideals. Unlike many parliamentarians blinded by personal ambition, he refused. For Saklatvala, the callous response of the authorities was neither incidental nor motivated by personal dislike. As he recalled:</p>
<p class="p2">The open and concealed persecution carried out by Government Officials against me was largely due to their desire that a Parsee taking part in a bona fide and unadulterated anti-imperialist communist politics should be ruined to the finish to make an example to others.</p>
<p class="p1">Saklatvala’s failure to fit the “national” mould allowed a more natural identification with the universal interests of the world working class. As a member of the small Parsee (Zoroastrian) religious minority and a British Indian in the heart of empire, he was in a better position to see the contradictions in viewing politics through a narrow national gauge. Although a militant inside a movement which professed to be atheistic and materialist, Saklatvala’s religion played a critical role in shaping his internationalism.</p>
<p class="p1">He accepted the Communist Party’s condemnation for initiating his children into the Parsee faith, and justified it by saying the “circumstances were outside his control and due entirely to the peculiar position of his people.” The Communist Party condemned Saklatvala because his decision would encourage “religious prejudices,” particularly in India, which the British authorities “made use of” by divide and rule. What the party didn’t recognise was that remaining loyal to his religion was not incidental to Saklatvala’s politics. His people’s existence as a minority on the borderline of various cultural and national boundaries had shaped his wider commitment to the universal interests of the oppressed across the world.</p>
<p class="p1">The fact that Saklatvala is little known today tells us more about the <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/labour-corbyn-lansman-momentum-campaign-strategy"><span class="s1">British left</span></a> than it does about the significance of his pioneering life. Not mentioned in Ralph Miliband’s <i>Parliamentary Socialism</i>, even radical and critical histories leave him absent. A communist and anti-colonial militant being the first Labour MP of colour is hard to integrate into traditional narratives of Labour Party history, often politically mobilised as an untainted struggle on the side of progress. The bitterness, recrimination, and repression that Saklatvala faced from the party makes hagiography a harder proposition than silence.</p>
<p class="p1">Yet Saklatvala’s awkwardness in Labour Party history emanates less from his dual commitments to the Labour and Communist Parties than the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-theresa-may-snap-election"><span class="s1">British left’s</span></a> firm and often unspoken division between “national” and “foreign” issues. The latter has tended to be sacrificed for efficacy in the former. But Saklatvala’s commitment to the internationalist potential of the British labour movement shows that the choice is one Labour MPs need not and should not make. Issues deemed to be “national” or “foreign” are, Saklatvala would argue, mutually constitutive. A ruling class that can make war around the world is better able to make war on working-class living standards at home. The logic which allows imperial and neocolonial powers to divide the world between those who decide and those who acquiesce is the same used by bosses to justify workers’ powerlessness in the metropole.</p>
<p class="p1">As imperialism and settler colonialism continue to tarnish our world today, Saklatvala’s version of internationalism is something some in the Labour Party would still rather forget. As new generations of socialists question their country’s past and assert a different future, speaking these silences and confronting these pasts is more useful than the search for easy heroes.</p>
<p class="p1">As Nicolas Klein of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America remarked in a speech in 1918: “In this story you have the history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” Stuck at the first stage, Saklatvala has no statues standing in the heart of London; his portrait doesn’t appear on banknotes nor do films eulogise his name. The former imperialists he committed his life to fighting stand in his place. If “Comrade Sak” — as his friends and admirers called him — were alive today he may be unsurprised at the continuing ability of the question of empire to shape Britain’s political imaginaries.</p>
<p class="p1">Exorcising the shadow of the empire where the sun never set and the blood never dried — to quote the radical Chartist Ernest Jones — is not an expendable accessory to be thrown at the first hurdle for more pressing “national” issues. The need to confront the past implies reimagining the kind of role Britain should play in the world today. The struggle for a socialist Britain — in Saklatvala’s time as today — depends on the success or failure to embody an internationalist politics in deeds as well as words.</p>
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Matt Myershttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-fight-to-save-julian-assange/The Fight to Save Julian Assange2024-03-27T13:33:13Z2024-03-27T13:30:36Z<p>If kicking the can down the road was an Olympic sport, the judges in the Assange case would be gold medalists. The High Court this week had one job: to decide whether Julian Assange should be granted a full appeal hearing or whether he should be immediately extradited to the US to face trial. Given […]</p>
<h3>Now the High Court has recognised Julian Assange may be executed by America for exposing war crimes, the fight to save his life and defend press freedom could not be more urgent.</h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">If kicking the can down the road was an Olympic sport, the judges in the Assange case would be gold medalists. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The High Court this week had one job: to decide whether Julian Assange should be granted a full appeal hearing or whether he should be immediately extradited to the US to face trial. Given two clear options they decided to do neither. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Instead, with Assange approaching five years in Belmarsh high security prison, they decided to wait for even longer before making a final decision.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This latest delay is because the Court has asked the US government to supply ‘assurances’ that if Assange is put on trial in the US, he will be treated as if he were a US citizen, not a foreigner; that he will be guaranteed First Amendment freedom of speech protections; and that he will not face the death penalty. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">If the US fails to provide such assurances, then the judges will reconvene and grant a full appeal hearing. If its assurances satisfy the Court, then the extradition will proceed. All this will be argued through at yet another hearing on 20 May.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It is, of course, a relief that Assange was not bundled onto a plane and sent to a US Supermax prison this week. But much else about this judgement is wrong. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">The endless delays are now habitual and are their own kind of torture for Assange. And the process of asking the prosecuting authority to give their word that they will behave well, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is deeply flawed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The US government has already used a key witness who has <a href="https://heimildin.is/grein/13627/">admitted perjury</a>, spied on Assange and his lawyers, and planned to <a href="https://uk.news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-inside-the-ci-as-secret-war-plans-against-wiki-leaks-090057786.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEeqW7RJeLuJ5Dd94lBKYNlBF_zOAMXqUcdssARXf19lT-OILEdLjOGRJcJVkLRghAZxDdzHbJaP7omUleeYVG4pl0ieCKOGZNNbVV9YIbjtYw9dw2y-9a9uKf_A4F4Ryu4XQvuT6Ow4lxCujyHbv32uvYVj4g-QeoIonKGSZDhb&guccounter=2">kidnap or assassinate</a> him. These are not the acts of people who can be relied on to be honest in their intentions towards the person they have pursued for years, on whom everyone from Donald Trump, perhaps soon to be president again, to the head of the CIA has heaped abuse.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Moreover, Assange is to be tried under the US 1917 Espionage Act, the first journalist ever to be so. The whole US case is based on treating Assange as a foreign spy. This was the meaning of then-CIA director Mike Pompeo’s attack on WikiLeaks as a ‘hostile, non-state, intelligence agency’. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">But the assurances that the High Court is demanding amount to insisting that Assange will be tried like an American citizen and a journalist would be, with full First Amendment rights. In other words, the judges are asking the US to abandon the whole framework of the case against Assange.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Court must surely know that whatever assurances are given </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> and of course, the US would swear black was white if it resulted in delivering Assange to a US prison </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> they will not be acted on and should never be believed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">But perhaps the real significance of the further delay is political. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">This has always been an intensely political case, abandoned by Obama and restarted by Trump. It now faces considerable opposition from the Australian government and from lawmakers across the globe. There are vocal and well-supported campaigns for Assange in the UK, across Europe, in Latin America, and increasingly in the US. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">There must now be very real concerns in both the Biden camp and among Trump campaigners about whether they want the most significant trial concerning freedom of the press to come to a head during the final stages of the US presidential race. This might explain what lies behind the rumours that the US is considering a plea bargain deal that will allow Assange to return to Australia if he admits guilt.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Many in the Washington bubble must be hoping the UK courts can make the problem go away. However, the worst way of doing so would be a prolonged full hearing on appeal, which is one possible outcome if the US’s assurances are deemed too weak.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This is not because Assange does not deserve a full appeal hearing. He does. So far, his case has only had a full hearing in the original magistrates court, the lowest court in the UK system, which normally hears appeals against parking fines. A full hearing in a higher court would be the least this case deserves.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">But even if US pledges are dismissed, a full hearing will not happen. This week, the judges only allowed an appeal on three of the twelve points of appeal that Assange’s lawyers put before them. Again, they rejected public interest and political defences for Assange’s actions. That’s why the US is being asked to clarify its undertakings on only three issues. So any appeal will also be very limited.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This in itself is self-contradictory. The High Court is simultaneously refusing to recognise objections to extradition based on Julian Assange’s political opinions while demanding that the US assure him of First Amendment rights, which are precisely the rights which protect freedom of political expression.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">All this means that Assange’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the courts. It is public campaigning and political pressure that gained this reprieve. Only an intensification of that pressure can convince the political establishment, both here and in the US, that it will be more politically painful to continue the persecution of Julian Assange than to abandon a case that should never have been brought.</span></p>
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John Reeshttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/corporate-power-is-killing-the-planet/Corporate Power Is Killing the Planet2024-03-25T11:03:41Z2024-03-25T10:58:15Z<p>However much the British government plays fast and loose with our future by treating climate change as a political football, there is a reality it can’t deny: climate action is necessary. That’s why, against all its better instincts, it announced last month that Britain would exit the most climate-wrecking treaty of all — the Energy […]</p>
<h3>In the 1950s, a system of corporate courts was created to allow Western businesses to sue the Global South for threatening their profits — and now fossil fuel giants are using it to stop any country from fighting the climate crisis.</h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">However much the British government plays fast and loose with our future by treating climate change as a political football, there is a reality it can’t deny: climate action is necessary. That’s why, against all its better instincts, it announced last month that Britain would exit the most climate-wrecking treaty of all — the Energy Charter Treaty.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Energy Charter Treaty is the product of a previous era. It was invented in the 1990s to protect Western energy interests in the countries of the former Soviet Union. At its heart is a mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS — a kind of corporate court system which allows transnational businesses and investors to sue governments for regulatory changes which damage their bottom line.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Countries have been inserting these ISDS clauses into trade and investment deals for decades now. They were dreamt up by oil barons and financiers back in the 1950s. As countries across the world broke free of imperial ties, these corporate executives worried about how their economic interests could be protected from national liberation governments which were coming to power in the Global South.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The nationalisation of Iran’s oil was a turning point. While the US and Britain orchestrated a coup to remove Iran’s government, there was a recognition this wasn’t a sustainable way of running the world. Far better to create a series of legal obligations. Through ISDS, if a government expropriated a foreign corporation’s assets, they could bypass the local legal system and go straight to international arbitration where, with no transparency, no proper judge to weigh different interests, no right to appeal, and the weight of international law to bolster any successful claim, corporations effectively gained their own one-sided legal system.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Fast forward to the 1990s. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a wealth of new opportunities for Western business, but corporations didn’t want to take the risk of new governments coming to power that might feel differently about their operations. The Energy Charter Treaty was designed to eliminate that risk, and lock in business-friendly regulations into the far future.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">What the Western countries didn’t realise was that they too would one day become targets for these corporate courts.</span></p>
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<h2>West-on-West</h2>
<p>As the 2000s dawned, corporations realised that the biggest threat they faced wasn’t from a government taking over their oil rigs. It was climate action which was seen as a growing necessity across Europe.</p>
<p>City lawyers worked overtime to expand the types of cases they could take under the Energy Charter Treaty, and countries saw themselves sued repeatedly for bringing forward action to improve environmental quality and phase out the exploration of fossil fuels. German coal companies sued the Netherlands over their coal phase-out. Slovenia for banning fracking. Denmark for its windfall tax on excessive oil profits.</p>
<p>What’s more, corporations didn’t simply sue for the money they’d already invested in projects. They’d often been offered compensation to recompense them for these costs anyway. Instead, they would sue for many times more, basing their claims on lost future profits.</p>
<p>British company Rockhopper sued Italy when protestors forced the government to ban oil drilling off the country’s Adriatic coast — the area Rockhopper had hoped to explore. The compensation claimed by Rockhopper totalled about $350 million, seven times what the corporation had invested in exploration. The company then announced it was investing in a new project off the Falkland Islands. The lesson here was that the Energy Charter Treaty doesn’t simply shift the cost of climate action from the private to the public sector — it actively keeps the fossil fuel economy going.</p>
<p>Many of these cases look like attempts to punish governments for making decisions in response to protests and campaigns against unpopular mining projects. Elsewhere in the world, ISDS cases have been brought specifically on the basis that governments have not done enough to suppress protest movements in the interests of foreign capital. Little wonder then that these protest movements turned their attention to the problem of the Energy Charter Treaty as an impediment to popular sovereignty.</p>
<p>Politicians of all persuasions have seemed genuinely surprised about the existence of the ECT, and horrified at the way in which it impinges upon their sovereignty so fundamentally. From the left-wing government in Spain to the right-wing government in Poland, protests convinced politicians to move towards exit from the energy pact.</p>
<p>By 2023, nine countries including Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands all announced they were off. For many of these countries, the Energy Charter Treaty was now a clear and present danger to the imperative of gearing their economy to a point where it could deal with the climate transition, adding legal obstacles and extortionate costs to that already difficult process.</p>
<p>They still faced a problem though. The ECT has a deeply undemocratic 20-year sunset clause, which means that even if a country left today, cases could still be brought for the next two decades. Furious diplomatic activity began in the EU to find ways of abrogating this clause, with governments hitting on the solution that if they all left together, in a coordinated manner, they could sign a deal which at least prevents cases being brought against each other, limiting their exposure.</p>
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<h2>The British Particularity</h2>
<p>Outside the EU, Britain saw things differently. Still wedded to an outdated view that ‘the market knows best’, and that we can overcome our severe economic difficulties by embarking on endless trade talks — most of which have come to naught — the British government dragged its feet. Perhaps it even hoped to attract more fossil fuel investment by being the last bastion of investor protection in Europe.</p>
<p>Rishi Sunak is clearly trying to whip up a culture war with his dangerous drive to ‘max out’ North Sea fossil fuel reserves. However much he rails against the incoming tide, though, he can’t stop it. Reality is catching up.</p>
<p>Since Biden became US president, there is a recognition that climate change necessitates a change in attitude towards the economy. A race is now on between the big power blocs, using government money and power to build the industries of tomorrow.</p>
<p>Here, Britain is well behind the curve. While a part of the business community — most importantly fossil fuel corporations and part of the financial sector — back the ECT, another section realises that the British government’s laissez-faire approach is leaving them chronically uncompetitive.</p>
<p>As EU countries started leaving the ECT, the realisation that Britain would face proportionally higher obstacles to a green transition started to worry manufacturing unions, parts of the business community, and even a few Tory MPs. This started to create pressure within government and, over the last year, the line has changed from full-throated support to — finally, last month — an acceptance that the costs of remaining were just too high.</p>
<p>None of this undermines the role which campaigning has played in getting us to this point. At the broadest level, only significant campaigning by the climate movement over decades has forced the massive change in which climate action is seen now as a necessity. The people defeated the rule of ‘market knows best’ economics — though of course we have a long way to go to reach the economic change we need.</p>
<p>More specifically, only because of campaigning across Europe was the problem of the ECT raised to the point that politicians began thinking about withdrawal. And in most countries, it was campaigning which forced them to the exit. That applies to Britain too, where the divisions over ECT were forced open by campaigners over four years, with the climate movement — from Green Alliance to XR — joining in the critique of the system.</p>
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<h2>Next Steps</h2>
<p>Of course, last month’s announcement is only a first step, removing one structural impediment to the climate transition. It’s significant nonetheless. The UK’s withdrawal may well herald the end of the ECT as a whole. It’s now widely viewed as a dead man walking and will only be mourned by those profiting from the destruction of our planet. In turn, this means that one small but significant element of our neo-colonial, market-knows-best economy has been dismantled.</p>
<p>Those who have suffered most from the ISDS system live in the Global South. In numerous trade deals, ISDS is being used to bully and extract from countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Honduras and Colombia are currently facing eye-watering claims for doing no more than trying to protect the interests of their citizens from rapacious capital.</p>
<p>A recent development is corporations using ISDS to secure access to the critical minerals they need for the green transition and getting them on the terms they demand. While these metals might indeed be necessary for green industry, we cannot build a future economy on the poverty and exploitation of those who’ve done least to cause climate change in the first place. It should be for those countries to decide how their own resources can be used to bolster their development.</p>
<p>The good news is that countries from Pakistan to South Africa to Bolivia are, like the UK, also pulling out of treaties which subject them to this treatment. Most recently, the left-wing government of Honduras gave notice it would withdraw from the World’s Bank’s own corporate court system known as ICSID. The victory over the ECT will help them point the hypocrisy in a global economy which increasingly allows the Global North to embark on economic planning — albeit still woefully insufficient — but demands the rule of the market for everyone else.</p>
<p>More than anything, it’s now clear that the debate on climate change has shifted decisively, to a point where there is at least space to argue for radical economic transformation. Last week’s victory is a definite step forward.</p>
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Nick Deardenhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-socialism-of-william-morris-2/The Socialism of William Morris2024-03-24T06:25:08Z2024-03-24T06:25:08Z<p>‘Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,’ declared William Morris in his 1894 essay ‘How I Became a Socialist’, ‘the leading passion in my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.’ As his characteristically bold assertion suggests, Morris cast a sceptical eye on his era’s triumphant claims to social and technological progress. […]</p>
<h3>William Morris is most famous for his iconic patterns, but a new collection of his writings shows the other passion of his life: a conviction that only the overthrow of capitalism could liberate humanity.</h3>
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<p>‘Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,’ declared William Morris in his 1894 essay ‘How I Became a Socialist’, ‘the leading passion in my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.’</p>
<p>As his characteristically bold assertion suggests, Morris cast a sceptical eye on his era’s triumphant claims to social and technological progress. Born in 1834 on the cusp of the Victorian age, Morris pursued his leading passions in a dazzling array of literary and artistic endeavours.</p>
<p>Before embracing socialism in the early 1880s, he was a painter and a respected poet, a prolific designer of household goods at his firm Morris and Co., and a campaigner for the protection of ancient buildings. Late in life he founded the Kelmscott Press, which showcased his mastery of typography and enabled him to publish a series of prose romances which proved influential on the subsequent development of fantasy literature.</p>
<p>While socialism remains an enduring aspect of Morris’s legacy, his reputation today is based mainly on his artistic accomplishments, in particular his enchanting wallpaper and textile designs, and his role as a founding figure of the Arts and Crafts movement, a tendency in the decorative arts that rejected mass production and the industrial organisation of labour in favour of the traditional handicraft techniques of the past.</p>
<p>Given Morris’s avowed hatred of modern civilisation and his artistic immersion in the subjects and materials of bygone ages, it might be tempting to wave away his socialism as little more than a nostalgic denunciation of industrial progress in the name of an idealised depiction of the medieval craftsman. In reality, however, Morris’s socialism was rigorous, revolutionary, and fully engaged with the issues of his day.</p>
<p>His politics were at least as informed by Marx as they were by John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, the two Victorian critics from whom he learned to doubt his epoch’s reigning ideology of progress. Far from anachronistic, Morris’s vision of socialism as a globe-spanning cooperative society based on freely undertaken, creative, ecologically sustainable work remains an urgent alternative to the present system of overwork, environmental destruction, and nationalist rivalry that currently threatens our health, sanity, and indeed our very existence.</p>
<p>Fortunately, Morris’s socialist ideas have never been more accessible, thanks in part to the publication of a new volume of his political writings. Borrowing its title from the aforementioned essay, <em>How I Became a Socialist</em> contains seventeen lectures, essays, and articles by Morris arranged chronologically from the early 1880s to 1896, the year of his death.</p>
<p>In addition to offering readers a broad selection of Morris’s socialist activities, the volume, which is part of Verso’s ‘Revolutions’ series, includes detailed notes by Owen Holland and substantial introductions by Holland and Owen Hatherley that elucidate Morris’s context and legacy.</p>
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<h2>Art and Society</h2>
<p>For the reader new to Morris’s political writings—or the reader whose interest in Morris is rooted primarily in his art and design—the best place to begin is the title essay, which Morris contributed to the newspaper <em>Justice</em> in 1894. Here, Morris tries ‘to briefly, honestly, and truly’ give an account of his socialist convictions, explaining how his passion for beauty led him to conclude that socialism is a necessary condition for the flourishing of art.</p>
<p>Aside from Ruskin and Carlyle, it is Marx who is singled out as the key influence. Morris’s understanding of art as an activity intimately interwoven with the conditions of everyday life is indeed consonant with Marx’s materialist conception of culture and his scathing criticisms of wage labour as an institution that alienates workers from their creative capacities and robs them of their personality.</p>
<p>‘Surely any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork,’ proclaims Morris, ‘does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of thriving and unanxious life.’</p>
<p>This theme is further developed in the collection’s first essay, ‘Art Under Plutocracy’, which Morris delivered as a lecture at Oxford in 1883. Here Morris distinguishes between the decorative and the intellectual arts, and laments that the former had lost their vigour, leaving only the latter as a reified vestige of a once thriving popular artistic culture. Morris pleads for a more expansive definition of art in which its meaning is extended</p>
<blockquote><p>beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend to the aspect of the externals of our life.</p></blockquote>
<p>‘Art,’ according to the view Morris inherited from Ruskin, ‘is man’s expression of his joy in labour.’ It follows from this definition that an unartistic society is one in which labour has been deprived of its joyful and artistic qualities: ‘Now the chief accusation I have to bring against the modern state of society is that it is founded on the art-lacking or unhappy labour of the greater part of men.’</p>
<p>In Morris’s view, the problem with modern society is not just a lack of beauty and aesthetic accomplishment but a fundamental disregard for the working conditions of the vast majority: ‘All that external degradation of the face of the country of which I have spoken is hateful to me not only because it is a cause of unhappiness to some few of us who still love art, but also and chiefly because it is a token of the unhappy life forced on the great mass of the population by the system of competitive commerce.’</p>
<p>One might conclude from all his vituperation against modern society’s ugliness that Morris traces the decline of art to the advent of mass production by machinery. To borrow the language of Walter Benjamin—to whom Hatherley alludes in his introductory essay—perhaps Morris laments that the work of art’s aura withers in the age of mechanical reproduction.</p>
<p>But Morris introduces this possibility only to reject it: ‘What has caused the sickness? Machine-labour will you say? Well, I have seen a quoted passage from one of the ancient Sicilian poets rejoicing in the fashioning of a water-mill, and exulting in labour being set free from the toil of the hand-quern in consequence; and that surely would be a type of man’s natural hope when foreseeing the invention of labour-saving machinery.’ (As Holland observes in his meticulous and informative endnotes, Morris likely learned of this passage from Marx.)</p>
<p>Similar to Benjamin’s embrace of mechanical reproduction as potentially democratising, Morris embraces machinery’s ability to create more leisure time for people to cultivate themselves and their talents. But just as Benjamin warns that in the absence of political action, mechanical reproduction will end up serving fascism, so too does Morris stress that the use of machinery is ultimately a political-economic question.</p>
<p>As he writes in another one of the volume’s most rewarding essays, “How We Live and How We Might Live” (first delivered as a lecture in 1884 at the Hammersmith branch of the Social Democratic Federation),</p>
<blockquote><p>At present you must note that all the amazing machinery which we have invented has served only to increase the amount of profit-bearing wares; in other words, to increase the amount of profit pouched by individuals for their own advantage, part of which profit they use as capital for the production of more profit, with ever the same waste attached to it; and part as private riches or means for luxurious living, which again is sheer waste…. So I say that, in spite of our inventions, no worker works under the present system an hour the less on account of those labour-saving machines, so called. But under a happier state of things they would be used simply for saving labour, with the result of a vast amount of leisure gained for the community to be added to that gained by the avoidance of the waste of useless luxury.</p></blockquote>
<p>As he sums up the issue elsewhere, ‘It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.’</p>
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<h2>‘How We Might Live’</h2>
<p>Reading Morris’ texts today, one is immediately struck by their resolute internationalism. Morris devoted his energies to the Socialist League, and along with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter, Morris helped to steer the organisation toward internationalism, a principle articulated in its manifesto, which appeared in the first issue of the <em>Commonweal</em>, the League’s print organ, in 1885:</p>
<blockquote><p>For us neither geographical boundaries, political history, race, nor creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mutual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of masters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different lands.</p></blockquote>
<p>Morris’s internationalism abounds in such pieces as ‘How we Live and How we might Live’, in which he declares that ‘our present system of Society is based on a state of perpetual war’:</p>
<blockquote><p>As nations under the present system are driven to compete with one another for the markets of the world, and as firms or the captains of industry have to scramble for their share of the profits of the markets, so also have the workers to compete with each other — for livelihood; and it is this constant competition or war amongst them which enables the profit-grinders to make their profits, and by means of wealth so acquired to take all the executive power of the country into their hands.</p></blockquote>
<p>Racial and nationalist rivalries only serve to hinder the unity of the working class, in Morris’s view, distracting from the principal antagonism between capital and labour. This point is especially clear in his writings on the Irish and Italian movements for national independence, ‘Ireland and Italy: A Warning’.</p>
<p>‘For my part,’ writes Morris, ‘I do not believe in the race-hatred of the Irish against the English: they hate their English <em>masters</em>, as well they may; and their English masters are now trying hard to stimulate the race-hatred among their English brethren, the workers, by all this loud talk of the integrity of Empire and so forth.’ He concludes with the general advice: ‘Your revolutionary struggles will be abortive or lead to mere disappointment unless you accept as your watchword, WAGE-WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!’</p>
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<h2>A Victorian Environmentalist</h2>
<p>Morris was also a prescient observer of capitalism’s ecological destructiveness. Although the selections contained in this volume do not exhaust Morris’s writings on natural beauty (Holland mentions the additional lectures ‘Art and the Beauty of the Earth’ and ‘Under an Elm Tree; or Thoughts in the Countryside’ in his introduction), the reader will nonetheless encounter Morris’s profound environmental consciousness in this volume.</p>
<p>Born into the dawning of the age of Fossil Capital, Morris was among a group of radical <a href="https://www.venti-journal.com/stephen-eisenman">Victorian authors and artists</a> who called attention to the environmental degradations of industrial capitalism. He was also one of the first to articulate the connection between overwork, the waste created by the drive for profit, and pollution, and was keenly aware of the environmental risks posed by unregulated industrial development. ‘It is profit,’ he writes in ‘How We Live and How We Might Live,’ that wraps ‘a whole district in a cloud of sulphureous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers.’</p>
<p>As a revolutionary socialist, Morris was wary of parliamentary politics. In ‘The Policy of Abstention’, he argues that socialists ought not to engage in parliamentary politics but should instead agitate among the masses and organize an alternative labour parliament.</p>
<p>In ‘Whigs, Democrats and Socialists’ he cautions that while it may be permissible for socialists to enter parliament for purposes of disrupting it, they must resist being seduced into the business of parliament and enacting palliative measures which only serve to perpetuate capitalist class rule by making it marginally more tolerable.</p>
<p>These essays may strike the contemporary reader as a historical curiosity. After the experience of fascism, it is clear that our diminished socialist movement will not beget the triumphant open struggle that Morris anticipated. While a less conciliatory ruling class may make the predatory nature of the system more palpable, there are no guarantees that the mass resentment thereby engendered will take the form of socialism.</p>
<p>Moreover, if the last several years are any indication, socialists have more influence when we make electoral politics a terrain of struggle than when we retreat into small groups that uncompromisingly advocate extra-parliamentary revolution as the one true path toward socialism.</p>
<p>Even in his own day, Morris was not immune to what E.P. Thompson in <a href="https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=256">his biography of Morris</a> refers to as ‘purism’. Just what attitude socialists should adopt toward electoral politics was indeed a contentious issue within the Socialist League, and Morris often sided with its anti-parliamentary faction.</p>
<p>This refusal to countenance parliamentary means led Engels to remark, ‘You will not bring the numerous working class as a whole into the movement by sermons.’ That being so, Morris is surely right to insist that extra-electoral organisation of the working class is necessary to attain socialist goals, and that socialists must beware of the pressures exerted by electoral and parliamentary politics within the constraints of a system dominated by powerful capitalist interests.</p>
<p>But Morris was, in retrospect, wildly optimistic about the potential of revolution to emerge from laying bare the depredations of capitalism. As he wrote in ‘Signs of Change’, an essay that is not included in this volume: ‘A few years of wearisome struggle against apathy and ignorance; a year or two of growing hope — and then who knows? Perhaps a few months, or perhaps a few days of the open struggle against brute force, with the mask off its face, and the sword in its hand, and then we are over the bar.’</p>
<p>In passages like these, Morris envisages a dramatic rupture with capitalism that today appears somewhat far-fetched. In light of the hegemony of global capitalism in the twenty-first century and the discrediting of the twentieth century’s revolutionary alternatives, such a sudden rupture seems less plausible to us than it might have seemed to Morris.</p>
<p>A transition to socialism seems likely to take a different form today — such as Erik Olin Wright’s suggestion of <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-anticapitalism-democracy/">eroding capitalism</a> by undermining the coercive power of the capitalist labour market and erecting ‘real utopias’ based on alternative economic institutions.</p>
<p>Whatever criticisms one might make of his strategy for advancing socialism, Morris’s critique of capitalism endures because of his intense focus on alienated work, which remains as potent a source of mental, physical, and ecological destructiveness today as it was in Morris’s times. (<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1959/william-morris.htm">According</a> to E.P. Thompson, Morris is indeed ‘our greatest diagnostician of alienation.’)</p>
<p>It therefore seems logical to pursue a radical transformation of work—reducing compulsory labour as much as possible while democratising what remains—as a way of carrying his legacy forward.</p>
<p>What must be remembered, however, is that eroding the power of the capitalist class to dictate the terms on which we labour will require the kind of collective action and heroic fellowship consistently advocated by Morris, because the forces of conservatism, reaction, and property will not give an inch without a fight.</p>
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Benjamin Schachthttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/william-morris-i-do-not-want-art-for-a-few/William Morris: ‘I Do Not Want Art for a Few’2024-03-24T05:50:15Z2024-03-24T05:50:15Z<p>People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and flourish, you must make it the fashion; a phrase which I confess annoys me: for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, […]</p>
<h3>On William Morris' birthday, we republish his lecture on the decorative arts — in which he laid out his vision of art created by and for the people, and the post-capitalist world that would make it possible.</h3>
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<p>People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and flourish, you must make it the fashion; a phrase which I confess annoys me: for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that they cared very much for what they do not care in the least, so that it may happen according to the proverb: <em>Bell-wether took the leap and we all went over.</em></p>
<p>Well, such advisers are right if they are content with the thing lasting but a little while; say till you can make a little money — if you don’t get pinched by the door shutting too quickly: otherwise they are wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many strings to their bow and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that fails, for it to be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not their fault, they cannot help it, but they have no chance of spending time enough over the arts to know anything practical of them, and they must of necessity be in the hands of those who spend their time in pushing fashion this way and that for their own advantage.</p>
<p>Sirs, there is no help to be got out of these latter, or those who let themselves be led by them: the only real help for the decorative arts must come from those who work in them; nor must they be led, they must lead.</p>
<p>You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you must be all artists and good artists before the public at large can take real interest in such things; and when you have become so, I promise you that you shall lead the fashion; fashion shall follow your hands obediently enough.</p>
<p>I know what stupendous difficulties social and economical there are in the way of this; yet I think that they seem to be greater than they are: and of one thing I am sure, that no real living decorative art is possible if this is impossible…</p>
<p>Is money to be gathered? cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch, blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein.</p>
<p>And Science—we have loved her well, and followed her diligently, what will she do? I fear she is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she is too busy, and will for the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have thought easy for her, say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth her attention as the production of the heaviest of heavy black silks, or the biggest of useless guns.</p>
<p>Anyhow, however it be done, unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about art? I know it will cost much both of time and money to better these things even a little; but I do not see how these can be better spent than in making life cheerful and honourable for others and for ourselves; and the gain of good life to the country at large that would result from men seriously setting about the bettering of the decency of our big towns would be priceless, even if nothing specially good befell the arts in consequence: I do not know that it would; but I should begin to think matters hopeful if men turned their attention to such things, and I repeat, that unless they do so, we can scarcely even begin with any hope our endeavours for the bettering of the Arts.</p>
<p>Until something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest for the mind in the aspect of their own and their neighbours’ houses, until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful places, whose education enables them, in the contemplation of the past glories of the world, to shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men move in.</p>
<p>Sirs, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness, and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this, and say that on such terms I do not wish her to live. I protest that it would be a shame to an honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled up to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to sit and eat dainty food amongst starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort.</p>
<p>I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.</p>
<p>No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few exceptional men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance for which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they will not struggle with, — rather than this, I would that the world should indeed sweep away all art for a while, as I said before I thought it possible she might do: rather than the wheat should rot in the miser’s granary, I would that the earth had it, that it might yet have a chance to quicken in the dark.</p>
<p>I have a sort of faith that a clearing away of all art will not happen, that men will get wiser, as well as more learned; that many of the intricacies of life, on which we now pride ourselves more than enough, partly because they are new, partly because they have come with the gain of better things, will be cast aside as having played their part, and being useful no longer. I hope that we shall have leisure from war, — war commercial, as well as war of the bullet and the bayonet; leisure from the knowledge that darkens counsel; leisure above all from the greed of money, and the craving for that overwhelming distinction that money now brings: I believe that, as we have even now partly achieved liberty, so we shall achieve equality, and best of all, fraternity, and so have leisure from poverty and all its griping, sordid cares.</p>
<p>Then, having leisure from all these things, amidst renewed simplicity of life we shall have leisure to think about our work, that faithful daily companion, which no man any longer will venture to call the curse of labour: for surely then we shall be happy in it, each in his place, no man grudging at another; no one bidden to be any man’s servant, everyone scorning to be any man’s master: men will then assuredly be happy in their work, and that happiness will assuredly bring forth decorative, noble, popular art.</p>
<p>That art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountain-sides: it will be a pleasure and a rest, and not a weight upon the spirits to come from the open country into a town; every man’s house will be fair and decent, soothing to his mind and helpful to his work: all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful: yet all will be simple and inspiriting, not childish or enervating; for as nothing of beauty and splendour that man’s mind and hand may compass shall be wanted from our public buildings, so in no private dwelling will there be any signs of waste, pomp, or insolence, and every man will have his share of the best.</p>
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William Morrishttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/when-george-michael-came-for-blair/When George Michael Came for Blair2024-03-20T11:43:08Z2024-03-20T11:43:08Z<p>Summer, 2002. Flags and bunting billow as the UK marks Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. The Three Lions put in a better than expected performance at the World Cup, but in true English fashion, there is grumbling because the glory of almost four decades previous could not be replicated. Despite the cultural distractions, real political […]</p>
<h3>As Western governments drummed up consent for war against Iraq, George Michael’s 'Shoot the Dog' utterly withered Tony Blair — and pushed anti-war politics into the mainstream.</h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Summer, 2002. Flags and bunting billow as the UK marks Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. The Three Lions put in a better than expected performance at the World Cup, but in true English fashion, there is grumbling because the glory of almost four decades previous could not be replicated.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Despite the cultural distractions, real political discomfort is brewing. US President George Bush is pushing to take military action in Iraq with the stated aim of toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whether he gets international backing or not. Brits wait with bated breath as UK Prime Minister Tony Blair mulls joining him.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">At the same time, George Michael, one of the most successful musicians of the eighties and nineties, has been launching a comeback after a hiatus. After releasing the single ‘Freeek!’ in March, he returns in July with a </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABhZQ_VRbsQ"><span style="font-weight: 400">music video</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> for a new song: ‘Shoot the Dog’.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The song has a funky, feel-good beat, at odds with the lyrics he sings in husky tone:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">So, Cherie my dear</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Could you leave the way clear for sex tonight?</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Tell him</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">‘Tony, Tony, Tony</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">I know that you’re horny</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">But there’s somethin’ bout that Bush ain’t right’</span></i></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Shoot the Dog pushed discussions over the war out from the political realm </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> or the ‘chattering classes’, as Michael called them </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> and into the public realm, eight months before the disastrous invasion of Iraq would be launched. Some Brits were left reeling by the video’s sexually provocative content, calling it distasteful and unnecessary; others applauded him for using music to </span><span style="font-weight: 400">give voice (and beat) to growing public discomfort over Blair’s blind allegiance to Bush on the so-called War on Terror. It would also jolt contemporary pop music’s political conscience at a time when protest in that genre was rare, and set a precedent for other artists to speak up before, during, and after the invasion.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The video was released on 1 July, to outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. The tabloids, his music industry peers and the public appeared to take delight in skewering Michael for the video. Why should a popstar throw in his two cents on a matter so serious and complicated? And how dare he disrespect the leaders of the free world with such sexually-charged barbs!</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Opponents said the song and video were simply a publicity stunt, and a cheap way to boost record sales. Some said the tropes he lent on for the video, including the depiction of Blair as a lapdog, were tired and uninspired. While there was nothing wrong with a pop star expressing themselves politically, the song was not worth listening to because it was musically underwhelming, some music critics said. Though the video made headlines and sparked public debate, the song received little radio airplay.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">In the UK, the</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400"> Daily Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> asked if he had ‘lost the plot’; </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">The Sun </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">asked if he had ‘killed his career’. In the US, some of the tabloid reception to ‘Shoot the Dog’ was downright homophobic. A </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2002/07/02/pop-pervs-911-slur-george-michael-mocks-bush/"><span style="font-weight: 400">story</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> from the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">New York Post</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> published a day after the video’s official European release date accused the singer of ridiculing the US for its reaction to the 11 September, 2001 attacks. Its headline read:</span></p>
<p><strong>‘<b><i>POP PERV’S 9/11 SLUR – GEORGE MICHAEL MOCKS BUSH’</i></b></strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Michael quickly released a </span><a href="https://gmforever.com/statement-of-george-michael-on-shoot-the-dog-2002/"><span style="font-weight: 400">statement</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> in defence of the video, full of the self-deprecation he often employed.</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘I am first and foremost a singer/songwriter and lucky sod, and I’m fully aware that people don’t really like their pop music and politics mixed these days … ‘Shoot The Dog’ is intended as a piece of political satire … I hope that it will make people laugh and dance, and then think a little, that’s all.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">In interviews with the US media, he sought to reassure the American public that he was not an Al-Qaeda sympathiser, that 9/11 was actually very bad, and that his long-term partner was American, so how could he possibly hate America? Not all of the public were reassured however, with some in the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">CNN</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> studios </span><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2097283.stm"><span style="font-weight: 400">reportedly booing him</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> as he fielded phone-in questions from viewers about the video.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Though he tried to extinguish the outrage felt in the US over the song and video, he stood by the decision to release it. Homophobia-fuelled tabloid reactions were not going to force him to relent; he had weathered a media storm in 1998 after the Los Angeles controversy, and he would weather it again.</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘I don’t think I could be this outspoken if I was worried about my privacy being invaded in the way it was years ago… there’s nothing left of it now, so what have I got to lose, really?’</span></p></blockquote>
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<h2>Popstars Protest</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">As summer faded, public alarm in Britain over a potential invasion grew. In September 2002, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">a British government </span><a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/813/81306.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400">dossier</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> would claim that there was evidence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction — a claim that flew in the face of findings by UN weapons inspectors, and one that in later years would be definitively rubbished.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">That month, Brits began taking to the streets in their masses to urge Blair to reconsider. Musicians other than Michael were making their opposition to the war known, and invited the public to join them. Blur’s Damon Albarn and Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3-D’ Del Naja backed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament anti-war push, and the two later designed and financed anti-war adverts that appeared in the NME. Not all musicians held the view that they had a duty to speak up on warmongery though. Oasis’ Noel Gallagher </span><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2115582.stm"><span style="font-weight: 400">said</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> war warnings from Michael and other musicians were ‘laughable.’</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> ‘</span><span style="font-weight: 400">I play guitar in a band and we’re really good. Arsed about anything else,’ he was quoted as saying at the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Public approval for the war would continue to plummet even further; by February 2003, </span><a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/iraq-last-pre-war-polls"><span style="font-weight: 400">more than two-thirds</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> of the public were opposed to the invasion. On 15 February, more than a million people </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku3q6jq2DcU"><span style="font-weight: 400">took to the streets of London</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> in a bid to prevent the war </span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> the largest demonstration the UK had ever seen. There was also more musical protest from Michael: he re-recorded Don McLean’s Vietnam War protest song ‘The Grave’, performing the song on </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnOBfan0IXg"><span style="font-weight: 400">‘Top of the Pops’</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> and the ‘</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYUCgrVUoGc"><span style="font-weight: 400">Graham Norton Show</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">’. He also duetted with the indomitable Ms Dynamite at the </span><a href="https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1f59v"><span style="font-weight: 400">2003 BRIT Awards</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> on a version of his hit song ‘Faith’, the lyrics reworked:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">‘We’ve been here before</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Talk of violence and talk of war</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">I don’t want to see the children die no more</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">So I gotta make a stand’</span></i></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Any musician taking an anti-war stance at this point was pretty much preaching to the choir. Even so, in the days before the war, a usually media-averse Michael stepped up his television presence. In a slew of TV appearances, Michael drew links between the inflammatory role that the media, and Murdoch-owned publications in particular, had played in the aftermath of the Los Angeles incident, and how those same outlets were beating the drum for war the loudest. He also tied the push for war in Iraq to events in Palestine, where Israel responded to the Second Intifada with </span><a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20150828-video-jenin-revisited-israel-palestinian-territories-operation-defensive-shield"><span style="font-weight: 400">brutal bombardment</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘I’ve no sympathy with Saddam Hussein… He should be gone, we need him gone in order to stabilise the region. But we cannot do this when the entire fundamentalist, terrorist network around the world is waiting for this to legitimise what they want to do,’ he </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKH4mbaxLVs"><span style="font-weight: 400">told</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">BBC</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">’s ‘HARDtalk’ in February 2003. ‘Why have we left him alone for twelve years, why did we leave him there ten years ago, and now at the point that [Ariel] Sharon is bombing the West Bank, we’re going to decide to take on Saddam?’</span></p>
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<h2>Flawed but Earnest</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">While Michael’s opposition to the war was determined, the thinking behind it seemed a little shaky. He never claimed to be an expert, and he said in interviews that much of his awareness on international politics had come about after his mother’s death in 1997 sent him into a debilitating bout of depression that bound him to his home. It was late-night television shows like the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">BBC</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">’s ‘Newsnight’ and ‘Question Time’ that raised the alarm for him, and those influences were clear.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">He seemed to pit Western society against ‘fundamentalist’ Islamic thinking in a way that feels rooted in Clash of Civilisations-type thinking, and he applauded ‘moderate Muslims’ speaking out against attacks conducted by extremist groups. He also appeared to avoid airing the opinion held by many in the public that the US and its allies were plotting for the war in order to exploit Iraq’s natural resources, namely oil.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">His hope that Blair would change his tune was unjustifiably boundless, given the British Prime Minister’s unrelenting push for war. Given 15 seconds at the end of ‘Richard and Judy’ chat show to summarise what he thought Bush and Blair’s thinking was just days before the invasion, he </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=759777597867650"><span style="font-weight: 400">said</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">: ‘I believe Mr Blair’s intentions are honourable but misguided and foolish, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">and Mr Bush’s are dishonourable and foolish’. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">As the timebomb for war continued to tick, he kept speaking with the hope that the prime minister would hear reason: </span><span style="font-weight: 400">‘If I was writing him off, I wouldn’t be here. If I thought that man was not listening to anybody, I wouldn’t be here,’ he told HARDtalk.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">After the invasion was launched in March 2003, yet more musicians would speak up. British musical icons including David Bowie and Paul McCartney contributed to a compilation album by War Child to raise money for the victims; both musicians would air criticism about the coalition’s approach to and handling of the war. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">A year after the invasion began, Bush and Blair were patting themselves on the back as they prepared to hand power over to an Iraqi interim government. While promoting his fifth and final album, ‘Patience’, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Michael</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> was </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAa8whKTARU"><span style="font-weight: 400">asked</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> by </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">MTV</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> about why he took the stance he took, and whether hope could still be had.</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘It’s easy to be despondent about what’s going on, but you have to be hopeful… I think people are more politically aware at this moment in time than in any moment in time that I can remember… if nothing else, what’s gone on has been positive in that way.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today, as Israel continues to unleash genocide in Gaza, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">the British public are making their horror at their government’s complicity in the Israeli onslaught clear, attending huge protests whose size has brought back memories of those held prior to the invasion of Iraq. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">No pop star of Michael’s stature is speaking up with the dogged determination he showed. Some are </span><span style="font-weight: 400">posting on social media, or sporadically speaking up at awards shows; others have stayed silent, or have even posted in support of Israel, all while Palestinian activists in the US and Europe are increasingly being silenced. Some vocalists say they have kept quiet because they do not know enough about Palestine to speak out on the issue; with his earnest opposition to the Iraq War, George Michael showed that that is not enough of a defence.</span></p>
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Shahla Omarhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/william-morris-why-we-celebrate-the-paris-commune-2/William Morris: Why We Celebrate the Paris Commune2024-03-18T12:57:19Z2024-03-18T12:57:19Z<p>The ‘moons and the days’ have brought us round again to the anniversary of the greatest tragedy of modern times, the Commune of Paris of 1871, and with it the recurring duty for all Socialists of celebrating it both enthusiastically and intelligently. By this time the blatant slanders with which the temporarily unsuccessful cause was […]</p>
<h3>Pioneering socialist William Morris on the Paris Commune and its legacy as a 'great tragedy which definitely and irrevocably elevated the cause of Socialism.'</h3>
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The overthrow of the statue of Napoleon I on top of the Colomne Vendome, during the civil war between the Third Republic and the Paris Commune. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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<p>The ‘moons and the days’ have brought us round again to the anniversary of the greatest tragedy of modern times, the Commune of Paris of 1871, and with it the recurring duty for all Socialists of celebrating it both enthusiastically and intelligently.</p>
<p>By this time the blatant slanders with which the temporarily unsuccessful cause was assailed when the event was yet fresh in men’s minds have sunk into the dull gulf of lies, hypocritical concealments, and false deductions, which is called bourgeois history, or have become a dim but deeply rooted superstition in the minds of those who have information enough to have heard of the Commune, and ignorance enough to accept the bourgeois legend of it as history.</p>
<p>Once more it is our duty to raise the whole story out of this poisonous gloom and bring it to the light of day, so that on the one hand those who are not yet touched by Socialism may learn that there was a principle which animated those who defended revolutionary Paris against the mingled dregs of the woeful period of the Second Empire, and that that principle is still alive to-day in the hearts of many thousands of workers throughout civilisation, and year by year and day by day is growing in strength and in the hold it has of the disinherited masses of our false society; and on the other hand that we socialists may soberly note what went on in this story, and may take both warning and encouragement from its events.</p>
<p>I have heard it said, and by good Socialists too, that it is a mistake to commemorate a defeat; but it seems to me that this means looking not at this event only, but at all history in too narrow a way. The Commune of Paris is but one link in the struggle which has gone on through all history of the oppressed against the oppressors; and without all the defeats of past times we should now have no hope of the final victory. Neither are we yet sufficiently removed in time from the events to judge how far it was even possible to avoid the open conflict at the time, or to appreciate the question as to what would have become of the revolutionary cause if Paris had tamely yielded itself up to the perfidy of Thiers and his allies.</p>
<p>One thing, on the other hand, we are sure of, that this great tragedy has definitely and irrevocably elevated the cause of Socialism to all those who are prepared to look on the cause seriously, and refuse to admit the possibility of ultimate defeat. For I say solemnly and deliberately that if it happens to those of us now living to take part in such another tragedy it will be rather well for them than ill for them. Truly it is harder to live for a cause than to die for it, and it injures a man’s dignity and self-respect to be always making noisy professions of devotion to a cause before the field is stricken, on which he is to fight in the body.</p>
<p>But with the chance of bodily sacrifice close ahead there come also times of trial which either raise a man to the due tragic pitch or cast him aside as a useless and empty vapourer. To use a transparent metaphor, on the march to the field of battle there are plenty of opportunities for the faint-hearted to fall out of the ranks, and many will do so whose courage and devotion were neither doubted by others nor by themselves while the day of actual battle was far distant. So such times of trial are good because they are times of trial; and we may well think that few indeed of those who fell sixteen years ago, who exposed themselves to death and wounds at all adventure were mere accidental braggarts caught in the trap. Of those whose names are well known this was far from being the case and who can doubt that the nameless multitude who died so heroically had sacrificed day by day other things than life, before it came to that?</p>
<p>Furthermore, it must surely be rather more than doubtful to all thoughtful men if the mere exercise of every-day and civil virtues, even when directed towards the social end will suffice to draw the world out of its present misery and confusion. Consider the enormous mass of people so degraded by their circumstances that they can scarcely understand any hope for their redemption that can be put before them in peaceful and constitutional times. Yet these are the very people for whom we are working; and are they to have no hand in the work, then? Is it to be once more according to the degrading Positivist motto, ‘everything for you, nothing by you?’</p>
<p>Meanwhile in these people, unless we Socialists are all wrong, there are seeds of manly and social feeling, capable of large development; and surely when the time comes that their hope will be made manifest, as it was in the time of the Commune, and will lie before them for their hands to take, they will then have part in the work indeed, and by the act of doing so will at once raise themselves out of the slough of degradation into which our false society has cast them and in which it keeps them. The revolution itself will raise those for whom the revolution must be made. Their newborn hope translated into action will develop their human and social qualities, and the struggle itself will fit them to receive the benefits of the new life which revolution will make possible for them.</p>
<p>It is for boldly seizing the opportunity offered for thus elevating the mass of the workers into heroism that we now celebrate the men of the Commune of Paris. True they failed in conquering immediate material freedom for the people, but they quickened and strengthened the ideas of freedom by their courageous action and made our hope of to-day possible; and if to-day any one doubts that they were fighting for the emancipation of labour, their enemies at the time had no doubt about the matter.</p>
<p>They saw in them no mere political opponents, but ‘enemies of society’, people who could not live in the same world with them, because the basis of their ideas of life was different — to wit, humanity, not property. This was why the fall of the Commune was celebrated by such hecatombs sacrificed to the bourgeois god, Mammon; by such a riot of blood and cruelty on the part of the conquerors as quite literally has no parallel in modern times. And it is by that same token that we honour them as the foundation-stone of the new world that is to be.</p>
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William Morrishttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/hands-across-the-sea/Hands Across the Sea2024-03-15T12:22:46Z2024-03-15T11:50:06Z<p>History is often understood through the stories of ‘great men’, reflecting capitalism’s encouragement of the individual and suspicion of the collective. Socialists, understandably, have traditionally sought to reject such narratives; a famous example is in the final address of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who, before his death in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, […]</p>
<h3>Fifty years ago, Scottish workers refused to fix engines from the fighter jets of Pinochet's regime. As Israel commits genocide with British-built weapons, unions and activists should rediscover the traditions of concrete solidarity.</h3>
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Credit: Debasers Filums
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">History is often understood through the stories of ‘great men’, reflecting capitalism’s encouragement of the individual and suspicion of the collective. Socialists, understandably, have traditionally sought to reject such narratives; a famous example is in the final address of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who, before his death in Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, assured listeners that “history is ours, and the people make history.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The post-industrial area of Nerston, East Kilbride echoes this sentiment half a century on. This town on the outskirts of Glasgow is not known for its monuments to famous generals or statesmen; instead, there is a humbler tribute to an alternative history that was, until recently, largely forgotten. In 1974, six months after Pinochet’s coup against Allende’s elected government, 3000 members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in the Rolls Royce plant in Nerston, led by Communist Party member Bob Fulton, ‘blacked’ a batch of Hawker Hunter jet engines that were to be returned to Chile after repair. Nowhere else were engineers qualified to repair those engines.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">At a union branch meeting, the workers had already voted to condemn the coup. ‘The people being tortured and murdered, they were just like us — trade unionists,’ explained Stuart Barrie in a 2018 interview with </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">The Guardian</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">. In the same interview, John Keenan outlined how crucial organisation was to AUEW members at Rolls Royce, who had a history of taking political action: “the only reason we could do what we did was because we were organised. We took strike action for the NHS, the Shrewsbury pickets, you name it.” When the boycott came, it lasted four years, and workers were able to significantly undermine the capacity of the Chilean Air Force. Their action, alongside actions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’s members’ refusal to allow a Chilean warship to dock in Oakland, became part of a global community of workers whose defiance of tyranny is accredited with the release of tens of thousands from Pinochet’s prison cells and torture chambers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today, we watch on as incomprehensible barbarism is unleashed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, much of our response is stifled by illusions of helplessness and despair. The Rolls Royce workers shattered that illusion in 1974 and showed us the best way to combat tyranny, whether in Chile or Palestine: through industrial action in our workplaces.</span></p>
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<h2>Imperialism and the Workplace</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">In Allende’s final broadcast to the nation, as Pinochet’s Hunter jets rained hell upon the Presidential Palace, he detailed the reality of the coup that had toppled Chilean socialism and outlined the role of imperialism in the assault against democracy: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition… hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.’ </span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Allende was right. It was the United States, fearful of Chile’s reformist programme of nationalisation and Allende’s firm friendship with Castro’s Cuba, that orchestrated the coup with the aid of Chile’s ruling elite and its military allies. The imperialist world system – led then, as it is today, by the USA – intrinsically links the source of extraction to the imperial metropole. It was the United States’ interest in exploiting Chilean natural resources that made Allende’s government a target, just as it was Britain’s manufacturing capacity — itself sustained by imperialist exploitation — that brought Chilean-owned jets to the workshops of East Kilbride.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">If these links are the source of imperial power, then the ability of workers to undermine them in their workplaces is also a major pressure point. The action taken by Fulton and his comrades illuminated the tangible impact workers in the imperial core could have on the lives of those in the Global South. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today, we can also contextualise our own workplaces in the imperialist system and pinpoint its weaknesses. This is critical to building a more effective, dynamic movement for Palestinian liberation in Britain. Israel — itself a heavily militarised outpost of US imperialism — is fundamentally tied to the Western economies that keep it afloat. By understanding those ties in our own workplaces, we can begin to organise workers in the same vein as Fulton and his comrades.</span></p>
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<h2>Workers Against Genocide</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today, Scotland’s industrial base is comprised in large part by weapons manufacturers. The work of groups like Palestine Action and Workers for a Free Palestine in shutting down these factories should be applauded, but we must also ask what comes next. The 1974 Rolls Royce boycott lasted four years – considerably longer than any direct action, and with the collective power to protect workers from the state repression we see now. Sustainability is a principle from 1974 that we must carry forward to inform our strategy today.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">At present, our tactics disrupt the running of weapons plants short-term, without the support or endorsement of the workers inside. To develop a movement of workers that is truly anti-imperialist, we must build in stages and engage proactively with workers in weapons factories, with the aim of organising sustainable, long-term boycotts </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">inside</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> these factories themselves. Building inside weapons manufacturing facilities like BAE and Thales in tandem with a wider drive to organise Scottish workplaces around cultural and economic boycotts of apartheid Israel has the potential not only to bolster our campaigning on Palestinian liberation, but also to strengthen our movement industrially and re-establish its foundations.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The British trade union movement is still traumatised by the shattering defeats of the Thatcher era. Timid ideas of service-model trade unionism have grown alongside a reluctance to branch into the political sphere beyond the parameters set by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Thatcher’s victory over organised labour was embellished with a wave of legislation that has hampered the ability of unions to politically intervene, with the threat of financial and legal reprisals often hanging over them. Lay-members must consider an organised offensive against this repression as a critical factor in workplace organising around Palestine and beyond. The broad public support for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine should provide trade unionists across the British economy with fertile ground upon which to nurture a politicised trade unionism that can raise British workers’ empathetic response towards Palestine into a political one that engages people in their daily lives. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Elsewhere in Scotland, workers are already showing the potential of their power. Unite Hospitality’s Glasgow branch have recently launched the ‘Serve Solidarity’ campaign, which is organising worker-led boycotts of apartheid produce in the city’s social and cultural spaces. The successful campaign by workers at The Stand Comedy Club has led to the boycott’s enforcement in all three venues. From Belgium to South Africa and India, transport workers’ unions have refused to touch arms shipments destined to Israel, while garment workers in Kerala will no longer make Israeli police uniforms.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The proximity of these industries to imperialism, and Israel in particular, will naturally vary. What is key is their contribution to a wider global movement taking sustained, material action to halt the ongoing genocide. Leonardo Cáceres, a radio broadcaster on the day of Pinochet’s coup, said in an interview for the 2018 documentary ‘Nae Pasaran’ that, although the Rolls Royce trade unionists might have seen their gesture as ‘something small’, it was in fact extremely valuable: ‘They proved to the dictators in Chile that despite the support of certain governments, their actions were condemned by the majority of human beings.’ </span></p>
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<h2>Rebuilding Internationalism</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">What Fulton and his comrades at Rolls Royce were able to demonstrate was not solely the collective power of workers in the international arena, but also that the workplace is a weakness of the imperialist world system. They proved to the world that acts of defiance can undermine a seemingly insurmountable enemy, while illuminating the material relationships that link workers and their interests everywhere. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">When the workers of Rolls Royce extended the hand of solidarity from East Kilbride to Santiago, it removed fascist planes from the sky. Our movement must now do the same for the people of Palestine and use our own hand of solidarity to shatter the reactionary, insular ideas that have seen our movement become weak and disorganised, and redirect it towards being a force that can challenge imperialism and change the world.</span></p>
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Nick Troyhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/its-time-to-revive-the-lucas-plan/It’s Time to Revive the Lucas Plan2024-03-14T22:38:48Z2024-03-14T13:59:06Z<p>In January 1976, workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation produced one of the most radical documents in Britain’s economic history. The Alternative Plan for Lucas Aerospace — known as the Lucas Plan — was a bold strategy to reorient the company away from the production of weapons towards the production of socially useful commodities. The […]</p>
<h3>In the 1970s, workers at Lucas Aerospace proposed saving the company by producing technologies that fight climate change instead of waging war — showing how workplace democracy can solve the crises of capitalism.</h3>
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Members of the Lucas Aerospace Combine Committee, photographed in 1977.
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<p>In January 1976, workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation produced one of the most radical documents in Britain’s economic history. The Alternative Plan for Lucas Aerospace — known as the Lucas Plan — was a bold strategy to reorient the company away from the production of weapons towards the production of socially useful commodities. The company was struggling to compete with emerging aerospace giants in the US, Japan and Europe, and Lucas found itself in trouble: management had spent the previous decade trying to ‘rationalise’ the sprawling enterprise, introducing successive restructuring plans, all of which included mass layoffs, but nothing was working.</p>
<p>Some hoped for a last-minute nationalisation, but the UK economy wasn’t exactly in rude health either and workers quickly realised that nationalisation was not on the table. The message was clear: Lucas’ fate would be decided by ‘the market’. Trade unionists from across the organisation went to Tony Benn, one of the foremost democratic socialists on the British left, who was then the Secretary of State for Industry. He reaffirmed that nationalisation was not on the cards, but gave the workers another suggestion: why not come up with their own plan to save the firm?</p>
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<h2>Shopfloor Ingenuity</h2>
<p>At first, the trade unionists wrote to academics, policymakers and local government officials seeking advice, but only three bothered to respond. So, they went to their own workers for ideas instead. The response was astounding. Lucas’ workers came up with hundreds of ideas about how to transform the company into a viable, and socially useful, organisation. More than 150 ideas for new products were brought together into the final document, which also contained detailed information about the human and technical resources the firm could draw on, market analysis, and a step-by-step plan for transitioning towards the new way of working.</p>
<p>The ideas workers proposed were divided into five categories: ‘medical equipment, transport vehicles, improved braking systems, energy conservation [and] oceanics’. Some examples included expanding production of kidney dialysis machines, constructing wind turbines, researching solar cell technology and developing a hybrid power for cars. These were extraordinarily radical and farsighted ideas at a time when human-induced climate change was only first being discussed. Notably, none of the ideas was related to military technology, which had thus far been a major part of the work done at Lucas: the workers were turning their backs on the production of destruction.</p>
<p>Management was stunned, as were many ministers in the UK government. Workers from across the organisation had banded together, overcoming the geographical, technical and cultural barriers that divided them, to create a plan that would simultaneously save their jobs, transform Lucas Aerospace and capture the imaginations of working people all over the world. For this reason, the plan was rejected by the firm’s senior managers, who could not wrap their heads around the idea that the workers they were used to controlling could demonstrate such ingenuity. The leaders at Lucas Aerospace preferred to see their organisation die rather than hand it over to the workers.</p>
<p>As one MP put it:</p>
<blockquote><p>It took the shop stewards three years to meet the management to discuss the corporate plan, because they were challenging the hierarchical nature of our society, which is that the bosses shall make the decisions and the workers shall accept them, and woe betide workers who question those decisions and perhaps even produce better ones.</p></blockquote>
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<h2>Architect or Bee</h2>
<p>The Lucas Plan was an extraordinarily ambitious document which challenged the foundations of capitalism. In place of an institution designed to generate profits via the domination of labour by capital, the workers at Lucas Aerospace had developed an entirely new model for the firm: one based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities. It was almost as if the workers had never needed managing at all; as though they were creative architects, rather than obedient bees.</p>
<p>In fact, a trade union leader at Lucas, Mike Cooley, later wrote a book entitled <em>Architect or Bee: The Human Price of Technology</em>. Cooley was an Irish engineer at Lucas and one of the architects of the Lucas Plan. He was such an effective union leader that Lucas Aerospace fired him in 1981 for ‘spending too much time on union business’. Afterwards, Cooley continued his work on socially useful production with the Greater London Corporation. He is remembered as a pioneer of the ‘human-centred design’ movement. In 2018, in the foreword to Cooley’s book, <em>Delinquent Genius: The Strange Affair of Man and His Technology</em>, Irish President Michael D. Higgins referred to him as ‘the most intelligent Irishman, the most morally engaged scientist and technologist Ireland has sent abroad’.</p>
<p>Cooley had a view of ‘ordinary people’ that was diametrically opposed to that of thinkers like Hayek and Keynes. In fact, he believed that he had never met an ‘ordinary’ person in his life. Everyone he knew, all the people with whom he worked, had ‘extraordinary … skills, abilities and talents’, as the Lucas Plan showed. For Cooley, the great crime of capitalism is that ‘those talents [are] never used or developed or encouraged’.</p>
<p>Cooley’s democratic socialism fitted the spirit of the 1970s. The new social movements, which had emerged out of the protest movements of the late 1960s, were challenging traditional hierarchies in the Labour Party, the labour movement and society more generally. Rank-and-file workers were disappointed with what little progress had been made on wages, working conditions and the broader political demands made by the unions after a decade of successive Labour governments. Both groups were increasingly disillusioned with the top-down, bureaucratic approach to nationalisation that had become characteristic of the post-war consensus.</p>
<p>Many on the new left saw worker democracy as a way to bridge the gap between the protest movements of the 1960s and the institutional strength of the labour movement. Meanwhile, many on the ‘old left’ saw the plan as a way to reinvigorate the tired post-war consensus. The peace movement saw it as an example of how to destroy the military-industrial complex without alienating workers. Farsighted environmentalists saw it as a model for transitioning towards a green economy without any loss of jobs. And everyone from Marxists to anarchists saw it as a fantastic example of how to build worker power and socialise production without the support of the capitalist state. Even more liberal-minded commentators conceded that the workers at Lucas Aerospace had achieved something quite remarkable.</p>
<p>In this time of turbulence, the actions of the workers at Lucas Aerospace were like a lightning rod for radicals everywhere. While the British political class played up the threats to order and stability posed by weed-smoking hippies and striking workers with Soviet sympathies, the British left coalesced around the Lucas Plan as a very real and practical example of what could be achieved when working people drew on their collective skills, solidarity and creativity.</p>
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<h2>The Neoliberal Response</h2>
<p>Then came 1979. In her first term, Thatcher radically restructured the UK economy. She waged war on the UK’s unions while also privatising whole swathes of the public sector and releasing finance capital from the chains imposed by the post-war consensus. The shift in government undermined the labour movement in general, and the Lucas Plan specifically. Cooley was ‘effectively sacked’ for his activities in 1981 and the Plan, which workers had been organising behind the scenes to implement, foundered.</p>
<p>Where the workers behind the Lucas Plan had laid the foundations for the development of an economy that respected the dignity, creativity and autonomy of workers, Thatcher instead used her control over the state ruthlessly to reassert the power of capital over labour. Cloaking her project in the language of freedom and autonomy, she crushed one of the most innovative and ingenious examples of democratic production the world had ever seen. The success of the neoliberal movement ensured that ‘individualised consumerism rather than collective services and a democratised state and economy became the main legacy of working-class struggles during the twentieth century.’</p>
<p>In 1996, after successive rounds of reorganisation and restructuring, Lucas merged with an American company to form LucasVarity PLC, which immediately announced cost-cutting measures that led to 3,000 job losses. Three years later, the merger was reversed when LucasVarity was purchased by the US company TRW, which carved up and stripped the company in the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s, and then sold the remnants, now known as TRW Aeronautical Systems, to US manufacturing company Goodrich Corporation two years later. In 2012, Goodrich itself was acquired by United Technologies for $16.5 billion, which merged Goodrich with an existing subsidiary to form United Aerospace.</p>
<p>A few years later, United Aerospace had something of a shock when, a plane for which it had provided many components nosedived out of the sky. United supplied Boeing with avionics, cabin components and mechanical systems for the 737 MAX, and one of its subsidiaries — Rosemount — had supplied Boeing with the faulty angle of attack sensors that had played a role in the two crashes. A month after the Ethiopian Airlines Crash, United Aerospace announced that it could lose $80 million worth of earnings as a result of Boeing’s decision to cut production of the 737 MAX.</p>
<p>In 2018, United Aerospace acquired Rockwell Collins and merged UTC Aerospace systems — the part of the company that can trace its lineage back to Lucas Aerospace — to form Collins Aerospace. Collins continued to have a strong relationship with Boeing, providing inputs for its Boeing Business Jet 737 MAX — the private corporate version of the 737 MAX. In 2020, UTC was merged with Raytheon Technologies, one of the largest multinational aerospace and defence conglomerates on the planet.</p>
<p>What was once Lucas Aerospace, whose workers had been at the forefront of a movement to create a new mode of production based on democracy, sustainability and social utility, had by the early twenty-first century become a subsidiary of a sprawling American conglomerate deeply enmeshed in the military-industrial complex which was supplying corporate jet parts to a company whose unbridled greed led it to manufacture planes that fell out of the sky. There is no better illustration of the two paths we faced as a planet during the 1970s: total domination by capital, or sustainable, socialised, democratic production.</p>
<p>The economy that produced the 737 MAX disasters is no less centrally planned than that which produced Lucas Plan; the main difference is that fifty years ago workers had an input into the planning process, which is now dominated by corporate executives, bureaucrats, politicians and financiers. The choice we faced in the 1970s was a choice between democratic, socially useful production and the extraction of profit at any cost. It was the choice between a society in which workers organise themselves to produce kidney dialysis machines for a public healthcare system, or one in which bosses direct workers to produce corporate jets for a company that, in a just society, would have been found guilty of corporate manslaughter.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center"><em>This is an edited extract from </em><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/vulture-capitalism-9781526638076/">Vulture Capitalism</a><em> by Grace Blakeley (Bloomsbury, 2024).</em></p>
Grace Blakeleyhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/labour-is-failing-black-people/Labour Is Failing Black People2024-03-12T21:33:30Z2024-03-12T10:28:55Z<p>The rich and powerful tradition of anti-racist struggles against white power structures in the Caribbean is something the Windrush generation — people like my grandfather, and the community around him — brought with them when they migrated to Britain after World War Two. When they arrived, many of those communities found a political home in […]</p>
<h3>Labour’s deplorable treatment of Diane Abbott and Kate Osamor shows that anti-black racism within the party isn’t only tolerated, it’s being actively exploited to quash the left.</h3>
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<p>The rich and powerful tradition of anti-racist struggles against white power structures in the Caribbean is something the Windrush generation — people like my grandfather, and the community around him — brought with them when they migrated to Britain after World War Two. When they arrived, many of those communities found a political home in the Labour Party. Labour benefited from their numbers and was also enriched by their talents and experience. African, Caribbean, and also Asian communities began to form a significant and loyal voter base for Labour. It has remained ever since.</p>
<p>That relationship, of course, has not been without its challenges. In the post-war period, black people were also facing hostility from all corners of society, and elements of the Labour Party were no exception. Later, in the 1980s, a series of insurrections and uprisings — dubbed ‘race riots’ by some — gripped London, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, and Leeds when black people mobilised against the racist policing and widespread unemployment that blighted their lives. Some of those involved in those movements looked at Labour, a party which claimed to be anti-racist, but which had produced no black MPs, and set about organising Labour Black Sections (LBS), a national movement to address the absence of black representation in Labour.</p>
<p>LBS achieved considerable success in increasing the presence of Black and Asian representatives in council and leadership positions. 1987 proved historic, with four black MPs elected to Parliament, all of them Labour. They were the late great Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, and Keith Vaz. Abbott made history by becoming the first black woman MP elected to parliament. The previous year, Bill Morris had become the first black general secretary of a major trade union.</p>
<p><span data-contrast="auto">While achieving these victories, the LBS also struggled with opposition from within Labour itself. Leader Neil Kinnock, who many believed was a friend of LBS, wanted to see its demise, as did his deputy Roy Hattersley. In 1989, Kinnock infamously prevented Martha Osamor, the mother of Kate Osamor, from becoming the parliamentary candidate in Vauxhall. Osamor was Deputy leader of Haringey Council at the time and had been democratically elected as the party’s candidate by the local membership.</span><span data-ccp-props="{}"> </span></p>
<p><span data-contrast="auto">Despite receiving the most nominations, the NEC refused to shortlist Osamor, opening the door instead for Kate Hoey, who remained the MP for Vauxhall until 2019. Then as now, Labour’s leadership was involved in an effort to quash the party’s left — and then as now, it recognised that black voters formed an essential part of that group.</span></p>
<p>Today’s Labour Party has revived this assault with new tactics. The treatment of Diane Abbott, who was at the heart of LBS in the 1980s, is the clearest indicator of its intentions. Factional manoeuvring is transparent in the notion that Abbott’s words in the <em>Observer </em>last year warrant a year-long suspension from the party while figures on the party’s right — largely white men — have been <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/racism-gaza-starmers-labour-fails-its-black-voters">quickly returned to the fold</a> following comparable or indeed worse infractions. Darren Rodwell, Neil Coyle, Steve Reed, and Barry Sheerman are cases in point. Racism is acceptable, the Labour Party seems to believe, as long as it’s committed by the right people.</p>
<p>Kate Osamor, another black female MP, is the most recently casualty of Starmer’s campaign. Officially, her suspension is due to her acknowledgement of the fact that Palestinians are experiencing genocide on this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, despite the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s website <a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=c22a2b817b347f35JmltdHM9MTcwODkwNTYwMCZpZ3VpZD0yYjRiNWMwOS04Y2IyLTZmNDUtMDY4Ny01Mzg4OGQxOTZlNDYmaW5zaWQ9NTIwOA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=3&fclid=2b4b5c09-8cb2-6f45-0687-53888d196e46&psq=holocaust+memorial+day+trust&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG1kLm9yZy51ay8&ntb=1">making clear</a> that the day is intended to honour the victims of many genocides, and despite the ICJ recently finding the case for Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians entirely plausible. For Starmer’s Labour, none of that matters; Osamor, like Abbott, is disposable.</p>
<p>The Labour leadership seems to believe it can continue in this fashion without compromising the loyalty of black voters — but signs indicate that’s not the case. As I recently <a href="https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2024/02/01/keir-starmer-doesnt-care-about-black-people/">reported in the <em>Voice</em></a>, more and more of those with direct experience with Labour are saying what growing numbers of us feel: Keir Starmer doesn’t care about black people.</p>
<p>This impression was dramatically worsened by Labour’s <a href="https://x.com/TheVoiceNews/status/1754926291613028721?s=20">car-crash</a> launch of its almost non-existent race equality act, from which the <em>Voice</em> and other black media outlets were excluded. The <a href="https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2024/02/05/labours-promised-race-equality-act-draws-scepticism-from-campaigners/">act itself</a> offers no substance on the main issues that concern black people in Britain today, including police brutality and black underachievement in schools. That it arrives in this state four years after its announcement only increases the sense that Labour is making a display of its casual disregard for issues of race. Voters have not forgotten the findings of the Forde Report, which revealed a deep culture of anti-black racism within the party and an unwillingness to tackle it.</p>
<p>There are steps Labour could take to improve things, if it chose. Abbott and Osamor could be reinstated. The farcical race equality act plans could be replaced with a concrete plan to tackle the issues that matter to the black community. Above all, Labour could engage seriously with black voters and their demands. If those demands consistently align with the policies of the party’s left, Labour should take that guidance seriously, rather than disregarding it because it does not fit with its factional goals.</p>
<p>The only alternative is serious damage to that black-Labour link that has remained, in stronger and weaker forms, consistent since the Windrush days. Starmer thinks that black voters need him, but the Labour Party on its present trajectory seems to offer little to no deviation from the unjust status quo black people in Britain are already experiencing each day. He can change course now, or he can pay the price on the ballot. Either way, it will eventually become undeniable: it’s Labour that needs us.</p>
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Richard Sudanhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-inquisition-of-oppenheimer/The Inquisition of Oppenheimer2024-03-11T13:52:56Z2024-03-11T13:51:41Z<p>The place: Washington. The date: April 14, 1954. The question before the Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission: whether Dr Robert Oppenheimer may safely be allowed continued access to secret information. Oppenheimer is testifying for the third day running. He is under cross-examination (the official record uses this term) by Roger Robb, counsel for […]</p>
<h3>We republish a 1955 <i>Tribune</i> article on the interrogation of Dr Oppenheimer which defends the father of the atom bomb and concludes the ‘accusing finger of history is pointed at the statesmen, not at the scientists’.</h3>
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US nuclear physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967), testifying before the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
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<p><em><b>‘</b>We have a record of your voice’ said the inquisitor’<span style="font-weight: 400"> by John Beddoe, </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Tribune</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> (16 December 1955)</span></em></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The place: Washington. The date: April 14, 1954. The question before the Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission: whether Dr Robert Oppenheimer may safely be allowed continued access to secret information.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer is testifying for the third day running. He is under cross-examination (the official record uses this term) by Roger Robb, counsel for the Board. Robb has just cited an admission made by Oppenheimer in 1943 that he knew of, and did not rush to disclose, a channel for passing atomic data to the Soviet consul.</span></p>
<blockquote><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Robb</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: Do you recall saying that in substance?</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: I certainly don’t recall it.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Robb</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: Would you deny you said it?</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: No.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Robb: </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">Is there any doubt now that you did mention a man attached to the Soviet consul?</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: I had completely forgotten it. I can only rely on the transcript.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Robb: </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">Doctor, for your information, I might say that we have a record of your voice.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: Sure.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Robb</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: Do you have any doubt you said that?</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">: No.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">There was never, of course, any suspicion that Oppenheimer — wartime head of the atom bomb project and America’s leading physicist — had himself been tempted to give away secrets, even when the Russians were our gallant allies. An allegation to this effect had sparked off the enquiry, but was dismissed by the Board as too hare-brained for investigation.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">No, what made the doctor a security risk was a mass of scattered facts and may-be-facts, roughly of three kinds:</span></p>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400">In the thirties, long before entering Government service, he had associated with Communist front organisations and had Communist friends.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400">When a university colleague of extreme Left views (never himself accused of spying) told Oppenheimer that he knew how to get stuff to the Russians, Oppenheimer showed little enthusiasm for helping the FBI to follow this up, and even less for incriminating his friend.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400">Much later, in 1949, with the atom bomb stacking up fast in the American arsenal, Oppenheimer advised concentration on tactical atomic weapons rather than an effort to make the hydrogen bomb.</span></li>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Such a record was quite enough to make him a possible security risk, even though scientists and generals of high degree vied in choosing superlatives to describe his services to America. And when the enquiry was all over, both the Board and the Commission itself decided by majority vote that he was indeed unfit to know what was going on in the laboratories he had been foremost in creating.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Official America, which emerges without dignity from the story, may be congratulated on one thing: on publishing the record of the enquiry. If this had happened in Britain, the document would be released to selected historians in 1990. An efficient abridged version had been made by Mr Michael Wharton and published under the title of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">A Nation’s Security.</span></i></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">I do not think it is decent to examine a distinguished scientist, accused of no crime, in a way that would be considered harsh at the Old Bailey.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Or to hide dictaphones in rooms where he is talking. Or to bring his wife to the witness-stand and ask her when and where she fell in love with her first husband and how she reacted when he was killed in Spain.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It stinks. I hope the record will be read in Britain by officials and MPs as well as by private citizens, and remembered as a lesson in what not to do.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">But I hope that readers will not get too angry to raise a smile at the solemn self-parodying of the security hawks. One colonel in what they oddly call Intelligence, reporting adversely on Oppenheimer, wrote:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘This Office is still of the opinion that Oppenheimer is not to be fully trusted and that his loyalty is divided. It is believed that the only undivided loyalty that he can give is to science.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">One page of this book, however, is inspiring. It tells us what the outstanding scientists who were asked in 1949 whether the H-bomb should be made, really said at the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">They all said No. Oppenheimer and three others said it like this:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘In determining not to proceed with the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of eliminating the fear and arousing the hope of mankind.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Professors Fermi and Rabi were yet more far-seeing:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="font-weight: 400">‘The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing . . . We think it wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.’</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Those words remain to testify that the accusing finger of history is pointed at the statesmen, not at the scientists.</span></p>
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Tribunehttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/austerity-is-killing-birminghams-culture/Austerity Is Killing Birmingham’s Culture2024-03-11T23:23:28Z2024-03-11T11:59:49Z<p>As a child, the Library of Birmingham was my favourite place in the world. My mum, seeing my best efforts to gather up five or six books at any one time, had to enforce a strict ‘only take what you can carry’ rule. With the two books my little arms could manage I’d breeze through […]</p>
<h3>A 100% cut to arts funding in Birmingham is a deathblow to the institutions that make the city vibrant. If the government’s austerian assault continues, the arts will only be accessible to the wealthy.</h3>
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Library of Birmingham
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<p>As a child, the Library of Birmingham was my favourite place in the world. My mum, seeing my best efforts to gather up five or six books at any one time, had to enforce a strict ‘only take what you can carry’ rule. With the two books my little arms could manage I’d breeze through the hours after school or after bedtime with a torch under the covers, and race back the week after for more. When it was the heritage spaces of Birmingham that offered me my first ever paid job years later, she and I agreed it made sense.</p>
<p>This is only one example of the role Birmingham’s creative spaces have played in only one life. The next generation of the city’s children, however, will not be able to benefit in the way I did. Last week, Birmingham City Council announced its plans to shut <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/04/people-in-birmingham-views-on-council-budget-cuts">25 of 35 libraries completely</a>, and, from 2025/6, make a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/23/joe-lycett-others-condemn-100-budget-cut-birmingham-arts">100 percent cut</a> to the arts funding that makes institutions like Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Birmingham Opera Company, B: Music — the charity that oversees Birmingham Symphony Hall and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra — and the century-old Birmingham Repertory Theatre possible. <span style="font-weight: 400">The council could make up the funding shortfall by selling off its <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-birmingham-68340410">assets </a></span><span style="font-weight: 400">—</span><span style="font-weight: 400"> even works of art from our much-loved museums could be sold to private collectors. </span>With this comes a 21 percent rise in council tax.</p>
<p>Councils across the country are in crisis. Section 114 notices — the means by which Birmingham effectively declared itself bankrupt in September last year — are feared to become the fate of almost <a href="https://www.local.gov.uk/about/news/section-114-fear-almost-1-5-council-leaders-and-chief-executives-after-cashless-autumn">one in five</a> councils this year or next, according to the Local Government Association (LGA). Croydon, Slough, Thurrock, Nottingham, and Woking have already been forced to bite the bullet. Birmingham’s escalating costs from an equal pay claim and issues with a new IT system, Oracle, play their part, but the underlying cause of this growing rash of financial distress across the country is clear: austerity.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/10/englands-collapsing-local-government-funding-cuts">Antonia Jennings and Jon Tabbush</a> wrote in <em>Tribune</em> in October, local government in England had its funding slashed by £15 billion between 2010 and 2020: a real-terms cut of 20 percent. The result is that councils are forced to reduce their provision of the services residents depend on. Analysis in the <em>Guardian</em> earlier this year found that between 2010-11 and 2022-23, net local government spending per person on roads and transport was cut by 40 percent in real terms, on housing by 35 percent, and on planning and development by a third.</p>
<p>In these circumstances, with health, social care, and education all undergoing unprecedented squeezes, arts spending is seen as the least important. The figures make that clear: the <em>Guardian </em>analysis found spending on cultural services had been cut by a massive 43 percent. The problem, for those who declare the arts an extravagance, is that their impact cannot be disentangled from any of the other services and benefits a local authority might seek to provide.</p>
<p>This is true on an economic basis. Events like the Dance Festival and Birmingham Heritage Week draw huge numbers of tourists to the UK’s second city, generating vital income. The LGA has <a href="https://www.local.gov.uk/topics/culture-tourism-leisure-and-sport/cornerstones-culture/section-two-why-invest-local-culture">noted</a> that in 2019, the creative industries contributed £115.9 billion to the UK as a whole, accounting for 5.9 percent of the economy and 2.2 million jobs, as well as growing at four times the rate of other sectors.</p>
<p>It’s also true in a far broader sense. The same LGA report, ‘Why Invest in Local Culture?’, recorded testimonies stating that ‘Culture ‘[helps] people to identify with, understand, appreciate, engage with and feel a sense of ‘belonging’ to their place’, and that creativity is ‘a growing requirement for many occupations outside the creative/cultural sector and will be essential for problem solving, innovation and adaptation in any future job market.’ It also observed that ‘Publicly funded arts and cultural services made enormous contributions to our daily lives and wellbeing during the COVID-19 restrictions,’ and that the arts ‘have a role to play in supporting health at various levels in society, from contributing to general wellbeing across a population, to helping to prevent specific forms of ill health and providing treatment for acute health conditions.’</p>
<p>At a time of growing crisis in the NHS and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/11/uk-life-expectancy-falls-to-lowest-level-in-a-decade">falling life expectancy</a>, it’s this role for the arts — in closing health inequalities — that is particularly striking. The LGA’s report recorded clear benefits from cultural programmes in the clinical treatment of conditions like dementia — the UK’s biggest killer — and depression; that those targeted towards at-risk groups were valuable in a preventative approach to mental ill health and loneliness; that good cultural infrastructure and universal provision of cultural services at a population level was beneficial to community wellbeing and promoted networked, resilient communities.</p>
<p>These findings demonstrate the limits of treating questions of the arts and culture, health, economics, community cohesion, and social care as if they are distinct from one another and not entirely co-dependent. Crisis and collapse in one is only likely to increase the chances of crisis and collapse in all. In forcing the shuttering – or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/30/ministers-plan-to-push-english-councils-to-sell-assets-to-plug-budget-holes-condemned">sell-off</a> – of accessible cultural institutions and thereby cutting off the arts to all but the wealthiest, that is exactly the future this government’s austerian assault is ushering in.</p>
<p>There are other options. Actors’ union Equity recently <a href="https://www.equity.org.uk/news/2024/equity-presents-alternative-funding-plan-for-arts-and-culture-to-suffolk-council#:~:text=We%20are%20proposing%3A,the%20form%20of%20biddable%20projects.">published</a> an alternative funding plan for culture in Suffolk, after the council there also proposed a 100 percent arts funding cut. The Arts Council website hosts a list of <a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/other-sources-funding-0">alternative funding distributors</a>, although the revenue to be raised from these are likely to be small compared to local government levels. Above all, <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/10/local-government-regressive-council-tax-budget-rishi-sunak">calls continue to be made</a> for more power to be placed in the hands of local authorities to control their own finances, and for Keir Starmer’s incoming Labour government to match that by increasing public spending. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-policies-benefit-cuts-reeves-b2399406.html">insists</a>, in response, that her Tory-led fiscal rules are non-negotiable. Whether that position will stay tenable as more councils collapse remains to be seen.</p>
<p>The arts are not a panacea. But they are vital to a life different from the ones Britain’s political class currently seem to imagine for the majority of the public — lives in which we wake up in mouldy and extortionately-priced homes, spend long days at tech jobs, and then return to repeat it all, unable to afford access to whatever small number of leisure or cultural activities still exist. The arts represent the potential for something better: a world that values and stimulates curiosity, joy, and connection. Perhaps that is what the people in charge really want to avoid.</p>
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Michaela Makushahttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/palestine-is-a-feminist-issue/Palestine Is a Feminist Issue2024-03-08T16:32:20Z2024-03-08T15:51:12Z<p>Today, Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip should be gathering to be celebrated for their contributions and accomplishments and to strategise how to take forward the ongoing struggle for women’s rights. Instead, they are fleeing their homes under relentless Israeli bombardment, barely surviving in tents and shelters, desperately searching for food to feed their families […]</p>
<h3>This International Women’s Day is for the women of Gaza, whose strength and resistance in the face of genocide is an inspiration to those fighting for freedom and justice across the world.</h3>
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<p>Today, Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip should be gathering to be celebrated for their contributions and accomplishments and to strategise how to take forward the ongoing struggle for women’s rights. Instead, they are fleeing their homes under relentless Israeli bombardment, barely surviving in tents and shelters, desperately searching for food to feed their families and grieving their loved ones. More than 9,000 Palestinian women have been killed by Israel’s attacks in the past six months, and thousands more are injured or missing under the rubble.</p>
<p>The impact of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinian women is beyond catastrophic. It has left women without access to medical care, including pregnant women forced to give birth without basic supplies like pain relief. UN experts have raised the alarm at documented cases of Palestinian women and girls being ‘arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members.’ Moreover, Israel has escalated its campaign of arbitrary detention, imprisoning hundreds of Palestinian women across the occupied Palestinian territory. Addameer, the Palestinian prisoner support association, has reported how women in Israeli detention are being subjected to torture, including beatings, isolation and sexual violence.</p>
<p>In the face of such overwhelming violence, Palestinian women are courageously facing these unprecedented challenges, working to keep their community together in the face of such horrors: the doctors, nurses, and other medical workers who are saving lives or providing comfort to the dying in the Gaza Strip; the teachers and community activists who are organising lessons and play for Palestinian children in shelters, children whose lives will never be the same after this, if they even survive.</p>
<p>The women who are working as journalists, particularly since international media cannot get into Gaza, are diligently reporting and documenting the violence against — and the strength of — their people. The names of these Palestinian women won’t be celebrated in international forums or uttered by our political leaders, but their steadfast refusal to submit to the might of Israeli forces inspires all those who fight for freedom and justice across the world.</p>
<p>Palestinian women have faced down gendered violence from Israel’s colonial regime since its beginning, leading the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In 1933, the British high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, wrote in a letter his concern that a ‘new and disquieting feature’ of a protest in Jerusalem was the prominent role taken by women who led the protest and fought back against the colonial police. During the Mandate period, Palestinian women’s organisations formed that were active in Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation, from organising protests to dispatching telegrams to raise awareness of the national struggle across the world.</p>
<p>Women have remained at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. The First Intifada, a mass uprising against Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation, was led and sustained by women’s committees in local communities across Palestine. Women organised demonstrations and formed co-operatives, which gave strength to the economic boycotts which saw Palestinians refuse to work on illegal Israeli settlements or purchase Israeli goods. Palestinian women also formed community organisations, including health committees and underground schools, to serve and strengthen their community after the Israeli army shut down regular schools as a form of collective punishment in response to the uprising.</p>
<p>This tradition of community organising continues today, with organisations like the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC) continuing to empower women as part of the struggle against Israeli apartheid, and the Health Work Committees providing medical care to the poor and marginalised. In response, these organisations face Israel’s repression, including criminalisation and raids on their offices.</p>
<p>This International Women’s Day, we are inspired by the decades of Palestinian women struggling for freedom, including the women today organising in the face of the most horrific violence from Israeli forces. Tomorrow, we will march through the streets of London for our tenth national demonstration for Palestine since October, demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, for freedom for Palestinian women and the entire Palestinian people, and for the sake of the universal principles of freedom and justice that we all hold dear. I’m proud and excited to say that we’ll have an entire line-up of women speaking at the demonstration in support of a ceasefire and an end to British arms sales to Israel. See you there.</p>
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<p><em>Click <a href="https://palestinecampaign.org/events/national-demonstration-ceasefire-now-stop-the-genocide-in-gaza/">here</a> for the details of tomorrow’s national demonstration. </em></p>
Ryvka Barnardhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-changing-face-of-the-enemy-within/The Changing Face of the Enemy Within2024-03-11T03:39:22Z2024-03-08T10:16:13Z<p>Forty years ago, a dispute that would echo through the decades was pushed upon miners and mining communities by a government determined to use whatever they could to destroy the organised working class in Britain. Then, as now, ordinary hard-working men and women, simply fighting for what they believed in, were smeared by the holders […]</p>
<h3>Four decades ago, miners like me were labelled ‘the enemy within’ by Thatcher. Today, the same rhetoric is being used against British Muslims and all supporters of Palestinian freedom, writes Ian Lavery MP.</h3>
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<p>Forty years ago, a dispute that would echo through the decades was pushed upon miners and mining communities by a government determined to use whatever they could to destroy the organised working class in Britain. Then, as now, ordinary hard-working men and women, simply fighting for what they believed in, were smeared by the holders of the highest offices in Britain.</p>
<p>During that dispute, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described miners as ‘the enemy within’ and the Home Secretary, Leon Brittain, described mining leaders as extremists and striking miners as practicing mob rule.</p>
<p>The language should be familiar to followers of British politics in recent times. Striking doctors and nurses described as militants, climate protestors accused of hating Britain and, more recently, those protesting in sheer frustration at Britain’s failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza described as ‘hate marchers.’</p>
<p>In 1984, the government willingly smeared ordinary people to enable a fundamental shift to the free-market economics that continues to devastate our country by smashing the strongest champion of the organised working class, the National Union of Mineworkers. Today, a government hated in large swathes of the country and hunting for an issue to turn the tide, are using the same tactics to try desperately to cling to power. Yesterday it was the miners, today it is the Muslims.</p>
<p>Last week, our unelected Prime Minister appeared on the steps of Downing Street to make deranged pronouncements on the state of the nation. The diminutive Tory leader appeared behind the government rostrum making incredibly dangerous statements which smeared hundreds of thousands of people across this country. Whilst he did not utter the words, it was clear that his intention was to use dog whistle politics to define a new enemy within.</p>
<p>Whilst people may pour scorn on the words of Rishi Sunak, there was not long between pronouncements from Margaret Thatcher and feeling the might of the state directly upon me. Arriving at Blyth Power Station in Cambois, in March 1984, I joined pickets from Scotland and across the North East. Within minutes of arriving, I was pulled from the throng by police and assaulted and caged like a wild beast in a four-foot by four-foot windowless vehicle alongside scores of other miners. We were detained for hours in horrific conditions without having a clue where we were and decanted into Ashington magistrates court. An officer I had never seen before claimed to be the one who had arrested me. I was acquitted on this technicality despite having committed no crime.</p>
<p>Whilst Orgreave remains the most prominent example of state violence at play in the strike, there were thousands of instances of state violence that took place during the dispute. On one occasion, I remember being at Whittle Colliery just off the A1 and standing on the brow of the hill whilst picketing. Suddenly, row after row of Black Mariahs began streaming up the road. Hundreds of police officers confronted us, chasing peaceful pickets into the Colliery yard and unleashing violence and arrest upon the men.</p>
<p>Whilst there are still high-profile examples of police failure, the rhetoric of government has not yet crystalised into mass examples of state violence against today’s protestors. However, the sinister messaging coming from the highest echelons of government is finding a violent outlet with the enabling of the far right. The sight of Nazi salutes on Whitehall on Remembrance Day, after being emboldened by the then Home Secretary, was a horrifying example of what I fear is to come. The rhetoric from the very top is smearing ordinary people and putting them at risk of serious harm.</p>
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<h2>Solidarity</h2>
<p>The reason that we came so close to victory during our dispute is something those seeking justice today should take note of. Our fight to save whole communities was sustained, in the face of the might of the state, by two key pillars. Working class solidarity and the rising to the occasion of our own. The degree to which men and women in mining communities were forced to reach potential through circumstance was unbelievable. Without their oratory, organisation, and activism the strike would never have gone so far.</p>
<p>I will never forget my great friend Anne Lilburn, described as a housewife from Hadston, who rose to national prominence sharing platforms with the finest speakers in the land; Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, Rodney Bickerstaffe, Arthur Scargill and many more. She never looked out of place. Neither should we forget the efforts of those who organised the pickets and distributed food and essentials.</p>
<p>The similarities echo in today’s protests. Ordinary people moved to activism and oratory by being unable to turn a blind eye to injustice. The attacks of senior politicians amplified by the gutter press are simply a sign of their terror as ordinary people are once again organising.</p>
<p>With no formal strike pay in place for miners our efforts were sustained by the supply of a couple of cigarettes, a cup of Oxo and a cheese sandwich. As a non-smoker who doesn’t like cheese, I made do with the Oxo. The miners were creative in sustaining themselves. My branch, for example, had bought a potato field in north Northumberland, near to Seahouses, organising trips for striking miners to pick the crop and subsidise their diminished diet. Today’s disputes will find their creative vent too.</p>
<p>I will always remember the heart-warming act of kindness from the dirt-poor miners of apartheid South Africa who gave up a days’ worth of pay for their comrades in the UK. That cheque remained uncashed and framed on the wall of the miner’s HQ in Barnsley reminding us of their kindness and the bond that exists between workers everywhere. My own family were sponsored by Norwegian trade unionists who vowed that we would not starve, and I will never forget the juggernauts of Christmas joy that landed in the coalfield courtesy of the CGT in France.</p>
<p>The bonds of solidarity built across social movements in the UK should never be forgotten. The film <em>pride</em> captures the solidarity from the LGBTQ movement but there was solidarity from communities of colour too. And whilst the Labour Party was mealy mouthed about the strike from the top, the support received from local politicians and councils could not be underestimated.</p>
<p>The Conservative Party have always sought to define an enemy within. The cause being championed may have changed but their destructive politics needs an ‘other’ to drive division and hatred towards. The Labour Party should not be sucked into their desperate attempts to divide our nation. The protest movements of today should continue to build the bonds of solidarity that brought the miners so close to victory during our struggle. This must extend to seeking the support from communities like my own and us repaying that unequivocal support that we received during our battle in the early 80s.</p>
<p>To paraphrase the slogans of banners of old: together we can change the world for the better, but divided we will fall.</p>
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Ian Laveryhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/how-the-miners-strike-changed-rugby-league/How the Miners’ Strike Remade Rugby League2024-03-07T10:46:05Z2024-03-07T10:37:49Z<p>It was the Summer of 1983 and the Featherstone Rovers loose-forward Keith Bell was preparing for his testimonial season. Back then, rugby league was a part-time game, and a ten-year celebration was the ultimate accolade for loyalty and commitment to the hardest of sports. In an age where players worked around shifts and received £50 […]</p>
<h3>The miners' strike saw rugby league players go from picket lines to games while clubs fundraised to feed their communities — changing both the sport and the coalfield communities forever.</h3>
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<p>It was the Summer of 1983 and the Featherstone Rovers loose-forward Keith Bell was preparing for his testimonial season.</p>
<p>Back then, rugby league was a part-time game, and a ten-year celebration was the ultimate accolade for loyalty and commitment to the hardest of sports. In an age where players worked around shifts and received £50 to £100 winning and losing bonuses, a fundraiser could set a player up for retirement. And in a tight-knit rugby league community like Featherstone, fans were always eager to dig deep for their heroes.</p>
<p>Coal was, alongside rugby league, central to life in Featherstone, with the railway track in the middle of the town symbolically separating the ground and the colliery. The Featherstone team remained rooted in the coal industry. It was often remarked how players — in the days before showers — would head straight to the training ground covered in coal dust after finishing a shift.</p>
<p>The fortunes of the team were intrinsically linked to the fortunes of the coal industry. During the 1926 General Strike, the club responded to hardship by allowing striking miners into the ground for free. By the 1970s, as the miners enjoyed the best pay and working conditions for a generation, it was little surprise that Featherstone Rovers enjoyed a period of success.</p>
<p>In 1983, Featherstone shocked the world by defeating Hull at Wembley in one of the all-time great cup shocks. When the club had returned home on an open-top bus, almost everyone in the pit village turned out on the streets to cheer them home. The players took the trophy to the colliery and posed for a photograph in full mining gear. But just as Keith Bell was putting together his testimonial plans, the miners in the town started an overtime ban. And rugby league would never be the same again.</p>
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<h2>The Confrontation</h2>
<p>Just weeks after their Wembley success, Margaret Thatcher won the general election with her second consecutive landslide. Throughout the campaign, there had been little discussion about what would happen to the coal industry. In 1981, Thatcher had attempted to instigate a round of pit closures but had been forced to retreat in fear that it would sink her premiership before it had even begun. Instead, there was just one sentence on the subject included in the manifesto: ‘In the next Parliament, the interests of the whole country require Britain’s massive coal industry, on which we depend for the overwhelming bulk of our electricity generation, to return to economic viability.’</p>
<p>By 1984, the miners had developed a unique position within the Labour movement. Buoyed by successful strikes in the 1970s, which brought down the Heath government, they had developed an increasingly political outlook on their work. Their trade union, the NUM, saw themselves as opponents of the government, acting on behalf of other, weaker unions.</p>
<p>The NUM outlined their position in the publication entitled <em>Miners and the Battle for Britain, </em>placing themselves at the forefront of resistance to Conservative economic policies. They argued that ‘the country’s miners are in the frontline trenches’ in ‘a unique position to observe the effects of good Government and bad Government’. The miners believe they could resist their plans to run down the coal industry because ‘history — and especially recent history — is on our side on this’.</p>
<p>A note prepared for Mrs Thatcher by her press secretary Bernard Ingham in February 1981 warned her that any plans to take them on would be a tough battle. He argued that she had taken a ‘relaxed approach’ towards pit closures. As a journalist in the 50s he had covered rugby league in Halifax and was often seen by Mrs Thatcher as someone who understood the motivations of the ‘working man’.</p>
<p>Ingham’s note concluded that the miners were indeed unique compared to other public sector workers, who would accept redundancy. The miners ‘are more resistant’ due to them being ‘the most cohesive industrial force in Britain who are prepared to defend the basis of their livelihood — i.e. pits’. Ingham wrote that miners were not ‘as corruptible as the next man’.</p>
<p>After winning the election in 1983, the government began to prepare for a strike by stockpiling coal across the country. At the same time, the miners had elected a new leader, the Yorkshireman Arthur Scargill, who made no secret of his eagerness for a confrontation too. Scargill was adamant that the National Coal Board (NCB) would begin closing down the coal industry pit by pit over the course of the 1980s. And while the NCB focussed in on the ones that were said to be ‘uneconomic’, he urged the miners to fight to keep each one open.</p>
<p>Scargill’s problem was that earlier attempts to bring miners on board with his strategy for national strike action had failed. He had tried to ballot his members to vote for a national strike, but they voted ‘no’ three times. Then, in March 1984, the NCB announced plans for a new wave of pit closures, and the confrontation that Thatcher and Scargill had been waiting for was a reality. But instead of calling a national ballot, each region was encouraged to strike individually. The Featherstone miners, alongside those in Castleford and Wakefield, immediately came out in support. Others, in Nottinghamshire, did not.</p>
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<h2>Hardship and Hostility</h2>
<p>Keith Bell was unusual amongst the Featherstone Rovers side because he didn’t work down the mines but as a maintenance fitter at the local glassworks. He hosted one of his testimonial events at the club just before the strike began. He had put on a darts night with John Lowe, who had become world champion in 1979. The club was packed, and Bell’s event did well. But as he sat and looked around the room, he understood that it was one last hurrah before people ran out of money.</p>
<p>For the Featherstone Rovers players, the off-season of 1984 was spent picketing and mobilising support for the dispute. Many believed that Thatcher would quickly U-turn and give in to Scargill’s demands. But Bell thought differently. One afternoon he stood on the hill outside his workplace and all he could see was mountains of coal. He thought to himself that this strike would be a lot different than before. As the strike began to hit the local economy, he felt ashamed about asking people for money when he was at work and others were in dispute. His brothers and his team-mates were doing everything they could to survive in Thatcher’s Britain. He was lucky because he had work. But there would be no testimonial windfall to set him up for retirement.</p>
<p>Fundraising for the testimonial was replaced by fundraisers to feed the community. Local traders were ‘forced out of business’ because of a massive slump in takings. The Castleford Chamber of Trade president said, ‘The effect of the miners’ strike on takings is forcing businesses to cut staff or even sell up.’ One of the first things the striking miners started doing was to stop getting haircuts, which hit local salons in the area.</p>
<p>In order to police the strike, southern police officers had moved into mining towns, and their presence caused much friction. Keith Bell continued to work in the power stations throughout the year and would have his car stopped and searched every day to ensure that he was not a flying picket. He had been issued with a document to show that he had the right to travel and the right to work, which he had to show the officers each day.</p>
<p>The attempt to demythologise the striking miners, to turn them into the ‘enemy within’ was central to the reporting of the strike in the newspapers each day. On picket lines, miners would burn copies of Rupert Murdoch’s <em>The Sun </em>to keep warm as the coverage of the strike grew ever more hostile. Their reporters descended on rugby league towns from London to generate news stories each day. In January 1985, a journalist for <em>The Sun </em>managed to go undercover in St Helens as a flying picket after befriending an elderly widow, and revealed the ‘secrets’ behind the life of the striking miners. The report, it was argued in the <em>St Helens Reporter</em>, was a complete fabrication.</p>
<p>And the suspicion of ‘flying pickets’ — groups of striking workers that move from one workplace to another to persuade them to not work — was high. When the Featherstone Miners’ Welfare amateur rugby team were on their annual training session in Bridlington, locals believed that they were flying pickets. When they had been confronted, the police reported that a crowd of 49 people had been engaged in a half-hour street battle. ‘The rugby coach was given a police escort while some players spent a night in the cells,’ according to a report in the <em>Pontefract and Castleford Express</em>.</p>
<p>To some people, it felt like Featherstone had been turned into a ‘police state’. Bell and his colleagues would try to get their own back the only way they could. If it rained, they would make the police officers stand and wait outside their car while they tried to find the relevant documents that allowed them to go and do their jobs.</p>
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<h2>End of an Era</h2>
<figure id="attachment_37395" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37395" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-37395" src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/03/07104527/Hope-and-Glory-450x675.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="675" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-37395" class="wp-caption-text">Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher’s Britain.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Naturally, rugby league was less of a priority in areas such as Featherstone. Attendances reduced as money dried up. In the past, the mines had linked up with clubs to ensure that ticket membership was removed from monthly wages. But without the pay packets, the club found that people no longer had the tickets or the means to attend.</p>
<p>To tempt back the striking miners, the club launched a ‘watch-now-pay-later’ plan in case the dispute continued through the winter. They developed a bottle-bank scheme where fans could return glass bottles, with funds coming back into the club. To raise ‘much-needed cash’, the club appealed for supporters to bring in old newspapers, catalogues and telephone directories for a waste-paper collection.</p>
<p>As the strike continued, the players understood that feeding their families was dependent on whether they could win games and receive bonuses. One youngster who felt the force of the strikers’ desire to win was the current France Rugby Union defence coach, Shaun Edwards. As a seventeen-year-old, he arrived at Post Office Road with a much fancied Wigan side, expectant of victory. But Featherstone pulled off a shock victory, leaving Edwards walking off the pitch battered and bruised. Later, he reflected that it was one of the hardest games he ever played, such was their commitment.</p>
<p>But in reality, the strike proved to be a major turning point for rugby league. The main pit in Featherstone, Ackton Colliery, never opened its doors again. The community was broken up and people took on new jobs as labourers and taxi drivers. The local historian Ian Clayton watched on as a succession of building societies and well-established businesses were boarded up and broken into. Crime, which had never been a factor in the town’s day-to-day life, increased. ‘For the first time to my knowledge, I’ve known Featherstone folk pinching off one another,’ Clayton wrote.</p>
<p>Over the course of the 1980s, clubs like Wigan, Leeds, St Helens and Widnes embraced the emerging commercial opportunities. Players such as Shaun Edwards, Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah would reap the rewards of the financial boom that the professional age brought.</p>
<p>Clubs would no longer look to the mines for players but instead develop a very different type of athlete. Players such as Jason Robinson and Andy Farrell emerged in the 1990s and would go on to influence both rugby league and rugby union. At the same time, clubs like Featherstone would be left behind, longing for a return to the glory days before the strike began.</p>
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<p>This is a modified extract from <em>Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher’s Britain </em> — longlisted for the <a href="https://www.pitchpublishing.co.uk/shop/hope-and-glory">William Hill Sports Book of the Year.</a></p>
Anthony Broxtonhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/football-fans-against-genocide/Football Fans Against Genocide2024-03-06T19:29:42Z2024-03-06T19:23:55Z<p>Like any football fan, I’m used to hearing differing takes on the same event. Nevertheless, I was surprised to read the Guardian’s report on those who gathered outside the Arsenal vs Tottenham Women’s Super League game last Saturday to protest the genocide in Gaza. According to the report, protesters were intimidating enough to scare dozens […]</p>
<h3>A recent Guardian article has tried to slander pro-Palestinian Arsenal fans as intimidating racist thugs. But these slanders will not stop people organising against genocide, writes a Jewish pro-Palestinian protester.</h3>
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<p>Like any football fan, I’m used to hearing differing takes on the same event. Nevertheless, I was surprised to read the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/05/arsenal-criticised-after-jewish-fans-walk-away-over-pro-palestine-rally-outside-emirates-stadium"><em>Guardian</em>’s report</a> on those who gathered outside the Arsenal vs Tottenham Women’s Super League game last Saturday to protest the genocide in Gaza. According to the report, protesters were intimidating enough to scare dozens of fans into going home without seeing the match, with fans feeling too ‘unsafe’ to attend the game.</p>
<p>Even by the <em>Guardian</em>’s standards, the dishonesty is shocking. Unlike the report’s author, I attended both the protest and the game. About 45 minutes before kick-off, around forty people gathered by the Thierry Henry statue to unveil a banner calling for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine and an end to genocide. After a few chants of ‘Free Palestine’, watched by several police officers, the protesters put their banner away and went to the game.</p>
<p>During the game itself, a separate banner calling for Arsenal to cut its ties with Barclays bank was unfurled. It was almost immediately taken down by stewards, who told the protesters they had to leave. As this was happening, a young Arsenal fan sitting below me astutely asked, ‘why do the Palestine flags have to go, but the Ukrainian flags can stay?’</p>
<p>For fans angry at the slaughter of Palestinians, the Women’s Super League is a clear target. This is because its main sponsor is Barclays. Research has shown that the bank, which also funds the Premier League, holds over £1 billion in shares and gives over £3 billion in loans and underwriting to arms companies who create the state-of-the-art weapons that murder, wound and terrorise millions of Palestinian civilians.</p>
<p>This is what we protesters intended to raise awareness about. But despite this, it can’t be ignored that the tone of the coverage hints that antisemitism was at play. There is nothing remotely antisemitic about wanting murder to stop, famine to be averted, occupation to be ended. As a Jewish person, many of whose family members were murdered in the Holocaust, it is beyond reprehensible. And I can’t imagine how it must feel for someone with relatives in Gaza to be condemned as a racist for wanting their loved ones to live.</p>
<p>Movements opposing injustice have never been represented in the ruling elite of football, and always face opprobrium by the liberal media. But that doesn’t mean we will stop, or bend to delegitimisation. Football fans have always been engaged in the struggles against injustice, especially Arsenal fans. At Highbury, the Anti-Nazi League always maintained a presence against the National Front. When apartheid rule choked South Africa, Ronnie Kasrils — a Jewish Gooner and leading member of Nelson Mandela’s underground army — would meet with anti-apartheid agents there, the sound of the crowd drowning out their discussions from any keen ears of the apartheid security services.</p>
<p>In these instances, there is no doubt who was on the right side of history, nor is there now — it is the 70 percent of the public who support a ceasefire, and those who are trying in any way to force our politicians to use what power they have to stop the slaughter. No feeble attempts by journalists, the FA, or anybody else will hamper this sentiment or this movement. On every terrace across Britain, football fans will continue to speak out and organise until Israel stops its genocide and Palestine is free.</p>
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Emily Coatmanhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/the-golden-goodbye-budget/The Golden Goodbye Budget2024-03-06T17:02:36Z2024-03-06T16:45:26Z<p>With the economy in recession and voters deeply concerned about the state of the UK’s parlous public services, Jermey Hunt has used what may be his last budget as chancellor to announce a 2 percentage point cut to national insurance. As the New Economics Foundation has pointed out, cuts to national insurance benefit the wealthiest […]</p>
<h3>Jeremy Hunt's final budget is a straightforward giveaway to every millionaire and landlord in our country — a parting glass to the only people they bothered serving in over a decade in power.</h3>
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<p>With the economy in recession and voters deeply concerned about the state of the UK’s parlous public services, Jermey Hunt has used what may be his last budget as chancellor to announce a 2 percentage point cut to national insurance.</p>
<p>As the New Economics Foundation has pointed out, cuts to national insurance benefit the wealthiest households, which stand to gain £1,751 per year as a result of the changes, <a href="https://neweconomics.org/2024/03/national-insurance-cut-would-benefit-richest-households-by-12-times-more-than-poorest">twelve times more</a> than they benefit the poorest ones, who will gain just £145.</p>
<p>When inflation is taken into account, the poorest households will actually end up paying more tax, as rising prices <a href="https://twitter.com/DanielJDunford/status/1765381249193893910?t=G2jacHEs_ix8Fjn-tujtNA&s=19">push them into higher tax brackets</a>.</p>
<p>Hunt also announced a range of other tax measures, including continuing the freeze on alcohol and fuel duties, abolishing the tax status of ‘non-doms’, and cutting the top rate of capital gains tax from 28 percent to 24 percent.</p>
<p>The non-dom policy is likely to raise an estimated £2 billion per year, and it comes in the wake of a scandal surrounding the Prime Minister’s wife, who has used <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/04/akshata-murty-rishi-sunak-tax-row-non-dom-status-infosys-chancellor">non-dom status</a> to reduce her tax bill.</p>
<p>While Hunt has previously resisted abolishing non-dom status, he has calculated that he can put the Opposition in a tight spot by removing it now. Labour had planned to use the extra £2bn per year raised from abolishing non-dom status to fund some of its pledges.</p>
<p>Hunt has delivered a double whammy by taking away one of Labour’s planned revenue raisers — abolishing non-dom status — while delivering tax cuts that households will notice immediately. Starmer will have to decide whether to cut back on spending pledges or reverse the tax cut.</p>
<p>The cut to the top rate of capital gains tax (CGT) is a massive giveaway to the wealthy — especially landlords. Taxpayers are exempt from paying capital gains tax — a tax on the amount an asset increases in value between purchase and sale — on their primary residences, but those with multiple homes must pay CGT on any capital gains from other properties.</p>
<p>Hunt is relying on the argument that cutting CGT will raise revenues, as it will encourage landlords to sell their properties, bringing in more tax revenue and increasing the stock of available housing.</p>
<p>But economists have pointed out that any increase in transactions — which will be limited given the impact of high interest rates on the housing market — will be more than offset by the fall in the rate of tax.</p>
<p>In other words, the cut to CGT is a massive giveaway to landlords and second home owners — a parting gift to his core constituency before Hunt leaves office.</p>
<p>Hunt has shown, yet again, that the Conservative Party is intent upon increasing the wealth of those at the top at the expense of everyone else.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/nov/27/uk-spends-more-financing-inequality-in-favour-of-rich-than-rest-of-europe-report-finds">A recent study showed</a> that the UK leads the way in subsidising the rich. Support for the wealthy and powerful costs the UK £106.2 billion per year in the form of subsidies and lost taxes, as well as wider social and economic costs.</p>
<p>There should be absolutely no doubt that maintaining inequality in the UK is this government’s policy.</p>
<p>On the spending side of things, the chancellor has demurred from announcing further cuts to public spending to fund his tax cuts. Departmental spending will continue to increase at 1 percent per annum.</p>
<p>So, the government is borrowing to fund tax cuts — something that almost any economist would advise against. The IFS estimates that balancing the books will now require an extra £20 billion worth of cuts per year by 2028.</p>
<p>The thing is, Hunt knows that this isn’t going to be his problem. It’s going to be Labour’s problem. Political commentators will call this savvy politics from Hunt. But if the chancellor has succeeded in pushing Starmer into a hole, it’s a hole Starmer dug for himself.</p>
<p>Labour has tied its own hands by introducing an <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/07/labours-self-imposed-straightjacket">absurd fiscal rule</a>, which commits the Party to balancing the books over its first term in office. He has also refused to raise taxes on the wealthy or on big businesses, meaning that any future Labour government will be severely constrained when it comes to public spending.</p>
<p>Over the long term, it will be Rachel Reeves, not Jeremy Hunt, who will have to figure out how to raise an extra £20 billion per year to balance the books.</p>
<p>Reeves has repeatedly stated that she will raise tax revenues by stimulating the economy, yet Labour has tied its own hands on this front too.</p>
<p>Not only will the Party be unable to increase spending on public services when in office, it recently abandoned the planned £28 billion increase in green investment, which would have created jobs and boosted growth while tackling climate breakdown.</p>
<p>Absent a plan to boost growth, Reeves will just have to hope that the global economy booms while Labour is in office. And with geopolitical conflict, trade tensions and climate chaos all on the rise, this seems extraordinarily unlikely.</p>
<p>Rather than investing to boost growth, the Tories are set on continuing to subsidise the wealth and power of those at the top. And Labour is not going to stand in their way.</p>
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Grace Blakeleyhttps://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/03/its-time-to-abandon-thatcherism/It’s Time to Abandon Thatcherism2024-03-07T21:16:04Z2024-03-06T11:17:28Z<p>This year’s Budget takes place on the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. I represent a coalfield community. The destruction of the coal industry and the miners’ fight to save it left deep scars, and we are still living with the consequences. Sunak’s and Hunt’s central economic logic is rooted in the Thatcherite ideology […]</p>
<h3>Thatcher’s assault on the miners led to generational decay in communities across the country. And, 40 years on, amid crumbling infrastructure and dysfunctional public services, the Chancellor is set to continue her devastating legacy.</h3>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This year’s Budget takes place on the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. I represent a coalfield community. The destruction of the coal industry and the miners’ fight to save it left deep scars, and we are still living with the consequences. </span><span style="font-weight: 400"><br />
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</span><span style="font-weight: 400">Sunak’s and Hunt’s central economic logic is rooted in the Thatcherite ideology which brought about the strike. Four decades on, the neoliberal philosophy is still the same: increase the power of big corporations; reduce the power of working people; redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top. What has this achieved?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Look around the country today, not just at the former mining communities. Nothing seems to work for ordinary people anymore. Public services no longer function, our infrastructure is crumbling, our town centres are boarded up. In recent years working people have experienced the biggest fall in living standards since records began. At the same time, the wealth of the richest has exploded and inequality has reached levels seldom seen before. The wealth of Britain’s billionaires has risen from £53.9 billion in 1990 to more than £684 billion in 2023. The least wealthy 10 percent of households, on the other hand, have a household wealth of £15,400 or less. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today’s Budget announcements will continue our country down the same unequal path. </span><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-hunt-national-insurance-cut-budget-b2506185.html"><span style="font-weight: 400">Research</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has found that the Chancellor’s flagship plans to cut 2p off National Insurance contributions will cost £10.4 billion. Almost half of that giveaway would end up in the pockets of the richest fifth of households, while only 3 percent would benefit the poorest fifth. Londoners would benefit the most (£608 on average), while those in the North East would get less than £1 per day (£342 on average).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Another </span><a href="https://www.ippr.org/articles/state-of-the-north-2021-22-powering-northern-excellence"><span style="font-weight: 400">report </span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">from IPPR, State of the North, reveals the stark regional dimensions to inequality in Britain. In 2010, total wealth per head in the North stood at 84 percent of the level of England, and 64 percent of the South East, the wealthiest region. By 2030, wealth per head in the North is projected to stand at 79 percent of the level of England, and just 55 percent the level of the South East. The North of England and Midlands were once the industrial heartlands of the world. Now they are held back by an economic system that is past its sell-by date.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Tories may wish to evade their responsibility for the current state of the economy, but it was already languishing before the body blow inflicted by the warped Truss experiment. The British Establishment has also sought to hide its guilt by talking about a ‘cost of living crisis’ as though it was something that just happened, inflicted by some invisible hand. But the crisis facing millions of British homes was and remains a consequence of the neoliberal economics that governments continue to embrace. The Truss experiment was therefore not an aberration, as the present administration pretends. It was the ideological distillation of all that the Conservatives have come to stand for in the post-Thatcher era.</span><span style="font-weight: 400"><br />
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</span><span style="font-weight: 400">Hunt and Sunak have themselves decided to react to the inflationary problem using conventional economics, introducing further fiscal tightening with the highest taxes on working people in more than a generation. The government’s allies in the Bank of England then gave things a more vicious twist by introducing monetary tightening too. The net effect was massive downward pressure on household budgets. The Governor and the government both warned against wage rises and did their best to suppress industrial action by the working class.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Today’s Budget is simply a continuation of this neoliberal orthodoxy. Of course, in fiscal terms, it is nonsense. The real meaning is political and poses a particular challenge to Labour’s front bench. The truth is that Sunak and Hunt expect to lose the upcoming general election. Faced with an oncoming political force consisting of millions of voters, the Budget is their political response. It is designed to lay a trap for an incoming Labour government.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">A comparison might be made with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Leading an army of 500,000</span><span style="font-weight: 400">, Napoleon went deep into Russian territory en route to Moscow. The Russian army retreated, but in doing so </span><span style="font-weight: 400">it applied scorched-earth tactics, burning anything the French Army might want to use. The French supply chain then proved too long and its soldiers could not be fed or munitioned.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Tories are laying waste to the public finances, public services, and the earning power of working people in the same way, making a clear attempt to hobble the incoming administration. Tax revenues cut, services slashed, the deficit at record levels. They are trying to ensure that further impoverishment is the only future possible, with or without them leading it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Within the framework of conventional economic theory and practice, a Labour government will therefore face great difficulty when it seeks to deliver its mandate for real change. Frankly, if a Labour government plays by these rules, it will lose. </span><span style="font-weight: 400">There are clear warnings from our own history. When Labour Prime Ministers preside over cuts, we face electoral doom. Look at the end of the Macdonald government or the electoral consequences of Callaghan’s austerity. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The only rational response is to avoid this Tory trap by rethinking the whole intellectual edifice of neoliberal economics and to rebuild our economy on a new basis. A government intent on national reconstruction would rid itself of the crippling financial orthodoxy which has led to the near collapse of public services. It would set about tackling the now catastrophically large divisions in income and wealth.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This means shifting the balance of power in our society towards working people so that they have stronger trade union rights and higher wages. It also means modernising the tax system so that the huge sums of wealth accumulated by the super-rich can be taxed fairly and at the same level that income from work is taxed. This is the only credible path to ending austerity.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It would recognise that monopoly power in many sectors of the economy is what lies at the heart of inflation, and not turn the other cheek when markets are failing to deliver for working people. It would pursue an industrial strategy underpinned by public investment that creates well-paid trade union jobs throughout the UK regions in socially useful industries, like renewable energy. Such a government would set our country on a path towards a new economic settlement that could turn the tide on economic decline and sustain Labour in office.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Is the public ready for the large scale changes which this would entail? The answer is yes. There is a great desire for a real alternative to the political settlement that has blighted so many lives and communities since the Miners’ Strike began. The best way to mark the anniversary would be to start building it.</span></p>
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Jon Trickett