Issue 287

—front page—

Labour leave children with empty plates

Scottish Executive block Free School Meals Bill

Scottish Socialist MSP Frances Curran this week served notice on the Scottish Executive that despite the decision by the Communities Committee to block the progress of her Free School Meals bill the fight goes on.
Not only is the blocking a crude assault on democracy but it also exposes the opposition of both the Executive parties, and the SNP.
All three backed the gagging move.
Frances told the Voice:
“I have been inundated with angry protests from members of the public and organisations outraged at the Communities Committee gagging of the free school meals debate.
“However, my message is that the fight to win healthy free meals for our primary schools is far from over and I can promise its opponents that they have seen nothing yet.
“Along with many other organisations supporting it, we will be challenging all MSPs to come clean and tell us where they stand on this important issue.
“If I am prevented from progressing the Bill through normal democratic channels, I may seek to raise it as an amendment to the Executive’s own Health Promotion in Schools bill.
“We will also launch a major text campaign to allow the thousands of supporters of Free School Meals to let their thumbs do the talking and text support for this major pro-health and anti-poverty measure.
“These messages will, of course, be forwarded to the First Minister so my message to free school meals supporters is, watch for the text number and text Jack with your views.
“I will also use any other legitimate parliamentary device to challenge the disgraceful anti-democratic behaviour of the Communities Committee, including examining its supposedly heavy workload which is their lame excuse for blocking my bill.
“The disgraceful treatment of the Free School Meals bill blows a hole in the fancy talk about Holyrood being a new democracy and shows that the big parties will cynically use their power to get their own way.
“The reality is that both the Scottish Executive and the SNP know that there is massive public support for free school meals and they are desperate to block any discussion of it.
“Both are content to back bans on junk food in schools and pay for glossy TV ads and food Tsars but take cover when a concrete policy such as free school meals is up for discussion.
“Our job is to expose the hypocrisy behind the gagging of debate and continue to make the case for free school meals loud and clear.”

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—page two—

Peerages scandal threatens Blair

by Ken Ferguson

George W Bush may be reeling from his electoral savaging last week, but at least he can comfort himself with the thought that he isn’t facing a grilling from Scotland Yard regarding the flogging of seats in the House of Lords to a bunch of unsavoury money men.
The question now is not so much when Blair will go but whether he will manage to get out in time.
There’s a cloud of suspicion brooding over Downing Street and someone’s in for a soaking.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion - despite hot denials - that the cash for peerages scandal lies behind the resignation from the government of multinational grocer, GM food fan and Blair bankroller, Lord Sainsbury.
Initially the prospect of a police probe was scoffed at by the spoonfed journalists who make a fat living rewriting press releases dished out to them by Blair’s spin doctors.
These so called ‘lobby’ journalists are portrayed as fearless seekers of truth when in reality they meet with Downing Street spinners twice a day to be told what to put in their articles.
Incidentally, despite all the rhetoric about a shining new democracy in Edinburgh, the establishment politicians there work the same type of operation, with the largely compliant Holyrood press corps producing a stream of ‘Jack trounces Nicola/Nicola trounce Jack’ pap which they have the cheek to pass off as news.
Despite the opinions of these ‘experts’, it is now clear that police are engaged in more than just a cosmetic glance at complaints about cash for peerages.
Key Blair henchman Lord ‘cashpoint’ Levy has been arrested and questioned and the cops are now asking questions of all present and recent government ministers.
Their enquiries have even taken them to the plush London home of ex-Tory leader and former Home secretary, Michael Howard.
Indeed the only top politico not yet in the frame is the man himself, former ‘Teflon Tony’ Blair.
Why?
The latest reports indicate that Scotland Yard is now taking a close interest in claims that the party produced a false balance sheet and broke the law by failing to disclose £12m worth of loans in audited annual figures published last year.
Oops.
It has been alleged that the loans were hidden from Labour’s own auditors which, if true, is a clearly illegal act with very serious consequences.
It is apparent that the cops will build a strong and serious case, with a wealth of evidence, before they come knocking on the famous black door.
Opening this new area of enquiry significantly turns up the heat on the increasingly beleaguered Blair, placing him firmly at the centre of suspicion.
Police are said to be looking into allegations that Labour was guilty of the “systematic concealment of liabilities” in its financial accounts, according to sources involved in the investigation, with press reports suggesting that senior New Labour figures knew that the loans were concealed from auditors.
The Scotland Yard team, led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates, is expected to feel Mr Blair’s collar in the next few weeks, with questions about the accounts.
The police will need to consider whether the alleged false balance sheet, part of Labour’s 2004 accounts, was a breach of the terms of the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which includes an offence of concealment or disguise.
Meanwhile, ministers are furiously putting distance between themselves and Blair by telling detectives they cannot explain why he nominated secret donors for peerages.
They believe “the net is closing in” on Mr Blair after Commissioner Yates wrote to every member of the Cabinet last week, and clearly intend to avoid sinking with the captain if SS New Labour goes down in a vortex of scandal.
Anyone who scoffs must recall that the current law was formulated as result of just such a scandal, involving Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George and his honours salesman, spy and fixer, Maundy Gregory.
Gregory went to jail and then into a comfortable exile in Paris.
LG avoided the jail but his political career never recovered and he was an increasingly isolated figure from the late 1920s until his death in 1945.

Kids call for free school meals

by Frances Curran

Last Friday I visited Haldane Primary school in Alexandria with Labour MSP Jackie Baillie.
The topic for their presentation, chosen by the class themselves, was free school meals.
The opening lines read: “In Finland, all schoolchildren from 7-18 are entitled to free school meals. The education authorities believe that children should not be dependent on their parents’ way of living to get proper food”
A red-faced Jackie Baillie was then confronted with the arguments.
“THINK ABOUT IT.
“Without doubt, a tasty nutritious hot meal has a dramatic impact on behaviour, concentration and the ability to retain information.
“We should learn about food and good eating habits when we are young.
“We believe that if every child received free school meals then: we would all be equal; we would work better on a full stomach; we would concentrate more; it ensures one hot meal a day; young children would be eating a balanced diet; children will be healthier; all of us would be healthier; we would be encouraged to try other foods.”
I cheered whilst Jackie Baillie squirmed, taught a lesson by the 9-10 year olds of Haldane school, who spoke more sense than Jack McConnell and all the Labour and Lib Dem backbenchers put together.
Who says young people want to eat junk food and don’t care about what they eat? It’s a pity we can’t get these pupils into the debate in Parliament. The Executive can try to silence the idea of Free Healthy School Meals by blocking my bill but they cannot stop the momentum for an idea whose time has come.
The presentation ended:
“I am a child, I am special. Every child is special and every child is equal. We look forward to hearing your views on this subject.”
A challenge if ever I heard it. To the boys and girls of P6 in Haldane school - respect!

Scotland’s rape crisis

Last week, SSP MSP Carolyn Leckie took part in a debate in the Scottish Parliament on violence against women.
The debate took place against a background of increasing violence against women in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out to defend women’s rights.
However, noted Carolyn, we will find women subjected to sexual violence close to home too.
Last year, despite 900 reports of rape throughout Scotland, there were just 39 convictions. That’s a rate of 4.3 per cent, even though the number of reported attacks has doubled in a decade.
Both the Criminal Procedure Act 1996 and The Sexual Offences Act 2003 were meant to give greater protection to women reporting rape and improve their chances of bringing a successful prosecution.
But the Scottish Executive’s own research shows these efforts have failed.
In June 2006, it was announced that the Lord Advocate was accepting 50 recommendations to improve the way that rape cases are investigated and prosecuted.
Carolyn said more is needed to protect and support victims of sexual violence.
The courts, for instance, are not even protecting them from humiliation and degradation in the witness box.
Research shows that defence lawyers made verbal applications to introduce evidence of the complainants’ sexual history in 23 per cent of rape cases.
Ninety five per cent of these were sprung on the complainant during her testimony,
“The nature of the questioning and the inspection of the complainers’ private lives, including their medical and gynaecological histories, can be potentially humiliating and intimidating”.
Research from the States suggests that introducing sexual history evidence lowers the chances of securing a conviction.
Carolyn called for specialist sexual violence courts of a type similar to Glasgow’s domestic violence court.
These courts are presided over by judges who will provide protection to women complainants; prosecutors are determined to secure justice for rape victims and defence lawyers are prevented from humiliating victims.
Until then, we will continue to fail women subjected to vile crimes against their person, whilst letting rapists believe that they can get off “Scot free”.

North Sea divers end strike

More than 900 North Sea divers and support staff, on strike since 1 November, have voted overwhelmingly to accept a pay package that will increase current rates by a cumulative 44.7 per cent over the next two years.
The divers’ dispute was backed in a Scottish Parliament motion tabled by Colin Fox MSP which noted that, despite doing a highly dangerous and demanding job, North Sea divers were paid less than members of the Scottish Parliament.
Some 703 - 84 per cent - voted to accept the deal, with 127 - 16 per cent- against, on an 80 per cent turnout. The strike will therefore end forthwith.
The settlement gives an immediate increase of 25 per cent on all rates, with a further five per cent on the new rates next April, and increases in November 2007 and 2008 of RPI plus 1.5 per cent or five per cent, whichever is greater.
The seven employer signatories to the deal will all now pay eight bank holidays, up from four, and each has undertaken to agree proper bargaining structures with the union, although pay will continue to be negotiated collectively.
“By any standard, this is a tremendous victory,” RMT general secretary Bob Crow said Tuesday.
“Divers and their support crews do difficult and hazardous work in an industry that makes enormous profits, and this settlement represents a massive stride towards reversing the two decades of pay erosion they have endured.
He concluded:
“Our members in the North Sea came out as one, stood together through ten days of solid strike action, and can return to work proud that their unity has won a significant advance.”

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—page three—

news

Gearing up for G8 2007

Up to 500 activists converged in the north German town of Rostock last week, to plan demos, road blockades and an Alternative Summit to coincide with next year’s G8 summit on the remote Baltic Sea island of Heiligindamm.
A delegation from Scotland gave detailed accounts of their experiences from G8 2005 in Gleneagles.
Participants included left-wing parties WASG and PDS, anarchist groups, anti-deportation and anti-nuclear campaigners and representatives from Germany’s NGO scene.
It was good to see autonomous groups working closely with anti-capitalist left groups.
Suggested tactics for the 2007 Alternative Summit include getting ‘big name’ speakers like Noam Chomsky to hold outdoor mass meetings, as a radical alternative to lecture-theatre style of ‘plenaries’.
Concerns were voiced that the organising process could become dominated by less radical NGOs, who seem lukewarm about direct action, proposing a series of press-conferences instead.
There were also concerns that the German trade unions remain ambivalent to the Anti-G8 movement

Council workers resist cliff-edge pay cuts made in the name of ‘equality’

by Richie Venton SSP National Workplace Organiser

Labour and SNP councils across Scotland, including Falkirk, Glasgow and North Lanarkshire, are slashing pay and conditions in so-called Equal Pay packages.
SSP members in the council workers’ unions are campaigning for a national demo to pull together the strands of struggle, to prevent isolation and dislocation being used as a weapon by the employers, and for strike action if cuts are imposed.
We have everything to fight for. Council and Scottish parliamentary elections loom, making councillors and MSPs nervous and susceptible to orchestrated pressure. The last thing these chancers want is a revolt of council workers, their families and communities.
The SSP MSPs used their allocated debating time last week to argue for funding from the Scottish Executive to reach settlements with the local government workers’ unions without detriment to services.
Carolyn Leckie, moving the motion, reported that her sister, who works with learning disabled adults, is about to see her pay slashed by nearly £3000.
“When the single status agreement was reached, equal pay had been a matter of law for almost three decades, but for all that time, women have had their labour stolen, and over their lifetimes, they have been short-changed by hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“This inequality persists.”
Glasgow city council’s 13,000 UNISON members are balloting for strike action against the Labour council’s attempt to impose a package that directly cuts the pay of one in six workers - nearly 5,000 of the 31,000 staff.
Some stand to lose over £10,000 in cliff-edge pay drops from March 2009.
Many of them are already amongst the lowest paid.
For instance, ushers at the chief executive’s offices face a cut of 10 per cent on their £15,063 salary.
The council insists that nobody will lose out as they will be retrained to restore their current salaries by March 2009. This is nonsense! Workers will have their pay frozen till then, and the scale of rises required and the time-scale to achieve the re-training make it impossible.
Kate Riordan, UNISON steward in Culture and Leisure services, urges members to vote yes for strike action.
“There are a lot of people in my department losing out badly. Michael is a Visitor Assistant, his wife Janette is a Senior Library Assistant, between them they stand to lose £4,000 a year. They are not untypical.
The council, she says, are bulldozing through the cuts.
“Even the council’s bribery of those who gain is dodgy. Many of them will actually lose out after cuts to enhancements, bonuses and overtime rates are taken into account. For example, cleaning staff face £400 a year cuts after the loss of enhancements.
“The council have said they will issue those who sign up for the new deal with lump sums in December. Everyone assumes they will get that for Christmas, when in fact it will not be until 28 December and therefore in the January pay packets.
“Another case of being economical with the truth!”
“I really hope we get the YES vote for strike action. And the councillors should be made aware that many council workers who used to vote labour will never do so again - over 4,500 of them, plus their families for a start.”

Scottish power profits reach for the sky

Scottish Power, the fifth largest energy supplier in the UK, has seen its pre-tax profits leap a staggering 77 per cent, to £483million, in the six months to September.
Meantime, Scottish Power bills have risen 32 per cent for gas, and 18 per cent for electricity.
Scottish Power is the target of a £12billion bid by Spanish company Iberdola.
Lovely news for shareholders, terrible news for us, as it spells an increasing concentration of ownership in the energy sector, the inevitable result of privatisation.
The company insists the profits are borne of ‘restructuring’, rendering Scottish Power ‘leaner and more responsive’.
In other words, sacking loads of staff and keeping power prices sky-high, thus ensuring that tens of thousands of over-65s die of cold-related illness in the coming months and some 90,000 children live in discomfort because their families cannot afford to pay their fuel bills.
Scottish Power blame rising wholesale prices.
But in fact, they source their electricity cheaply, from coal-fired generators, and forward-bought their gas when prices were lower.
Nonetheless, the government seems set to do nothing and charities like Help the Aged are reduced to lobbying the power giants, asking them to be a bit nicer.
If that happens, hell will freeze over. Then again, given fuel prices these days, that may be a possibility.

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—page four—

Israeli phosphorous use exposed

Civilians burned alive in Lebanon

“Phosphorous burns bodies, melting the flesh right down to the bone.”
So said a former US soldier, describing the use of white phosphorous, known in military slang as Willy Pete, in an Italian documentary for RAI News 24, into the US attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004.
Willy Pete is in the news again, a team from the UN confirming that the Israeli army used it during its onslaught on Lebanon this summer, which ended on 14 August.
White phosphorous is often compared to napalm, as it combusts spontaneously and melts human skin. It is banned under the Geneva Convention for use in weapons directed against civilians, though Israel, like the Americans with regard to Fallujah, insist they only fired the deadly chemical weapon at military targets, or to “illuminate battlefields”.
We know that isn’t true, as both assaults were characterised by the wholescale destruction of both civilian infrastructure and civilian life.
The Italian documentary - Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, directed by Sigfrido Ranucci - quotes the former US soldier again, describing seeing the burned bodies of women and children, some of them incinerated in their beds.
“The phosphorous explodes and forms a plume. Whoever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope.”
A medical team were dispatched to Fallujah, to report on what they saw. They were appointed by the Bush-appointed Iraqi interim government, and thus were unlikely to be punting propaganda against the US.
They confirmed that “burning chemicals” had evidently been used on the civilian population there.
“All forms of nature were wiped out,” said Dr ash-Shaykhli, meaning animals and plants as well as people. He was speaking at a press conference that went universally unreported by the embedded media.
A Fallujah biologist, Mohamed Tareq, recalled:
“A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by its multi-coloured substance started to burn. We found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact.”
The US committed these atrocities in Fallujah because they sought to instil deadly terror in the Iraqi population as a whole. It was the ultimate terrorist act.
Israel, who learnt the lessons of their patrons well, did likewise in Lebanon. They melted its face to instil terror in the wider Middle East.
On another but hardly lighter note, the UN team insisted they found no trace of Depleted Uranium (DU) use by the Israelis. This conflicts with the findings of three British activists in October, who found traces of DU in southern Lebanon, which were confirmed as such by the Harwell Laboratory in Oxfordshire, a lab chosen because it is also used by the MoD.
Dr Chris Busby, one of the three activists, is alarmed by the UN’s failure to confirm their findings.
“We are concerned that UNEP don’t know what they are doing. Earlier (in 2001), they were useless at finding depleted uranium in Kosovo, due to the wrong choice of instrumentation.”

Children damaged by chemical overload

by Roz Paterson

We face a ‘silent pandemic’ of brain-damaged children, borne of the overload of toxic chemicals in the biosphere, according to a shocking but timely report by Harvard School of Public Health in conjunction with Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Children born to industrialised nations between 1960 and 1980 were exposed to potentially toxic levels of lead from petrol. This may have reduced the number of IQ levels above 130 in these children, whilst increasing the number of IQ levels below 70.
But those born now face many more hazards, from the manufacture and use of pesticides, petrol additives, plastics, fizzy drinks cans and fertilisers, amongst other things, which could lead to such Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDDs) as autism, Attention Deficit Disorder and cerebral palsy.
One sixth of developmental disability in children could be the result of even low-level chemical exposure, warns the peer-reviewed study, which is due to be published in The Lancet.
The authors identified 202 chemicals as potentially dangerous, including styrene, used in plastics production, and which can cause hearing and visual problems, and hinder responsiveness, and acetone, used in nail polish remover, which can cause dizziness and confusion.
These chemicals have already, almost certainly, damaged the lives of millions of children worldwide.
Furthermore, the authors stress, this is by no means an exhaustive list, as over 1000 chemicals are known to be toxic to laboratory animals.
During pregnancy and early childhood, our brains are essentially ‘hard-wired’ - any interference during this period, through accident, ingestion of alcohol or exposure to toxic chemicals, can have a lifelong legacy as there is little potential thereafter for repair.
The fact that the placental barrier during pregnancy is not proof against toxic substances entering the mother’s bloodstream, and that the blood-brain barrier is not established until a baby is at least six months old, also explains why very young children are so especially vulnerable.
We know about alcohol and its detrimental effect on a developing foetus, so it’s not a great stretch to accept that the chemical soup created through decades of irresponsible, market-lead industrial production could be implicated in NDDs.
Industry interests are already trying to undermine the report as scaremongering, and the case is rendered more difficult to make because NDDs tend to evade statistics as their effects are sub-clinical, or not clinically visible - an example being lower than average intelligence.
The report recommends erring on the side of caution and imposing strict regulations on chemical testing and production now, especially with regards to pregnant women and children, rather than waiting until there is categorical proof, a process which could take decades, by which time many more millions of children’s brains could be irreparably damaged.
“There really is a lot at stake,” says Philippe Grandjean, of Harvard, and the lead author of the study.
“We are talking about the brain development of future generations. There will be an enormous cost of not regulating exposure.”
He continues:
“We must make protection of the young brain a paramount goal of public health protection. You only have one chance to develop a brain.’

n www.hsph.harvard.edu/

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—page five—

letters

Rough theatre
Willie Rough, previewed in last week’s Voice (issue 286), is a ‘must see’ play for all those who oppose exploitation and injustice. Written some years ago by Bill Bryden, a weel-kent figure of the Scottish theatre, it is thanks to Leitheatre for reviving this classic about the period prior to and during the First World War.
Willie Rough, the main character, is a young man determined to fight for decent wages and conditions on the Clyde - being inspired by MacLean and Gallagher.
But this play, which is based on fact, also mentions that women played an important role in fighting rent increases, forcing landlords and the government to come to their terms. Willie inevitably falls foul of the Defence of the Realm Act and is imprisoned for his anti-war stance and socialist views when he writes an article in a left wing newspaper.
The Leith players are a strong cast, ably directed by Don Arnott. And they have to be good - ma dug Mac plays a part in various scenes.
Get along and see this powerful production - for the play has an important message today for all those who believe in a better world and socialism.
It’s performed in the Church Hill Theatre, Edinburgh, from 15 to 18 November at 7.30pm.
Ron Brown,
Leith

The market’s greatest failure
Congratulations on the Voice’s coverage of the environment last week. As socialists, however, you missed a trick.
For years Thatcherism and Reaganomics have assured us that if left to its own devices, the market would automatically, without the intervention of anyone, correct any imperfections in its functioning. Supply and demand, not legislation, will see to it that at some point it will become profitable to stop looting the planet and trashing the environment. Not only that, there would also be a ‘trickle down effect’, whereby the filthy, mucky, dirty, foul, loathsome, spotted, creeping and, of coarse, stinking rich would, by buying caviar and personal jet aircraft, stimulate the economy and allow us to share the goodies.
Great! I hear you exclaim.
Not so. It’s official! Capitalism will destroy the planet! But don’t take my word for it. Let me quote Sir Nicholas Stern, chief economic advisor to the Treasury and head of the government economic service, doing the media rounds last week: “This is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.”
You bet, Nicky. Start composting!
So all you little Fukuyamas out there, who thought history over and socialism as dead as the Berlin Wall, had better think again. It seems the only trickle down that we are likely to see in the immediate future is excrement.
David Fowler,
Bonnybridge

Grumpy old men bite back!
The SSP members of Maryhill North branch were outraged to read in the Voice financial appeal (issue 286) that our honourable title of glue factory is deemed to be a ‘cruel’ label.
It is, in fact, a badge of honour to our age and time within the socialist movement, taking inspiration from Boxer the horse in Animal Farm.
As this paper does not seem to do research before making inflammatory allegations, we see no alternative but to seek legal counsel.
Not only have you now to raise monies to keep your paper going, but will have to raise extra for legal expenses and our damages - approximately £200,000.
Comrade Malcontent and Comrade Grudge,
Maryhill, Glasgow

SSY just won’t stop growing

New ideas
Voices from the SSY
Jack Ferguson

This weekend, 18-19 November, sees the fifth annual conference of Scottish Socialist Youth, and it looks set to be a real milestone for our organisation.
For the first time ever we’re holding a two day conference, with a record number of motions and members set to be heard.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost time for a whole series of participatory and exciting workshops on a wide range of topics.
Naturally enough, after the dramatic events of the summer, there’s a number of motions relating to the split in the SSP and reforming the constitution of SSY. But apart from the sections that we’ve titled ‘The Shit from the Split’ and ‘Navel Gazing’ there are also outward looking motions set to spark really interesting debate, including proposed affiliations to Hands off Venezuela and Iraqi Union Solidarity, as well as participation in the Faslane 365 project.
We’ll also be putting forward statements of solidarity with Communist youth, banned by the Czech government, and with the mass movement against electoral fraud and for democracy in Mexico.
To open the educational part of the weekend we’ll be having a major workshop for everyone on the SSP’s People Not Profit campaign. Groups will discuss one of the ten points from the campaign and try and come up with some specific action that we’ll take on that issue between now and the May elections.
Another workshop for all participants on the Saturday will be Clare and Roisin’s Sparkly Guide to not Being a Bastard. SSY’s resident angry schoolgirl feminists will be educating us on the whole issue of violence against women and unacceptable behaviour.
In SSY we recognise that just joining a socialist organisation doesn’t immunise you from the effects of growing up in a capitalist patriarchal society. SSY members are just as capable as other members of society of reflecting the sexist culture they are part of, and if we want to change that we all need to actively examine and challenge our own prejudices and ideas.
A highlight for Saturday’s programme is going to be slam poet Eamonn Coyle. Eamonn is now known for his work throughout the party after his barnstorming performance at the rally for Unity, Integrity and Socialism (you can still check it out on YouTube).
But we’ve been aware of his talent for some time now. At the weekend he’ll be leading a workshop on radical poetry and song, with the aim of coming up with some new material for anti-war demos.
On Sunday we’ll have workshops on topics as diverse as the possible revolution taking place in Mexico right now, and a role-playing session on the Spanish Civil War, which makes participants put themselves in the shoes of a fighter in the war against fascism and ask what would you do?
Frances Curran is coming along to talk about the campaign for free school meals for all. We’re trying out new directions with workshops on radical graffiti and stencilling, as well as one on radical theatre, and how we can use drama as a tool for our internal education and also as a means of political expression to the wider world.
And of course on Saturday night there’ll be more legendary SSY partying, with music for all tastes from a variety of DJs.
SSY has come on leaps and bounds since our first conference, and have become a fully autonomous part of the SSP with our own identity, campaigns and membership.
If you’re under 26 and aren’t involved in SSY yet, or if you know someone who is, please tell them to get along to the Kinning Park Complex on Saturday.
It will be a brilliant introduction to what SSY is all about, and looks set to be an important step on the road to building a mass socialist youth movement in Scotland.

Elderslie by-election

On 7 December, voters in the council ward of Elderslie, Renfrewshire, will have the opportunity to give Labour a good kicking. If they lose - a distinct possibility - the result will be a hung council.
If the SSP win, and we admit it’s a long shot, candidate Gerry McCartney, a local GP, will fight for public ownership and community facilities, decent council housing, the abolition of the Council Tax and the introduction of free school meals.
Gerry was involved in the recent, successful campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the Renfrewshire Housing Stock Transfer ballot.
“Now we want to see the money, promised if they voted yes, to be released, and invested in housing directly,” he told the Voice.
He is also calling for the local swimming pool, recently transferred to Renfrewshire Leisure Ltd, to be returned to public ownership and subject to longer opening hours.
“We will also campaign hard for the re-provision of youth clubs and facilities for young people in Elderslie and the surrounding area.
“It’s not the answer to everything, but it would ensure less young people were hanging around with nothing to do and maybe getting into trouble.”

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—centre pages—

The state of the union

Yes, the Republicans were hammered in the US mid-terms last week, with Democrats seizing control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
And yes, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton, two odious, ruthless thugs to be sure, lost their political heads.
And indeed, everyone’s saying this means the beginning of the end of the US presence in Iraq and a U-turn on the gas-guzzling culture that is bringing climatic ruin on us all.
But if you think this means the US is heading for a green, clean, humanitarian future, then take a deep breath...and smell the coffee.
In opposition, the Democrats were no great shakes. Did I say no great shakes? I meant diabolical.
Or, as American journalist and author (of Empire Burlesque: the Secret History of the Bush Regime) Chris Floyd puts it:
“(This) gaggle of corporate bagmen, spine-free time-servers and craven accomplices of tyranny and aggression...Whenever it really counted - Supreme Court nominations, tax cuts for the rich, the class warfare nuclear bomb of the Bankruptcy Bill, the appointment of sleazy, third-rate officials such as torture-enabler and Constitution-gutter Alberto Gonzalez to high office and, of course, the eager goose-stepping into the war crime of Iraq (which was, let us remember, approved by a Democratic-controlled Congress) - (they) folded, would not even go down fighting.”
The Democrats even helped usher in the Military Commissions Bill (see Voice 284), which allows the President - yes, all by himself - to suspend Habeas Corpus regarding certain suspects, thereby denying them access to a free trial and tearing up several centuries of Constitutional law.
In power, for sure, the Democrats will slow down the handcart to hell that is/was the Bush regime, but they won’t change the face of America.
The rich will remain rich and lightly-taxed. Hell yes. The Democrats, like the modern-day Labour Party, is dripping with multi-millionaire sponsors.
And the poor will continue to work three jobs, hardly see their kids, and feed them out of church-run soup kitchens. Without the vast army of poor people, who work for barely enough wages to sustain them, the rich wouldn’t get to be rich, so don’t expect any super new worker-friendly legislation any year soon.
The minimum wage may get a slight tweak upwards, but only because the law of physics demands it; the Republicans have been sitting on it for so long, it’s bound to blow all of its own accord.
But that doesn’t mean Wal-mart ‘associates’ (the corporation’s creepy euphemism for worker) will suddenly be allowed to join a trade union, or health insurance will become an affordable commodity. For America’s underclass, it’s business as usual.
Internationally, it’s not looking good either.
For the Palestinians, the outlook’s bleak. The powerful Zionist lobby seeps deep into the Democrat machine, which displays a wholehearted enthusiasm for arming Israel to the teeth with state-of-the-art military hardware.
Iraq’s future is not rosy either. The Democrats did not spend their time in opposition taking part in anti-war ‘die-ins’ and acting as human shields in downtown Baghdad. They didn’t even block requests for top-ups to the military budget or speak up about civil liberties when the Patriot Act came a-calling.
In truth, the Democrats and Republicans are not poles apart. Both are rich, elitist parties dedicated to rich elites.
Furthermore, the Democrats have limited power, even with both houses in hand, as they control only the legislative wing of government, while George W Bush remains Commander-in-Chief and at the helm. Only if the President is impeached will he lose that power, and the Democrats have already said they won’t follow up on that one.
Which means that, though this was certainly a ballot on the war, and the outcome was a resounding opposition to it, the victorious Democrats cannot do much about it. Congress can ask some awkward questions, through investigations and hearings, into the failure of intelligence that led to 9/11 for instance, and the whole WMD fiction, but they can’t stop the war.
But all this aside, the Democrats’ victory is remarkable and good news for the world.
Remarkable because - you know those crazy Republicans! - vote-rigging peaked this election, with an estimated 4.5million potential Democrat votes canned before the first polling booth even opened, through vote spoilage (900 per cent more likely to happen to you if you’re black), the photo ID scam that allows Republicans to hang around polling stations demanding that your ID photo exactly matches the one on the state database, and a tiny clause of a new law that bars would-be voters if their ID cannot be verified against the state database.
Says Greg Palast, the investigative journalist who first lifted the lid on the Florida 2000 vote-rigging scandal, “You just can’t win with 51 per cent of the vote anymore.”
And the Democrats didn’t. They won with something nearer 58 per cent. The American people, disillusioned with politicians and government, sickened by war, impoverished by the free market, and, much more than us, unconvinced that their vote could matter, even if they were lucky enough to be allowed to use it, came out and voted anyway, and in so doing, sent the Bush administration into a tailspin.
It won’t change the world, but it sure is a step in the right direction. God Bless America.

It was the war what done it George

Sleaze, corruption and hypocrisy impacted heavily on the Republicans’ vote last week. ‘It was for a friend’, whined Ted Haggard, Bush’s closest religious advisor, as he was caught buying crystal meth from a male sex worker whom he’d been paying for sex over three years.
Republicans are alleged to have covered up for congressman Mark Foley, who sent sexually harassing messages to young volunteers, afraid that exposure just before an election would damage their vote. But possible attempts to conceal his behaviour damaged them even further.
The scandal of Jack Abromoffs, a lobbyist who conned Native American tribes out of vast sums of cash, tainted Republicans all the way up to the Oval Office.
Exit polls found 41 per cent of American voters said ‘public morality’ was ‘extremely important’.
But there’s no doubt the overarching concern was the bloody quagmire in Iraq. A poll for the staunchly pro-Bush Fox News found Iraq was mentioned twice as much as any other issue in voters’ considerations.
The war in Iraq was cited by 89 per cent in exit polls as ‘extremely’, ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ important in their reasons for voting.
Some polls found as many as 60 per cent of voters saying they disapproved of the US intervention in Iraq, and wanted to register their opposition.
In the lead-up to the vote, the Democrats kept shaking that stick, candidate after candidate queuing up to say the elections were a referendum on Bush and his failed policies abroad.
The tactic worked, yet the vote was not an enthusiastic one for them, but an overwhelming measure of revulsion for Bush.
William Hughes, for the USA media monitors network, says the credit for the ousting of the Republicans must go to the anti-war movement, whose dogged campaigning has forced reluctant Democrats to take up the issue, meaning voters have eventually turned to them as the “war-lite party”.
Meanwhile other, even right-wing commentators, found the result to be a rejection of the entire neo-conservative Bush project.
“It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance,” noted David Brooks, a principal columnist in the New York Times, a few weeks before the election. “This election is a period, not a comma in political history.”

First Socialist In the US Senate

by Colin Fox

Amidst the dog fight between Democrat and Republican in the mid-term elections, a remarkable result was barely covered - for the first time, ever, a socialist was elected to the US Senate.
Bernie Sanders was elected to the US House of Representatives as an independent 16 years ago.
In 2005, the Voice reported that he had agreed to join us in Scotland to lead the Edinburgh May Day rally.
Unfortunately he had to call off because of his election campaign commitments - and now that campaign had paid off.
Last week he won the Vermont seat in the Senate. In fact he romped it. He defeated his Republican opponent by a majority of more than two to one in the most one-sided contest in America last week. Sanders won 170,000 votes (65.5 per cent) against 84,517 (32.4 per cent) for his opponent.
Bernie Sanders’ story is all the more remarkable in a country which to the outside world appears dominated by neo-cons, warmongers and the Christian right wing.
Originally from Chicago, he moved to New York City as a student in the 1960s, and graduated as a teacher. As a radical socialist activist he joined many causes before moving, with many other young people, to more rural Vermont with its strong liberal tradition and hippie culture.
Vermont is, to be fair, not typical of the rest of the US. It is largely rural and liberal attitudes prevail in the state’s small town, family farm politics.
But it is in these circumstances that Sanders has built up a formidable following and support. An outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq - Vermont has lost more soldiers per head of its population than any other state in the country - Sanders’ demand that the US troops be immediately brought home has overwhelming support.
The war in Iraq was a huge issue in last week’s elections without a doubt, but it wasn’t the only one. And Bernie has as much support for his position on health, wealth, national minimum wage and the environment.
He has repeatedly led the argument for a national healthcare system which ensures every American gets free treatment. He led thousands of people across the Canadian border to protest and buy their prescription drugs there because they are a third of the price of US-bought drugs.
He is “outraged”, he says, that the US has the highest rates of childhood poverty in the western world and yet “we give tax breaks to billionaires”.
“Bernie Sanders stands for the working families of America not to represent the rich and powerful,” declared the slogan on his election posters. And he believes his election will mean that, “Vermonters will be leading America in a very different direction.”
The people of Vermont have again put their faith in him and his socialist ideas. For the next six years he will represent them in the US Senate.

n www.bernie.org

Rogues’ Gallery

Robert Gates

Robert Gates, incoming US Defense Secretary, is no stranger to ‘controversy’ as the American journals like to refer to his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, which saw US agents selling deadly arms to Iran and funnelling the profits to the equally deadly Contras, at the time engaged in a vicious bid to overthrow the democratically elected, leftist government of Nicaragua.
Gates, then Deputy Director of the CIA, could not but have known what was going on, yet he appears to have gone to some lengths to hide the truth from Congress as the scandal was breaking, in so doing clearly breaching his duty as a servant of the American people.
He was never indicted over this, but could be in the future.
He was also implicated in a scandal involving the passing of sensitive information to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
Oh yes, and accused of knowingly exaggerating the military power of the USSR at a time when the Soviet superpower was on the brink of disastrous decline.
An old pal of George W Bush’s daddy, Gates is regarded, in the current climate, as a relatively safe pair of hands. Things are bad.

Donald Rumsfeld

“If you are not criticised, you are not doing your job,” he once said. But Rumsfeld wasn’t so much criticised as loathed. Even Nixon called him “a ruthless little bastard”.
Rumsfeld began his career in the Eisenhower administration, his subsequent career following the established path of members of the American establishment in combining public and private service - that is, big business and high office, including a stint as Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East and culminating in his appointment as Defense Secretary in the Bush jnr administration.
A hardened neo-con and war enthusiast, Rumsfeld’s military strategy with regards to Iraq was to send relatively limited troop numbers, thereby keeping costs and American casualties to a minimum. However, this policy proved a recipe for havoc, as buildings were looted, infrastructure collapsed and the streets of Baghdad became a no-go zone. The US forces guarded the oil refineries though.
On “his watch”, prisoners were brutally abused in Abu Ghraib, suspects were detained, and tortured, without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay (regarding which a war crimes case is being filed against him, in Germany, as we speak) and 655,000 Iraqis were killed, as were nearly 3,000 American soldiers, mostly poor, working-class boys sent to war on false pretences.

Nancy Pelosi

She will be the first woman speaker of the House and, they say, a real thorn in George W Bush’s side. Yeah, whatever.
Ms Pelosi loves to network and powerbase, often calling on her very long list of loyal donors, including such cuddly corporations as IBM and Lockheed Martin, the world’s foremost military contractor, as well as rewarding those who stay on-message with perks and jobs.
This, ahem, hard leftist is richer than George W Bush, she and her partner being worth in excess of £13.1 million.
She’s not all bad. She was instrumental in derailing Bush’s attempt to privatise the social security system and was one of the very few to vote against the Iraq war in 2002.
She is, however, more likely to pay ball with Bush than kick it in his face.
She is also, lest we forget, an avowed friend of Israel, and is consistent, and ruthless, in her refusal to recognise the brutality of the Israelis toward the Palestinians.

back to index

—page eight—

A community stands together

“They were not members of the Asian community. They were not members of any community. They were brutal, vicious people who were not a part of us.”
Kriss Donald was only 15 years old when he was snatched from Kenmure Street, in Glasgow’s Pollokshields, and bundled into a car.
What followed was the stuff of nightmares and his stabbed, beaten and burnt body was found the next day, dumped on the Clyde Walkway.
Last week, three men - Imran Shahid, 29, his brother Zeeshan, 28, and Mohammed Faisil Mushtaq, 27 - were sentenced, to 25, 23 and 22 years’ imprisonment respectively for this most brutal of killings.
It was the first conviction under the new Scots Law charge of racially aggravated killing.
The community of Pollokshields, which is 50/50 Asian and white, heaved a sigh of relief.
But back in March 2003, in the days that followed Kriss’s murder, the tension was palpable. Shutters were drawn down over shops, the streets were unnaturally silent, people walked quickly, looking down.
Everyone feared some kind of horrific reprisal against the Asian community and the BNP, sniffing an opportunity, made plans to hold an open-air rally in the centre of Kenmure Street. It withered on the vine; no-one took the bait.
Pollokshields is an odd socio-economic mix, including the street with the most millionaires in Scotland, Albert Drive, and areas of pronounced and visible poverty.
Educational attainment is patchy, crime stats are hardly desirable though no worse than similar areas, economically speaking, and housing is often poor.
Yet race relations are actually quite good; this is not a black ghetto where certain streets are no-go zones for particular races, though it would be naïve to say there is no racism, particularly white on Asian, though in some cases also Asian on white.
This latter, according to Manjot Sumal, a DJ in local radio station Awaz FM, is generally a result of being racially abused and wanting to give as good as you get.
“In my teens, I was kicked, punched and spat on. I didn’t go down the violent route, but some people might think, ‘If you do this to me because of the colour of my skin, then I will do it back to you.’”
But Kriss’s murder, while race played a part - the killers sought revenge for a scuffle in a nightclub the previous night, and were out to get ‘a white guy’, didn’t matter which one - so too did gang culture, which stalks these streets.
Kriss’s mother led the way, by saying that her son’s murder was not a racial matter. Her calmness and dignity, her recognition that the killers were simply murderous thugs, allowed everyone to recognise that it was not a case of ‘us and them’, white versus Asian, but ‘us and them’, ordinary people versus brutal criminals.
A local Asian worker, quoted at the top of this article, told us that there was “no support for them”, meaning the three killers who absconded to Pakistan, with which the UK has no extradition treaty, in the belief they would escape justice.
Mohammad Sarwar, the local MP, waged a 15 month campaign with the Pakistani authorities to have them handed over.
They relented when he persuaded them of the importance of these convictions to the Pakistani community in Glasgow.
Not only did the Shahids terrorise whites, they also terrorised Asians.
“If it had been me they’d had a row with that night, it would have been an Asian they picked up,” says our local worker.
In fact, a very similar event happened in 2003, when the son of a former city councillor, an Asian, was abducted from the streets by the Shahid gang and driven around until he managed to escape.
He was 23; his age and strength perhaps gave him an edge on young Kriss.
Imran Shahid was convicted that same year for a road rage incident in which he punched a middle-aged female social worker unconscious, then tried to run her over. Sentenced to 30 months, he served nine.
Three months after that, he murdered Kriss.
Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesperson for the Muslim Association of Britain, is 26. He knew these guys in school.
“They hit everyone. They beat up Asians, white people, whoever.” They were not “Asian supremacists”.
But they thought they were untouchable; something that Osama believes was fuelled in part by the paltry sentence served by Imran Shahid in 2003.
Pollokshields is well rid of them and the fact that the community managed to come together over such a terrible murder is testament to how strong is the will to live together and work things out.
There’s a plaque now where Kriss was abducted. His sweet face smiles down at the flowers and flags that are laid there in his memory.
One, a flag of Pakistan, flicks in the wind. Across it, in a childlike hand, the words “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! May they rot in jail.”

No place for the nazi BNP

The acquittal of BNP Führer Nick Griffin and his Goebbelsesque Director of Publicity Mark Collet on race hate charges last week came as a shock to many anti-racists.
The charges were brought after the BBC showed footage of them both making racist speeches at a BNP meeting in 2004, in which they lashed out at Muslims, asylum seekers, and the murdered black student Stephen Lawrence, claiming that he was not killed by a group of white racists but by someone black.
The trial was a success in more ways than one for the nazis of the BNP; the media frenzy that surrounded the case gave them more publicity than they could ever have hoped for.
Since Griffin became leader of the BNP, they have attempted to portray themselves in public as like any other political party, playing down their true racist and fascist nature.
But scratch the surface and you will find the beast underneath, a gang of Hitler-worshipping nazi thugs.
Take their Scottish Secretary Kenny Smith, recently named top of their Holyrood list for Glasgow in next May’s election, for example. He was exposed in the media celebrating Hitler’s birthday by flying a swastika in the garden of his Culloden home.
Or Griffin himself, who said of the Holocaust that wiped out millions in the Second World War: “The ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”
Or take Robert Cottage, BNP candidate for Pendle council in Lancashire, who was charged along with fellow fascist David Jackson after police found a horrifying array of bomb-making components and weapons in their homes. At least one rocket launcher was found - some reports indicate more than one - as was a biological suit, chemicals that could be used to make bombs and an array of racist BNP literature.
Lancashire police announced that the haul was the largest stash of bomb-making equipment ever discovered in a British home.
Yet the pair were virtually ignored in the news - perhaps surprising, considering the media frenzy over other raids on supposed home bomb-factories, even ones which have produced nothing at all. Raids on other homes, of course, owned by Asian people, because that’s what the media consider terrorists to look like. Anything else just does not compute.
Mind you, they’re only following the New Labour government’s lead in the portrayal of anyone with brown skin as a spectre to be feared.
The policies of this government have been the manure that has helped the BNP grow in England - not only with their phoney ‘war on terror’, but also their abandonment of working class communities to poverty and deprivation.
The BNP have declared they plan to stand candidates for the Scottish Parliament, trying to spread their racist venom across the country in an attempt to whip up hatred and division in our communities. They must be stopped.
The people of Pollokshields have given a remarkable example to follow. Griffin came up to Glasgow to try and start a race war after the brutal murder of Kriss Donald but was told in no uncertain terms to crawl back into his bunker. His vile hatred is not welcome on the streets of Scotland.

back to index

—page nine—

cultural resistance

Reading, writing and arrest

Naming The Dead - A Serious Crime by Maya Anne Evans with Milan Rai. Published by JNV

by Dick Barbor-Might

On Sunday four British servicemen were killed and three injured in Basra, adding to the steady and deadly toll of lives in Blair’s war in Iraq. Our own homegrown resistance to this war and to the attendant attack on civil liberties is in the hands of extraordinary but mostly very ordinary people, unregarded in the conventional political arena. At particular times and in particular places they manage to speak for us all. Such a one is Maya Anne Evans who became briefly famous for reading out the names of dead British soldiers at the Cenotaph - and being arrested for it. That was just over a year ago, on 25 October 2005.
Maya and her companion in crime, Milan Rai, had fallen foul of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) that had come into force that April and that amongst a host of other provisions had outlawed the previously taken-for-granted right to assemble in the vicinity of Parliament. Now that unqualified right was abrogated and specific police permission had to be obtained in advance. The Government had inserted this provision into the Act to take care of a persistent nuisance. The nuisance, a serious one from their point of view, was that for several years Blair and his MPs had had to pass by the colourful anti-war displays of Brian Haw whenever they entered or left the Commons. Poor drafting of the Act meant that Brian was allowed to stay in Parliament Square by one court until one that was more compliant to the Government’s wishes ruled that the police might remove him and his display. But somehow, against the odds and buoyed up by numerous supporters, Brian has hung on, his poster display diminished but still in the Square.
Along the way other protesters have been ignored by the police, who can choose to look the other way when somebody like the rebel Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn is there with his microphone. But at other times people have been arrested or harassed. Mark Barrett, for example, was found guilty of violating SOCPA and fined £500 including costs for meeting other activists for weekly “tea and cake” parties in Parliament Square.
The trademark of Barbara Tucker, another activist, has been described as a violently pink placard, “Blair’s genocide”, featuring photos of civilian deaths. Barbara has been accused under a public order act of causing alarm and distress to members of the public with her photos. The police dropped this line when nobody in the crowd would own up to being alarmed and distressed other than by Tony Blair. On another occasion she was charged with “obstruction” and handcuffed, her arms pulled tightly behind her back. She has been threatened with being sectioned under the Mental Health Act “for her own protection”, in case some enraged member of the public should attack her. The police dropped this after a huddled consultation behind the gates of Downing Street. On another occasion Barbara was engaged in conversation by police officers who wanted to know her views on the Prime Minister’s personal security: some helpful Sri Lankan tourists spotted that the officers were wired for sound.
Yet, although there can be a funny side, there is still the catch in the throat at the prospect of being arrested. In her new book, Maya Evans describes her personal moment of truth when she and her friend Milan Rai approached the Cenotaph and were told by a sympathiser that the police definitely would arrest them if they went ahead with their plan to read out the names of the British soldiers killed in Iraq. “For a moment it flashes through my mind that I can wriggle out of this, I don’t have to go through with it... I hate personal confrontations of any kind, and the idea of a face-to-face conflict with the ultimate authority figure, a police officer, is really uncomfortable. Do I really want to be arrested and prosecuted and end up with a criminal record and with a £1,000 fine? For half a second I didn’t want to any further.”
Since her arrest Maya Evans has become used to speaking in public and to the outward eye seems confident enough. But in her book she describes her embarrassment at the very idea of public speaking. She recounts how she grew up in multicultural Hackney with her mum and sister and how, although attracted to Islam through friendships with girls she met in school, she never made the final leap into faith. All this went with her sense of being just an ordinary person. At university she immersed herself in the anti-war movement. Later, on the day that Iraq was invaded, she was sacked from her job for demonstrating when she was due on shift. The manager said, “you no longer work here” and “you don’t have a reasonable excuse.” Maya was genuinely shocked. She looked the manager in the eye: “What, protesting against the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is not a reasonable excuse?” The manager looked up at her and answered “no”. Back home, Maya slumped on a sofa and watched Baghdad burning on the TV.
Maya didn’t give up. Eventually she and Milan were charged under SOCPA but thereby they seriously wrong footed the Government. This led to an interesting exchange on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. John Humphreys quizzed Lord Falconer, Blair’s close friend and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs.
Falconer: “The idea that you take a measure which is a public order measure, designed to protect our Parliament building, as depriving people of freedom of speech is ridiculously overdone, if I may say so.”
Humphreys: “I shall bear that in mind next time I stand outside Parliament and read my newspaper aloud, possibly an editorial that somebody doesn’t like.”
A few months later, in June 2006, somebody was stopped and questioned by the police for standing outside Downing Street with a copy of The Independent with a headline that read: “Warning: if you read this newspaper you may be arrested under the Government’s anti-terror laws.”
You couldn’t make it up.

You (Burmese) Tube

When the daughter of Burma’s military leader, Than Shwe, married her handsome groom in July, the lavish ceremony was captured for posterity on video.
The blushing bride wore enough priceless-looking jewellery to sink a small battleship as she gaily squandered champagne and counted up the cost of her wedding gifts. Some $50million, since you’re asking.
Meanwhile, for the ordinary people of Burma, the world’s bloodiest military dictatorship, life continues on its bitter and brutal path.
Women are routinely raped and murdered, children are recruited into an army that kills their own families, ethnic minorities are slowly annihilated...and vicious poverty bites deeper every day.
The wedding video, which provides a rare window on this almost hermetically sealed world, was leaked to Youtube last week and is stirring international outrage on behalf of the Burmese people who may never be able to view it, as internet access is severely restricted in Burma.

Tuned in
Keef Tomkinson

Saturday 18 November

Life Is Beautiful, BBC4 11pm
Roberto Benigni’s masterpiece is the story of a loving husband and devoted father desperate to shield his family from the holocaust. His clownish behaviour appalled many critics, confused at their own emotional reaction, but there are few better films about Hitler’s barbarism and the resistance to it.

Sunday 19 November

The Music Show, BBC2 7.30pm
BBC Scotland output is so poor you have to wonder why they don’t advertise the good stuff. This show returned a few weeks ago to showcase Scotland’s musical talent and the artists who inspire them.

Monday 20 November

Saddam’s Road to Hell, Channel4 8pm
Channel Four’s obsession to show a documentary about Iraq every five minutes continues with a look at the disappearance of 8,000 Kurdish men and boys during the 1980s. Take away the sensationalism of 10 of these docs and Channel Four could produce one great programme.
Rory Bremner: Beneath Iraq and a Hard Place, More4 10pm
As above, since there are so many of these shows on at the moment, this could be new or a repeat from the first Gulf War. Whichever it is, I am sure it will be funny and poignant.

Tuesday 21 November

Rain in My Heart, BBC2 9pm
While illegal drugs and tobacco are confirmed BADS, the jury is still out on booze. While health ads hit us from all directions, media bravado and giggles allow it to be acceptable drug abuse. This doc follows four alcohol abusers struggling through not only their own but other’s lives.

Wednesday 22 November

Pleasantville, BBC1 11.40pm
Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon star in this late night gem. Two teens are transported into the world of a 1950s TV Soap. Their impact on the highly conservative and mundane environment reflects not only on the tight conformity of the past but the prejudices we continue to exhibit. Don’t worry it’s a fun film but with brains.

Friday 23 November

Assault on Precinct 13, Film4 11pm
A black police lieutenant, independent minded women, local convict and serial killer, armed with a pistol and two rifles are all that stands between a machine gun wielding gang of hoods and a father grieving his daughter shot down for wanting raspberry on her ice cream.

back to index

—page ten—

international news

Free the Cuban Five!

by Gerry Corbett

In September 1998 five men - Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González - gave the American FBI office in Miami a dossier on ultra-right terrorist groups operating within the USA.
Groups like Commandos F4, Alpha 66 and ‘Brothers to the Rescue’, who operate with impunity and the knowledge of the American government, had been monitored by the Cuban men over the past few months. However, instead of acting on the evidence provided, the FBI promptly arrested the five men and illegally held them in solitary confinement for 17 months.
November 2000 saw the start of their trial and seven months later the five men, now widely known as the Miami 5, were given sentences ranging from 15 years to two life terms plus 80 months.
Gerardo Hernandez, who was sentenced to two life sentences and 80 months, was convicted of an additional ‘conspiracy to commit murder’. The conviction was for the shooting down, by the Cuban military, of two ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ planes on 24 February 1996. The planes had ignored warnings and penetrated Cuba’s air space after flying from Florida.
Hernandez had nothing to do with the shooting down of the plane but had sent word to the Cuban government warning them that a flight would be travelling across at some point in the near future.
On August 9 2005, after seven years of unjust imprisonment, the Cuban Five won an unprecedented victory on appeal. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of the Cuban Five and ordered a new trial outside of Miami. However, in an unexpected reversal on October 31, the 11th Circuit Court agreed to hear the US prosecutors’ appeal.
Therefore the opinion overturning the Cuban Five’s convictions has been set aside while a new appeal is heard. Oral Agreements were heard on February 14, 2006 and we continue to await a verdict from the Court of Appeals. Meanwhile the five men are still left stranded in an American jail.
George Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ does not extend to terrorists who are his pals. While the Miami 5 were being tried in 2000, a real terrorist, Posada Carriles was arrested in Panama along with three accomplices before they could carry out a plan to blow up an auditorium filled with students at the University of Panama where Cuban President Fidel Castro was to speak.
On August 26, 2004, in one of her last acts as President, Mireya Moscoso pardoned them in violation of Panamanian law. In March 2005 his friends smuggled him into Miami from the Yucatan peninsula aboard a yacht called the Santrina.
Venezuela immediately presented a request for his extradition for 73 counts of first degree murder in relation to the downing of the civilian aircraft in 1976. Rather than acting on the extradition request, the United States government is now sheltering him in El Paso, Texas in violation of international treaties and conventions.
US justice, it seems, allows terrorists to walk free while people trying to stop terrorism are jailed because they are Cuban.

n For more info contact:

Scottish Cuba Solidarity Campaign, c/o FBU,
52 St Enoch’s Square, Glasgow, G1 4AA

Salsa and solidarity

by Barbara Scott

Two years ago I took part in an International Work Brigade to Cuba, organised by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.
There’s a lot of misinformation and ignorance about Cuba going around. When I went for my inoculations, the practice nurse went on about how poor a country Cuba is - I explained that their health service is, nonetheless, better than ours.
Well meaning family friends made my parents worry with stories about how ‘dangerous’ Cuba is. But after reminding them that I was, then, 34 years old, I set off with my comrade Gerry Corbett for our adventure.
The work brigade is undoubtedly an unforgettable experience. Friendships are forged for life, from all around the world.
There were around 20 of us on the ‘UK’ brigade. (We all fell out about what to call ourselves - us Scots didn’t like ‘Great Britain’ but the Cubans thought ‘UK’ wasn’t much better, and they had a point!)
There were brigades taking part from all over Europe including Spain, Italy, France, Austria, Germany, Norway, Finland, Ireland and many more.
We stayed at the Campamento Internacionale Julio Antonio Mella, a camp consisting of eight-bunk dormitories, showers and toilet blocks of intermittent usefulness, an open-air bar, a stage for entertainment, and the dining room.
Staying with us at the camp were our Cuban hosts, who looked after us during our three-week stay. Many were students working at the camp for their summer vacation, including the interpreters assigned to our group, Monica and Lacey. They told us that they could study for six years at university for free - unlike in Scotland under New Labour.
Well this wasn’t a holiday - it was a work brigade! The main purpose was to show solidarity with the Cuban people and the Cuban revolution by doing voluntary work.
During our stay, which was during July and August, we worked in the sugar cane fields, the orange groves, and on a construction site.
As one not used to manual labour, or scorching heat for that matter, I found it hard going. Gerry however seemed happy digging big holes with all the boys. However, in the spirit of “each according to his/her ability”, I was given a special job straightening used nails, with a hammer, in the shade!
This brought home the level of hardship caused by the USA’s blockade of Cuba - they have to recycle absolutely everything!
It is real work, and you are expected to make an effort - that is the point of the brigade.
In the afternoons we had a series of meetings with different organisations, including the Communist Youth, the women’s organisation, trade unions, and the families of the Miami Five, known as the Five Heroes in Cuba.
We also went on trips to Havana, the beautiful Vinales Valley, to communities to see the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution which exist in every town and village, and to see community art and education projects.
Of course all work and no play makes Babs a dull girl, and there was also plenty of entertainment. Every night Son, Salsa and African music were played by a live band.
We were always mindful that our Cuban hosts had much less money than us - for example, a week’s wages in the camp bar is around US$8. So we always made sure that we paid for them to go on trips with us and bought them drinks.
They in turn tried very hard to teach us all to dance, but in my case, though not through lack of effort, it was a bit of a lost cause.
The downside of the trip was the food - there was plenty to eat, but it was mainly beans and rice. Being a vegetarian there was a bit of a non-starter too. However I’m sure it was much healthier and better for us than the processed and packaged foods we eat here.
You could say that we saw the Cuba that the government wanted us to see. After all the camp is run by ICAP, a government department dedicated to international solidarity between Cuba and other countries. But for those not feeling confident enough for an intrepid solo adventure, I would thoroughly recommend the International Work Brigade as a way of getting an introduction to Cuba - and much more rewarding than going to one of the ‘Sandals’ tourist resorts!

back to index

—page eleven—

international news

New UN resolution

by Brian Pollitt

On 7 November, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution requiring the United States to lift its four-decade old trade embargo against Cuba.
The resolution has been passed but ignored by the US for the 15th consecutive year but in 2006 the majority supporting it was crushing and the opposition derisory. The vote was a record 183 to 4 in favour, one abstention.
Those voting with the United States were Israel and the mini-states of the Marshall Islands and Paulau. The abstention was Micronesia.

Belgium jails Turkish activists under harsh ‘anti-terror’ law

by Stephen Kaczynski

It won’t have attracted much attention here, but the verdict of an appeal hearing in Ghent, Belgium says a lot about the ‘war on terror’ and the world we live in.
In February this year a number of people from Turkey were convicted of membership of the DHKP-C (Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front). The group has long been banned in Turkey but has also been placed on a list of proscribed ‘terrorist’ groups in the UK and, somewhat later, in the EU.
Three of those convicted - two men, Musa Asoglu and Kaya Saz, and a woman, Sukriye Akar - were immediately imprisoned in Belgium’s Brugge Prison. Another, Bahar Kimyongur, a Belgian citizen, was also convicted but remained free during his appeal process.
Lawyers for those convicted entered an appeal for the sentences to be quashed. But a lawyer hired by the Turkish state called for the sentences to be not only upheld but made more severe.

Human rights
I attended much of the appeal hearing in September, as I have known many of those arrested for many years and have often worked with them campaigning against human rights abuses in Turkey.
The DHKP-C has never carried out armed actions in Belgium, though it has done so in Turkey.
In 1999, Fehriye Erdal, a young Kurdish woman, was discovered by the police in Belgium. Erdal was wanted as she was accused of involvement in the 1996 shooting of one of Turkey’s leading industrialists, Ozdemir Sabanci, and two of his associates in Istanbul, for which the DHKP-C claimed responsibility.
Erdal has consistently denied involvement and was kept under house arrest. Since Turkey is known to use torture and kill prisoners, she was not extradited there.
Musa, Sukriye, Kaya and Bahar all worked at the DHKC (Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front) Brussels Information Bureau. This was set up in 1995, located close to the European Parliament, and was a thorn in the side of the Turkish authorities, who accused it of engaging in terrorist propaganda.
For example, in 2000, Bahar and others got inside the European Parliament chamber and protested there against the presence of Ismail Cem, the then foreign minister of Turkey.
However, Belgium adopted a harsher anti-terror law in 2003, redefining ‘terrorism’, criminalising expression of beliefs and association to a greater extent than before.
It was with this law that my friends were convicted earlier this year. Fehriye Erdal was also convicted, but escaped and is still on the run.

Isolation
Musa, Sukriye and Kaya have been kept in isolation conditions by the prison authorities.
Ideologically motivated prisoners have generally been kept in isolation in recent decades in Europe, in case they organise among themselves or convert other prisoners to their ideas.
This can amount to sensory deprivation and prisoners' entire social contact can be cut off in the name of "security".
At the appeal verdict on 7 November, the Turkish state got what it wanted. A year was added to Musa’s six-year sentence, Bahar was imprisoned and had a year added to his sentence. Other sentences stayed the same. There were scuffles in court after the sentences were announced and several people were detained.
In a letter to me some weeks before, Musa said the trial was “political” and would probably not have been surprised by the verdict, and I don’t think Sukriye would have been either. Neither was present at the hearing, they were protesting against aspects of their prison treatment.
Jan Fermon, one of the defence lawyers, said the trial and verdict was another stage in the criminalising of beliefs, adding that “it is not Turkey that is entering the EU, it is Turkish fascism that is entering the EU”.
CLEA, a Belgian civil liberties group, held a banner outside the courtroom saying: “A political opinion does not equal terrorism.” However, the lesson to be drawn from this is that you can be criminalised for your beliefs.

Maoists celebrate in Nepal

by Ken Ferguson

Nepal’s Maoists held a 20,000 strong victory rally in Kathmandu last week to celebrate the signing of an agreement with the governing seven party alliance. The alliance took power in the wake of massive street protests in the capital, a strike wave and intensifying military struggle.
Under the agreement, Maoist weapons will be held in secure stores but the rebels will not actually be disarmed.
What is increasingly clear is that the monarchy - which imposed a royal, military-backed, dictatorship - is almost certainly finished as a serious force in Nepali life. At the Kathmandu rally, crowds gathered under a sea of red banners and hammer and sickle flags chanting, “We want a republican state - Long live the Maoists.”
Maoist leaders said that they had laid down their arms for peace, but they insisted that the ideological battle will continue. They urged their activists to take the agreement as a partial victory, asking them to remain cautious.
But the significance of the gains won by Nepal’s Maoists for the struggle in the sub-continent should not be underestimated, particularly in India, where the inequalities resulting from the dash to capitalism has seen the rise of significant armed Maoist-led resistance.

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—page twelve—

Israel’s killing spree in Gaza

by Malcolm McDonald

In its most ferocious attack on Palestinians in four years, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) shelled a residential area of the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun last Wednesday, killing 20 and injuring in excess of 60 men, women and children.
The massacre took place in the early hours, killing and maiming families as they slept.
This latest atrocity, Israel’s tenth incursion since its much-publicised withdrawal from Gaza, brings the Palestinian death toll to 90 in only one week.
With typically obnoxious arrogance, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni referred to the massacre as “a regrettable incident”.
Losing your house keys is a “regrettable incident”.
This was bloody murder.
It’s been a long process since IDF troops in helicopter gunships, tanks and bulldozers first darkened the skies and streets of Gaza back in June.
A process of attrition, a determined siege with added killing, maiming and abuse.
The death and injury statistics are horrible in themselves, but countless others of the 1.4 million Palestinian souls crammed into Gaza have suffered almost unbelievably in recent months as a result of Israeli actions calculated to bring the whole area and its economy to its knees.
Power cut. Hospitals therefore of limited use. Water polluted. Tax revenues collected on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf but withheld, thereby seriously affecting the Occupied Territories’ economy.

Sanctions
Sanctions imposed by the West haven’t helped, of course. The West has absolutely nothing to be proud of in Gaza.
So far it remains unsatisfied in its demands for a “good” Fatah-directed national unity government to replace the “bad” Hamas-led democratically elected government chosen by the Palestinian people. Naturally Israel is doing its damnedest to make it as difficult as possible for this stitch up, sorry, “transition” to take place, by bombing and bulldozing places like Beit Hanoun to bloody rubble, thereby effectively derailing any diplomatic progress.
As Beit Hanoun cemetery gridlocked with 18 ambulances, the grief-shattered men of the town cried “God is greater than Israel or America!”
The belief on the Israeli side appears to be rather different, however.
Israel, with the US as chief cheerleader and quartermaster, seems able to do exactly as it pleases in order to achieve its objective, its biblical mission - all this with God’s blessing, or at least some kind of rubber-stamp.
The biblical mission, of course, means stealing Palestine’s land and murdering Palestinine’s people.
Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh is the latest Israeli thug to squat on the moral high ground and spout offensive nonsense.
He reckons the moral responsibility for Palestinian loss of life lies with the Palestinian militants who are “cynically using their civil population as human shields for terrorist activity”.
The truth is that his boss, Defence Minister Emir Peretz, is pretty stoked these days.
He’s using the current killing spree, dubbed Operation Autumn Cloud, as an opportunity to show his fellow parliamentarians, and the Israeli public, that he’s one tough guy.
He’s doing this because that same Israeli public gave its government the thumbs-down for its performance in Lebanon, judging the military operation there as “not determined enough”.
As ever, the bone-headed aggression of the Israeli state is reflected in its minions’ words. Israeli ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman reckons “war is a dirty business and during war ugly things happen.”
That ugly things happen is certainly true. One of the key motifs in Israel’s catechism of persecution is that the IDF went into Gaza to curtail “terrorist” activity - which means firing Qassam rockets into Southern Israel.

Cold Blood
It insists the Qassams are still a good reason to bomb family homes in the middle of the night, position snipers armed with high-velocity rifles on roofs with orders to shoot anything that moves, and round up able-bodied men for “questioning”- all males over 15 in Beit Hanoun were rounded up on 3 November and haven’t been seen since - and shooting down unarmed women in cold blood.
In reality, the Qassams are home-made affairs, highly unlikely to do the damage of even the smallest Israeli missile.
To describe the Israeli military response as “disproportionate” would be a serious understatement.
Yet the Israeli military response is absolutely, consistently, disproportionate.
It does what it does because that’s what it always does. If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always get.
If you do what you always do and expect to get something different, that’s insanity.
It’s almost impossible to adequately understand the Israeli mindset, without thinking in terms of some kind of collective insanity.
Does anyone in the Knesset, or on the streets of Tel Aviv, think that tomorrow, next week, next month, the Palestinian people will collectively shrug and say “That’s it, you’ve won fair and square, no hard feelings.”
And somehow disappear?
That’s not going to happen.

Return of the Sandinistas

by Jack Ferguson

In Nicaragua, the former leader of the revolution that overthrew a dictator and established radical reforms in favour of the poor has regained power in the Presidential elections.
But Daniel Ortega is a very changed man to the one that led the government of the Sandinistas in the revolutionary Nicaragua of the 1980s.
Back then his policies and alliance with Cuba attracted the extreme hostility of the US, leading the Reagan administration to fund vicious right-wing paramilitaries and conduct a covert war against his government.
This culminated with Ortega’s party, the Sandinistas, losing power in the elections of 1990, with the Nicaraguan population exhausted by years of war.
He has stood for the Presidency several times subsequently, but has now won thanks to a pact with the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC).
El Pacto, as it is known, has been widely criticised as being a means for both Ortega and another former President, Aleman, of the PLC, to protect each other from corruption allegations.
Also, Ortega has received criticism from a number of former comrades for the compromises he has made in his quest to return to power.
He has promised not to threaten private property and to protect business.
But just before the election he also backed making abortion illegal for women whose lives are in danger, leading to widespread international criticism.
In the run up to the election an alternative candidate, Herty Lewites of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, a group of disenchanted Sandinistas who had left the party, was polling well.
However, Lewites died of a massive heart attack in July, and his party ended up polling around 6 per cent.
Ortega’s re-election to the Presidency has been welcomed by Venezuela and Cuba, which has already been sending doctors to provide free healthcare in impoverished communities in Nicaragua.
Hopefully the new Sandinista administration will implement new social programmes and go some way to ameliorating poverty.
However, it seems clear that the second Sandinista government looks set to be nowhere as revolutionary as its 1980s predecessor.

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