From: New Worker Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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New Worker Online Digest
Week commencing 9th February, 2001.
1) Editorial - Who pays?
2) Lead story - New war threat to Middle East.
3) Feature article - Steel workers stand together.
4) International story - Iraqi girl now blind.
5) British news item - Straw attacks 1951 refugee convention.
1) Editorial
Who pays?
THE whiff of a general election is in the air. Already the smear merchants
are busily looking for stories and the three major parties are setting out
their stalls and practising their sales patter.
The Tories, who represent the seriously rich, are pushing their usual line
of income tax cuts. Well they would, wouldn't they. Those with the greatest
wealth obviously stand to gain the most from such a policy.
They claim they could make £8 billion worth of tax cuts without slashing
spending on health, education and public services. Labour, quite rightly,
points out that these figures don't add up and warns that spending cuts
would have to be made if tax cuts on this scale were introduced.
To broaden the base of support for this 'fat cats' policy, the Tories are
now proposing scrapping all tax on savings for those on the basic rate of
tax. This may well tempt the minority who can manage to put a bit by, but
it won't be worth a candle if the services we all need are squeezed even
more than they are now.
The sub-text of this Tory proposal is the usual old rubbish about standing
on your own feet, saving for your old age and looking after yourself.
It's all pretty cynical given that even the Tories know their Thatcherite
ideas can't work for the majority of people because wages are too low and
unemployment is set to rise -- the threat to the steel industry is a clear
warning of the fast approaching recession. Already personal debt is a big
headache for many people and saving is out of the question when short-time
working and redundancy knock at the door.
The same realities apply to Labour's more modest tax proposals. These
focus on Chancellor Gordon Brown's plan to give more tax relief for
families with children.
There is no doubt that child poverty in Britain is a scandal and many
families are under enormous strain because of the long hours parents have
to work and the dire shortage of good quality, affordable child care.
But tax credits would only benefit some families. Those without a
wage-earner and those on the lowest incomes will be no better off. The
looming recession will of course make tax concessions less and less
relevant to more and more families.
What is really needed is for Labour to break the mould set by previous
Tory governments on taxation and spending and to shift the tax burden onto
the shoulders of the rich -- it is after all the fruits of our labour which
lines their pockets and it is this wealthy elite which is getting richer
while the poorest get poorer.
The prospect of yet another recession means the rich will spare no effort
in protecting every penny of their unearned income and profits extracted
from the exploitation of labour. Talk of higher direct income tax for top
earners would provoke squeals of rage.
These parasites want normal service to continue -- that is for the working
class to bear the brunt of the crisis their capitalist system has created.
They want the poor to pay for them.
They hope that offering little crumbs of tax relief to various targeted
groups of people will divide the working class and cloud the issues.
They hope we will forget who gains most from tax cuts and who stands to
lose. And they certainly hope we have given up on the fight against VAT --
the most unjust tax of all since everyone has to pay at the same rate
regardless of whether a person owns billions or hasn't got two halfpennies
to rub together.
The issue of the injustice of VAT should be raised loudly. We should not
fall into the trap of thinking this is a lost cause simply because it is a
tax which stems from the European Union. If we accept that false argument
we will never protest at anything Brussels throws at us and we will be
treating the capitalist classes of Europe as untouchable and unreachable.
It is worth noting that even the Euro-sceptic Tories do not oppose VAT.
The capitalists in every country of Europe support such indirect taxation
because they know it makes the working class pay the lion's share. Our
fight is to reverse that situation and make the rich pay through a policy
of progressive direct income tax -- we say scrap VAT and let everyone
benefit!
*********************
2) Lead story
New war threat to Middle East.
by Our Middle East affairs correspondent
GENERAL Ariel Sharon, the leader of the reactionary Likud bloc, has won the
Israeli premiership elections.
His defeated rival, General Ehud Barak has resigned as leader of the
Labour Party though he will remain caretaker premier until Sharon forms his
government.
Speaking to Labour supporters, Barak said "Friends, we have lost a battle
but we will win the war."
Sharon's victory came as no surprise to the pundits. The Likud leader had
a 20 per cent lead in the opinion polls and he garnered 59.5 per cent of
the vote to Barak's 40-odd per cent share when the voting took place.
But Sharon's victory is likely to be a hollow one -- the 60 per cent
turn-out was the lowest in Israel's history even though most workers got
the day off to vote. And this was largely due to the fact that the Israeli
Arab minority and some ofthe peace activists had boycotted the polls.
The Israeli Arabs -- Palestinians who managed to keep their homes after
the first Arab-israeli war ended in 1949 -- account for some 14 per cent of
the electorate. Most followed the call from the communist led Democratic
Front for Peace and Equality and the Arab democratic parties to boycott the
vote.
For them there was little difference between a Barak who wanted a total
Palestinian surrender in return for a few crumbs and Sharon and his openly
Arab-hating supporters who will give nothing but whose future is already in
doubt.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said
the vote "was a signal to the Labour Party that this false romantic
relationship between us as an Arab sector and the Labour Party has ended.
We cannot accept that we are always losing with the losers and losing even
with the winners.
early election?
The Israeli Arab MP added "I think this government will be the shortest
government even in the history of Israel. We will, from the very beginning,
act in order to bring it down and have an early election for both Knesset
and prime minister."
That could come soon. Sharon has to forge a bloc to have a majority in the
Knesset. He's offered to form a "government of national unity" with Labour
but it's an offer Labour can easily refuse. Veteran Labour leader Shimon
Peres, who wanted to stand instead of Barak, is waiting in the wings for
his final moment of destiny. And Peres needs to get the leadership first.
Then he'll move for a snap poll if he thinks Labour can win.
Sharon could try to cobble together a minority government with the support
of the small Jewish religious parties but their fundamentalist and
fanatical agenda will polarise Israeli society even further. The new
Israeli premier has got 45 days from 13 February to form a government. He
must then get Knesset approval for his budget by 31 March. If he fails new
elections automatically follow.
To most Arabs Sharon is the "Butcher of Beirut" a war-criminal responsible
for many deaths when Israel marched into Lebanon in 1982. In Syria Al Baath
-- the daily of the ruling Arab Socialist Renaissance Party said "By
choosing Sharon, Israel is actually choosing escalation, terrorism and
aggression and severing its last thin link to the peace process... the
victory of the bloody terrorist and war criminal Sharon ...is a clear
message by the Zionist entity to the Arabs amounting to an official
declaration of war."
In Iraq General Ali Hassan al Majid was even blunter. "You should not ask
me about the Zionist regime. We are setting up a Jerusalem army to liberate
Palestine." he declared.
In Lebanon the leading daily Al-Safir called on the Arabs to be ready for
a new era of struggle. "Fatigue or fear of the new murderer should not lead
us to surrender without fighting."
And it was business as usual in the occupied territories. Sharon
celebrated his victory by strutting over to the "Wailing Wall" a Zionist
shrine in the heart of Arab Jerusalem. Gun battles erupted in Hebron
between the Palestinian resistance and armed settler thugs holed up in
their enclave and an Israeli soldier was shot dead by the resistance in
Gaza.
Some say that the prospect of the Sharon government brings the region
nearer to war. Most Arabs know that the war began in 1948 and never ended.
Nor is it likely to now.
**********************
3) Feature article
Steel workers stand together.
by Renee Sams
ANGRY steel workers held an emergency conference in London last Friday
after the shock announcement by the Corus group of mass plant closures and
joh losses.
Corus realises it faces the threat of industrial action and so backed down
on the immediate implementation of its plans, giving the unions two weeks
to come up with an alternative strategy to save jobs.
On the closure list are the Ebbw Vale site in South Wales with a loss of
780 jobs and the Bryngwyn site, also in South Wales with 127 jobs.
The giant plant at Llanwern is to lose its iron and steel-making
operations together with the annealing and tempering facilities with the
loss of about 2,000 of the 3,000 jobs there.
And on Teeside, the closure of the coil plate mill will cost 234 jobs.
Throughout this year there will be further closures of the annealing and
tempering facilities and galvanising mill at Port Talbot which has been
mothballed for some time.
The amalgamation of the head offices of construction and engineering
steels sections will lead to another reduction of 400 jobs. The
streamlining of central functions, including the corporate centre, will see
another 200 office jobs disappear.
Overall there will be 6,050 job losses with the biggest cut at Llanwern,
an area that has already lost many industrial jobs.
Bob Shannon, a national officer of the Amalgamated Engineering and
Electrical Union, told the emergency conference: "We had braced ourselves
but none of us saw how deeply we would be affected. We are shocked and
bitterly disappointed at the scale of job losses.
He said the company had had "enormous co-operation from the workforce" and
expressed his anger that far from just changing direction, as Corus had
described the package, "they are taking the capacity out of the workforce".
At the same time as the conference, just a few miles away in the City of
London there was rejoicing as they heard of the steel giant's plans to
"restructure" the industry in this country and its aims to rule out further
capital investment and to keep necessary expenditure on plant to a minimum.
Trades were overjoyed, marking the company's shares up by ten percent.
Corus was attacked by MPs and the Government for its shock announcement.
Ministers are working with the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC)
to try to save jobs and plants as they believe there will be an upturn in
the steel market in the not too distant future.
The Anglo-Dutch Corus Group has 63,900 employees and 23 business units
located worldwide. It was formed from what remained of British Steel in
October 1999 which merged with the Dutch company Koninklijke Hoogovens.
It is chaired by Sir Brian Moffalt, a former British Steel accountant
earning only a modest salary who made his name by axing jobs at Port Talbot
in the 1980s. Today, at the head of the Corus Group, his earnings are
fabulous.
The measures that Sir Brian is proposing are aimed "to significantly
improve the Group's competitiveness" and will result in "the reduction of
over three million tonnes of iron and steel-making capacity".
He blamed the "poor perPormance" of Corus and "lack of growth" in demand
in Britain. Last year, he said, the British part of Corus made a loss of
£350 million
He did not mention that in 1999 the company paid out an £800 million
special dividend to share holders to sweeten the merger with the Dutch
company, and so has not invested very much in the company to renew and
maintain plant and improve competitiveness.
When former Prime Minister Thatcher privatised British Steel, the company
was given a £4 billion subsidy from taxpayers. It also benefits from a
re-jigged pension fund that yields £1 billion every year.
In 1996 the company made pretax profits of £1 billion but despite all that
money it lost £350 million last year.
Corus exports more than half its production to Europe and worldwide there
is a glut of commodity steel production with prices at a 20-year low.
A nother complicating factor is the lack of demand from the domestic
industry, which fell by 13 percent between 1988 and 2000.
Steel making in Britain has also been hit by cheap imports, especially
from Russia and Asia. According to statistics From the Iron and Steel
Statistics Bureau in 1970 Britain had a market of 19 million tonnes, of
which 18 million tonnes were made here and the rest imported.
By 2000 we were exporting only 7.3 million tonnes and importing 6.6
million tonnes.
But the steel workers are not giving up. ISTC general secretary Michael
Leahy warned: "If Corus will not enter a meaningful dialogue, then I have
to say this, whilst we believe in the force of argument, our members are in
the mood for the argument of force."
The steel workers employed by Corus in Britain are being supported by
their Dutch colleagues who have vowed to boycott any orders transferred
from Britain.
Dutch steel unions FNV Bondgenoten and CNV met Michael Leahy earlier this
week to finalise details of the boycott.
Genit Idema, leader of FNV Bondgenoten, said workers at the Corus plant in
Ijmuiden are furious about the way their British colleagues are being
treated.
He said: "Workers in Holland cannot understand how 6,000 people can be
sacked and how there wasn't another way to solve the problems."
Michael Leahy said: "The resolution not to take orders from the UK is
especially significant for Ebbw Vale. Nothing that Corus announced last
week is a done deal."
*************************
4) International story
Iraqi girl now blind.
MARIAM Hamza, the Iraqi girl who received leukemia treatment in Scotland
after a dramatic appeal by George Galloway MP has now gone blind and
doctors say there is no hope of restoring her sight.
The seven-year-old girl has been receiving treatment in the United States
assisted by the Bruderhof Communities, a US-based group campaigning for the
end of sanctions against Iraq.
"Her eyes were carefully examined and it was determined that she had
suffered damage to the macular areas of her retinas, the optic nerve and
the centre of sight in her brain," the campaign reported.
"There is no hope for her eyesight to be restored. Mariam has been
condemned to live in darkness because of the cruel and criminal sanctions
imposed on Iraq by the United States through the United Nations," it said.
"Because the sanctions prohibit the importation by Iraq of the parts
necessary to maintain the equipment used to determine correct dosages for
treating leukemia patients, it is very difficult for doctors to administer
the medicines required to successfully treat leukemia. As a result Mariam,
an innocent child, became blind".
Mariam returned to Iraq this week via the Jordanian capital, Amman. There
she was met by George Galloway's wife, Dr Amineh Abu Zayyad. "At the moment
she's doing very well," she said. "She's been going to physiotherapy and
she's really fit and looking happier. She's learned to swim. She's ok. Her
blindness is irreversible but French scientists are carrying out work that
could eventually help."
*********************
5) British news item
Straw attacks 1951 refugee convention.
by Daphne Liddle
HOME SECRETARY Jack Straw last week tried to match the Tories in playing
the anti-asylum seeker card in the runup to the general election by
proposing new draconian measures against refugees for the whole European
Union.
And since many of his proposals would contravene the 1951 United Nations
Geneva Convention on Refugees, drawn up after the horrors of Nazism had
just been defeated, he has proposed that this convention should be
rewritten.
He claims it was a "well intentioned protocol" signed just after the
Second World War when millions of displaced citizens roamed the world and
asked should it apply in today's conditions?
The truth is that today there are again millions of refugees wandering
around the world. Only a small fraction ever end up in Europe but most are
displaced by wars that are either waged or fostered by the western
imperialist powers.
Straw proposes that all European Union countries should have the same
harsh policy on asylum seekers, that they should agree among them to take
certain quotas from those deemed to have been living under oppressive
regimes and bar the rest.
There would be a long list of countries deemed safe and no refugees would
be accepted from these. These countries include the Czech Republic and
Romania where Roma people now suffer real persecution under the new
capitalist regimes.
Earlier in the week, Straw had already dispatched a party of immigration
officials to the Balkans to try to stem the flood of refugees coming from
there towards EU countries.
He claims to be trying to put a stop to the criminal gangs who traffic in
smuggling people into other countries, including Britain.
If there is no legal way to find asylum what else can they do?
Straw's proposals also include sending "illegal" and "bogus"
asylum-seekers straight back to where they have come from. How can their
claim for asylum be judged if they are deemed bogus on sight? Many genuine
people are forced to use deception to escape oppression and illegal methods
to travel.
Already this country sends back thousands of refugees on a technicality if
they fail to fill in complex legal claim forms without examining their case
at all.
Many refugees coming to Europe or fleeing war-ravaged parts of Europe have
been displaced by imperialism in the first place and it should be our
ruling classes that pay the bill through taxation of the very rich.
The danger is that Straw's electioneering ploy is also looking like a good
vote-winning tactic to many other European governments. Strong interest has
been expressed by Germany, France and Italy, as well as support from the
Canadian and Australian governments.
But Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers was concerned about the attack on
the l951 convention. He said: "We should not erode the convention. I don't
think we should start to water down our international obligations. We have
to share the burden in a fair way but Europe is a very prosperous
continent."
In Britain Gurbux Singh, who chairs the Commission for Racial Equality,
said: "I did not get the impression that the issues had been fully thought
through and there were some real question marks about the practicality of
what he [Straw] was proposing."
*********************
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