From: New Worker Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
New Worker Online Digest
Week commencing 11th May, 2001.
1) Editorial - Vote Labour.
2) Lead story - Elections set for 7th June.
3) Feature article - Savings to replace state welfare.
4) International story - Trimble "resignation" condemned.
5) British news item - Telling the Toxic Texan to cool it.
1) Editorial
Vote Labour.
FROM now until June 7th the TV and newspapers will drench us with chatter
about swingometers, opinion polls, battlebuses, baby-kissing and pundits
going over the entrails of party manifestos. Leading politicians from the
three major parties, mostly exiles from the legal profession, will keep
popping up on the telly giving us good cause to do the washing up and make
some more tea.
This tedious business is not thrust at us because the election might bring
about some earth-shattering and fundamental change. On the contrary,
elections are hyped-up to make them seem more full of promise than they
actually are -- it is bourgeois democracy that is really being sold.
It is important for us, those who want to see revolutionary change
involving the seizing of state power by the working class and who want to
build a socialist society, to recognise that bourgeois elections are not
going to be a means of achieving that revolution whoever we vote for or
whoever we put forward as candidates.
The struggle for socialism and real change has to be fought on every front
and at all times. It certainly cannot be confined to Parliament or lelt in
the hands ofa clutch of MPs -- however left-wing.
So should we vote and campaign at all? Yes we should because working class
interests need to be defended and advanced here and now while we are still
living under capitalist dictatorship.
It is also important to recognise that in Britain the
"first-past-the-post" system means that elections are really fought between
the two major parties in order to form a government made up of one party
with at least a working majority.
Some people argue that various forms of proportional representation would
be better as those systems give a better chance to smaller Parties and give
the left at least a small voice in Parliament.
This may well be so. But it is also the case that PR creates a tendency
for coalitions of the centre-right to emerge and become embedded. The
experience of other European countries shows that PR all too often leads to
permanent control by the political centre -- in Britain that would be a
position occupied by the Labour right, the Lib Dems and the pro-Euro wing
of the Tories.
It is much more in the interests of the working class to have the
first-past-the-post system which can result in an outright Labour victory.
It is also argued by some on the left that "New Labour" is so drastically
different from "Old Labour" that we should wash our hands of it and support
one or other of the small left parties that put up candidates.
The reality is that none of these parties can win and therefore can't
deliver anything at all.
And it's not true that the Labour Party has become a totally different
party from the mythical "Old Labour".
The Labour Party was always led by right-wing social-democrats and some
leading figures of the past were bywords for class-collaboration and
reaction -- Hugh Gaitskell, Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Reg Prentice
and others, not to mention the gang of four who formed the breakaway Social
Democratic Party -- the House of Lords is full of such people.
The difference is that the left in the Labour Party is smaller and weaker
than it once was. It reflects a lower level of militancy in the working
class at the present time. This in turn means the right is having an easier
time than it has sometimes had and is able to press home its advantage.
This situation will change.
And yet for all the current problems the Labour Party remains essentially
and fundamentally different from the Tories, Lib Dems and others. It is
organisationally linked to the trade union movement and it is still the
mass party of the working class.
This relationship between Labour and the unions is under constant attack
-- from the right and even some on the left. It is a link the bosses and
the capitalist class would smash tomorrow if only it could. They regard its
potential with loathing because a rise in the militancy of the working
class could then be brought to bear an Parliament.
Blair has already bowed to pressure from this quarter and at least partly
restored the right of workers to be represented by a trade union -- a right
the Tories had taken away. Of course there is much more to be done. But
what is absolutely certain is that we need another dose of the Tories like
we need bubonic plague -- we say vote Labour everywhere and keep the
Tories, the BNP and the rest in the wildemess!
*********************
2) Lead story
Elections set for 7th June.
by Daphne Liddle
PRIME MINISTER Tony Blair last Tuesday officially announced the date of the
general election, as widely expected to be on 7th June, to coincide with
local elections that were postponed from 3rd May because of the foot and
mouth crisis.
This means that seven Bills currently before Parliament will have to be
dropped because of lack of time.
These include the Homes Bill which involves a "seller's pack"; the
International Development Bill which deals with overseas aid; the Bill
which would ban tobacco advertisements; the Hunting Bill; the Commonhold
and Leasehold Reform Bill; the Culture and Recreation Bill and the Adoption
and Children Bill.
There will be some sighs of relief among tobacco barons, landlords and the
hunting fraternity.
There remain some bills which the Government intends to rush through,
including the Criminal Justice Bill which extends DNA testing and child
curfews. It also gives fixed fines for a range of public disorder offences.
The Health and Social Care Bill is also set to be pushed through. This
will abolish community health councils.
The Government has dropped plans to allow police access to the Inland
Revenue files of suspected criminals.
The Finance Bill, implementing the budget, has already been passed.
The announcement effectively blocked Home Secretary Jack Straw from
announcing new sentencing rules for repeat offenders.
The election is happening this year and not in 2002 to speed the process
of getting Britain into the single European currency. A referendum will be
needed and already the propaganda to promote this is beginning to emerge.
It is also happening this year because a deepening economic crisis is
sweeping world capitalism. Employment rates are not too bad right now but
are likely to rise steeply soon.
Recent weeks have seen massive job cuts in the new technology industries
on a global scale which will impacton Britain. This week the communications
firm NTL announced 3,000 redundancies, most of which will come from its
22,000 British workforce.
Traditional manufacturing in dustry in Britain is in deep trouble. There
is not one major car manufacturer that has not been affected.
When the demand for cars drops, the steel industry suffers and Corus is
sacking thousands.
The future of Cammel Laird shipbuilders now depends on a successful bid
from Swan Hunters.
Factories throughout Britain are reporting a sharp drop in confidence
according to the latest Confederation of British Industry quarterly survey.
That says the balance of manufacturers who ate optimistic was now minus 29
per cent, from minus three per cent in January.
Labour seems set to win the election provided there is an adequate
turnout. But Blair is unlikely to be rising so high in the popularity polls
once the chilly economic winds start to drive up the unemployment figures.
**********************
3) Feature article
Savings to replace state welfare.
by Caroline Colebrook
'I`HE BABY-bond scheme announced by tbe (;overnrncnl two weeks ago may be
part ol' a long-term stralcgy Lo undermine stale welfare by pcrsuading
people to save or Lake out private insurance Lo cover illness, unemployment
and so on.
Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the scheme to give each new born child
a starter payment of at least �250, rising to �3,000 For those in low
income homes, to be put in trust until they are 18 as part of the
Government's proclaimed war on child poverty.
The savings accounts would be topped up at ages five, 11 and 16 to five a
maximum endowment of �8OO.
Families are to be encouraged to add to these trusts to give each young
adult a sum to help towards higher education costs or setting themselves up
as independent adults.
Many have pointed out this is small beer compared to the value of higher
education grants that have been abolished by successive government's,
together with the burden of tuition fees that have been added.
The Prime Minister was accompanied by Chancellor Gordon Brown, Education
and Employment Secretary David Blunkett and Social Security Secrehry
Alislair Darling at a recent press conference where they described this
package -- to be introduced in April 2003 -- as part of a "significant
reshaping of the welfare state".
At the same time they announced plans for a separate "Saving Gateway" to
encourage people on low income to save, saying the Government would match
pound for pound the savings of the poor up to �50 a month.
They claimed this was part of the Government's determination to match
"rights with rcsponsibilities".
No doubt the stakeholder pension schemes for the low paid are also part of
this vision.
"We want to encourage adults to save for themselves to help ride out
difficult times, losing a job or becoming ill for example," said Mr Blair.
He did not say expliciCly that this encouragement to save is likely in
future to replace the entitlement to various benefits and that more and
more benefits are likely to be made meanstested rather than linked to
National Insurance payments and at a statutory level.
Tony Blair was asked if labour was abandoning the notion that Government
would always provide in the areas of health, education and pensions.
He replied: "This for us is all part of changing the very nature of the
way we look at the welfare state, so that the welfare state becomes about
Government helping people to help themselves, rather than government doing
everything for people or simply handing out benefits to people."
Alistair Darling added: "We are seeing a fundamental shift towards our
vision of a welfare state that is much more than just a basic protection
and insurance but instead plays an active role in helping people become
independent."
Gordon Brown quoted from a 1995 Tory party manifesto which promised to
create a "property-owning democracy".
He said: "Now it is the Labour Party which is saying we believe in a
wealth-owning democracy for all, which is a wider vision for the future."
For the working class, this is a very dangerous vision. It will undermine
the safety net of state welfare.
And it shows up the myth in the very concept of a "welfare state". We do
not live in a welfare state but in a capitalist state that provides some
state welfare.
In times of capitalist crisis and high unemployment the demand for state
welfare to sustain the unemployed and their families is heavy. It is a
burden the capitalist system wants to be rid of.
It is a policy of the capitalist state to get rid of state welfare
regardless of which political party occupies the front benches in
Parliament. Refusing to vote Labour and so allowing in a Tory government
would only accelerate the process. It will take more than just votes to
stop this.
Clearly, the thinking of the right-wing Labour leadership needs to be
strongly countered by the trade union movement, who are after all,
organisationally linked to the Labour Party, as well as seeing a
strengthening of the struggles for decent wages.
The capitalists don't mind, up to a point, paying benefit to those in
full-time work because it means bosses can get away with paying lower
wages. The tax payers' money ends up in the bosses pockets.
And in times of high unemployment and low wages there will always be
masses who struggle to get by from day to day, never mind saving for the
future.
The savings these people will have, if any, will not be enough to keep
them from the direst poverty.
Meanwhile state benefits will all wither in value and those who depend on
them will suffer extreme poverty.
At the same time the capitalists are now urging us at every turn to take
out loans to pay off debts or to splash out on rare luxuries.
Repaying these debts will mean workers have even less of their earnings
available to save.
There is no substitute for the security of state benefits.
The scheme may seem generous but it will eventually take far more than it
gives.
*************************
4) International story
Trimble "resignation" condemned.
by Steve Lawton
FOOT and mouth or foot in the mouth? While that affliction of cattle has
affected daily life on the island of Ireland as it has here, the
provocative announcement by David Trimble, Ulster Unionist party (UUP)
leader and Northern Ireland Assembly first minister, that he will resign on
1st July, is an affliction of a potentially more serious nature.
He said that if the IRA do not begin destroying their weapons before the
30th June decommissioning deadline, he will go.
Peter Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, sneered,
declaring that it amounted to nothing more than a barely disguised election
stunt.
He demanded that Trimble go to the Assembly and tender his resignation now
if he really wanted to up the ante, and they would be happy to resign with
him.
While that view is equally self serving and is clearly connected to the
General Election too, the implications are obviously more serious than that.
Northern Ireland minister Dr John Reid regarded it as "highly regrettable"
and warned: "Progress needs to made on all fronts. The two governments set
June as the date by which they believed substantial progress would be made
to secure the full implementation of the Agreement."
A tall order given the disatisfaction among nationalists and republicans
over the crucial failure on policing, the banning of Sinn Fein from the
cross-border ministerial council and the inadequate British troop
withdrawals.
To date, the IRA have undertaken to co-operate with an independently
verified monitoring of an IRA arms dump. Trimble's insistence is tantamount
to declaring that the IRA are defeated aggressors and that the British
occupation is a benign part of the equation.
Now that we have it on record that during the Bloody Sunday events of 1972
Martin McGuinness was a senior IRA figure, we can accept the weight of that
reconfirmation of the IRA's absolutely consistent adherence to the Good
Friday Agreement. Moreover, despite all manner of tripwires and political
mines, the IRA maintains its ceasefire which it first undertook seven years
ago.
He said Tuesday that Trimble "intends to go forward at this general
election effectively allowing the rejectionist unionist tail to wag the
unionist dog." That, he said, amounts to offering a "negative manifesto,
and in effect a wreckers' charter" to the unionist people. On the last
occasion he threatened to resign, Tony Blair suspended the Legislative
Assembly for three months.
Sinn Fein leaders have frequently pointed out that this unionist
intransigence and dicing with the lives of both communities Catholic and
Protestant, unionist and nationalist, is part of a persistent rearguard
attack on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
It fits into a pattern of what republicans call the reactionary securocrat
agenda within the British state. And it may well be that diehard unionists
see the election as a means to put the Good Friday Agreement on trial. If
so, it will backfire.
There is no doubt, particularly given the way the Patten policing
proposals were shredded by the former northern Ireland minister Peter
Mandelson virtually setting a preservation order on the Royal Ulster
Constabulary (RUC), that there is a continuing effort by reactionaries in
in the British ruling class to unravel the political process.
But three years on, some solid foundations for confidence in progress to
date has been set firmly down. Not only are diehards finding it difficult
to push the IRA out of its disciplined resolve, but many unionists have to
swallow the bitter pill administered by the European Human Rights Court
last week.
The Court found against the British Government, ordering it to compensate
14 families of those who were killed by the British Army and RUC between
1982 and 1992. Some victims are at the centre of shoot-to-kill claims.
Martin McGuinness, since his position in the IRA at the time of Bloody
Sunday was recently declared, has been personally vilified in order to
undermine that inquiry. That's partly because it is probing the wretched
depths of British terror, and unionist bigots and reactionaries don't like
what is emerging.
Hardline DUPers tabled a motion of no confidence in the education minister
in the northern Ireland Assembly, but amid heated exchanges between Sinn
Fein and the DUP, the motion was defeated 45 to 31 -- Sinn Fein was backed
by the SDLP, Alliance Party and Women's Coalition.
Martin McGuinness, asked what the IRA's response would be to David
Trimble's announcement, said: "We had a very important initiative from the
IRA [last year] which unionists and David Trimble threw back in their faces
-- that was the international inspectors and their ability to come to
Ireland and inspect a number of dumps.
"This was coupled with an even more dramatic announcement from the IRA
that in a particular context, which they outlined, that they were prepared
to initiate a process to put weapons beyond use. David Trimble telling all
of us that he knows best how to deal with the issue?
"I can say without fear of contradiction, that if David Trimble persists
with this line, in my view, we will never see decommissioning."
*********************
5) British news item
Telling the Toxic Texan to cool it.
by Renee Sams
HUNDREDS of people joined hands around the United States embassy in
London's Grosvenor Square last Saturday to express their concern about
President George Bush's refusal to honour the Kyoto Agreement on global
climate change.
The event was organised by Friends of the Earth , the Green Party and
Greenpeace. They were joined by the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist
Party, Globalise Resistance and many individuals with their own slogans and
placards.
They were mainly young people from many walks life and from many different
organisations but were united in their fears of what escalating global
climate change will do to their future.
They all believe that climate change is now a grave th reat to the future
of the human race and the longer we delay taking action, the more difficult
it will be to halt and the greater risk we run.
They are angry that the US, the greatest producer of climate changing
gases responsible for around 25 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions, is
all set to make it worse.
The Kyoto agreement allows for the temporary exemption of some developing
countries. But even India would need astronomical economic growth to
produce as much greenhouse gas as the US seems determined to continue to do.
Demonstrators dressed in carnival attire, with death masquerading as Uncle
Sam, along with the statue of taking liberties and the Toxic Texan, led by
a lively group of drummers, made fheir way to the High Commission of the
Maldives Islands to draw attention to their plight.
The people of the low-lying Maldives are amongst those in greatest danger
of the rising sea levels it action is not taken to curb global
warming.
Bangladesh is another country where those who live in the delta of the
River Ganges, already suffering from more frequent floods, are also in
danger of being swamped if sea levels rise further.
Green activists also noted that President Bush's main backers are the big
corporations and among the biggest are the oil giants Esso and Chevron They
are calling for a boycott of these companies.
The next world climate change talks are scheduled to take place in Bonn in
July.
*********************
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