Scottish Socialist Voice
Issue 293
25 th Jan 2007
—front page—
Jack’s £2m snub To 10,000 families… and 600 workers
Jack McConnell must take immediate action
to safeguard vital services for single parents and jobs at One Plus, Glasgow
MSP Rosie Kane demanded on Monday.
One Plus - which supports 10,000 families in
It is thought One Plus’s liquidation could cost the Scottish economy as
much as £10million.
This week, Scottish Socialist Party MSP Rosie Kane will grill the First
Minister on the crisis, which will affect 600 workers.
The charity also runs nearly 40 nurseries, including 30 after-school clubs.
Rosie said:
“The Scottish Executive have been aware of this
crisis since December 2006 and have failed to act.”
Ideally, it should not be down to a charity to provide such essential
advice and childcare provision but, as Rosie says:
“The first priority must be to safeguard these vital services and the
jobs that provide them.”
Lone parents and their children make up nearly half the families in
“The £2million cost to save the much needed
organisation will be dwarfed by the millions a closure will cost,” says
Rosie.
Motorola were given £16.75million in government grants between 1995 and
2001.
They then closed their plant in
Scottish
Rosie concludes:
“It is ironic that the funding needed to keep One Plus in business is
£2million - the same cost as the Executive’s campaign on how to wash your
hands.
“Does Jack McConnell intend to wash his hands of the service users and
jobs at One Plus?”
—page two—
Honours scandal dishonours Labour
by Roz Paterson
Last Monday night, Jack McConnell became embroiled
in the cash-for-peerages scandal that has engulfed the Labour
party since last March, when he was called in for questioning
in
He insists he was “happy to help” to answer queries regarding
his nomination of Colin Boyd, the then Lord Advocate, for a
peerage last year.
It’s highly unlikely that wee Jack is involved in the case of
the false balance sheet, allegedly presented by the Labour party
to its own auditors, to cover up £12million in loans.
What this does tell us, however, is that the former party of
the working-class is now entrenched in the kind of corruption
and sleaze for which it once lambasted the Tories.
Indeed, it is scaling new heights - or rather, depths - in that
Tony Blair has now clocked up the, aherm, honour of being the
first serving prime minister to be interviewed by the police
as part of a criminal investigation.
That he was interviewed as a witness rather than a suspect will
do little to remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over Downing
Street, especially given last Friday’s dawn arrest of Ruth Turner,
a ‘key aide’ of the prime minister’s.
The outrage expressed by leading cabinet members is telling.
Clearly, they didn’t expect one of their own to actually be
subject to the laws of the land. So much for being a people’s
party.
Tessa Jowell expressed bewilderment, while David Blunkett called
the timing of the arrest a piece of “police theatrics”. Funny
that, coming from a former Home Secretary who always rather
favoured dawn raids.
The police are bridling at these criticisms, Sir Chris Fox,
the former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers,
characterising Labour’s antipathy as “scheming to discredit
a very important inquiry.”
Surely not.
But then again, Turner was arrested not only under the Honours
(Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 - the one formulated after a
similar scandal which finished off Lloyd George’s political
career and saw his chief fixer and honours salesman, Maundy
Gregory, jailed - but also on suspicion of perverting the course
of justice.
Are the police trying to suggest our government members may
be liars? Why, it would seem that they are.
The Police said the arrest of Turner was a “new development”,
and that an additional investigation would now be required before
a final file can be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service.
This will discomfit the cabinet, who doubtless hoped to see
this matter swept under the carpet long since, and backbenchers,
who are threatening to call for Tony Blair’s resignation if
either Turner, Downing Street chief of staff Jonathon Powell,
or director of political operations, John McTernan, are charged.
This, it seems, is the point at which Labour’s famous ‘rebels’
will draw the line. But the public drew the line a long time
ago, and in
SSP rallies round NCR workers
The SSP has been unequivocal in its condemnation
of Ohio-based company National Cash Register’s (NCR) recent
decision to axe 650 jobs in
A decision that has left hundreds of families in abject panic,
given that
In the wake of the decision, SSP convenor Colin Fox travelled
north with the party’s message of support for workers squaring
up to this wretched decision.
He was also keen to distance the SSP “from the attitude of all
the other parties that nothing can be done and that the only
option remaining is to follow the Scottish Executive lead and
provide retraining, advice on setting up new businesses and
educational routes forward away from NCR.”
Colin, alongside SSP Industrial Organiser Richie Venton and
Dundee SSP member Rod McGregor, spoke to local press, radio
and TV, and met Scott Murray, Amicus union convener at NCR,
to discuss the situation, the union’s approach and the SSP’s
support.
The public meeting was organised by Dundee SSP members within
days of the NCR announcement.
In building for the meeting, they held a successful stall in
the city centre and in two local schemes, leafleted the NCR
factory three days running, and got an article in the Dundee
Courier.
The meeting was well-attended and constructive, with speakers
Colin, Richie, and Mike Arnott from Dundee Trades Council.
Richie called NCR a “subsidy junkie. They have been handed £4million
by the Scottish Executive in grants since 1993. And a further
£2.2million off Scottish Enterprise just eight months ago.
“Instead of offering more handouts to NCR bosses who lie and
plunder, the Scottish Executive should seize their assets and
keep the workforce and its skills.”
Mike Arnott exposed NCR bosses as Corporation Tax-dodgers.
“They channel all their non-US profits - including those from
Dundee - through a front company in
“Yet by this legalised tax theft they can claim in 2005 that
31 people generated $186million profit - almost half their global
total! Why do they siphon their profits across the
Colin Fox warned NCR workers not to be conned into relying on
Task Forces that promise to re-train redundant workers.
“Look at Motorola. They didn’t even allow a trade union. But
they had a works committee. I met the convener of the works
committee when Motorola was closing down, promising re-training.
“Six weeks later I met the same skilled worker in Harthill Service
Station, sweeping up the forecourt!
“Unlike the mainstream parties who wring their hands in pretend
sympathy but preach there is nothing you can do, the SSP strongly
believes that if the NCR workforce decide on powerful, united
action, the jobs can be saved.”
Richie flagged up how
Mary McGregor, of Dundee SSP, said, “Our party will continue
to build support for the NCR workers and their families. We
cannot let this devastation of the city go ahead without a fight.
“The SSP is there to organise support for any action the workers
take.”
Lothians trident debate
Lothians SSP is hosting a series of meetings
to debate the issue of a Trident replacement.
When the nuclear arsenal on the
The government once promised a fulsome debate on the matter
and the SSP is keen to facilitate this process by inviting local
Labour MPs to attend these meetings.
First up is Edinburgh South, where SSP MSP Colin Fox will speak
alongside (invited) speaker and full-time Labour hack, Nigel
Griffiths MP. For those unfamiliar with Nigel, he’s one of those
who voted for ID cards (several times) and to extend the maximum
period for police detention of a terror suspect without charge
to 90 days.
Surely such a humanitarian will recoil at the idea of billions
that could be spent on schools and hospitals being squandered
on deadly nuclear weapons moored only a matter of miles from
Should Nigel fail to make it to Moredun this Thursday for the
SSP meeting, a tub of lard has been invited to step in at the
last minute.
—page three—
No such thing as a free lunch
...unless you go to school in
“Weak and totally inadequate,” is
how SSP MSP Frances Curran describes the Scottish Executive’s
Nutrition and Health Promotion bill, which promises
to ban junk food in schools but fails to introduce healthy,
free school meals.
The SSP’s Free School Meals bill was blocked to make
way for the Executive’s bill, due to be debated in the
Scottish Parliament as we went to press. And just as
new research emerged, unequivocally backing the policy
of free lunches for all schoolchildren.
Hull
Positive
Free, nutritious school meals, they said, had
a highly positive impact on learning, health and behaviour,
the report’s author even enthusing that the policy “works
wonders”.
Says
“This latest report is further evidence that the case
for Free School Meals is unanswerable. Indeed
“Across
As it happens, the Labour/Lib Dem Exec are not the only
ones prepared to play political fast and loose with
children’s health.
In Hull, believe it or not, the ruling Lib Dems have
‘vowed’ to scrap the free school meals project in March,
when its three year trial period comes to an end, despite
its being a resounding success.
They claim it’s all down to a lack of take-up, though
65 per cent is a serious succss story, and one that
is likely only to increase. The real reason for the
Lib Dem axe is, of course, that the policy was introduced
by their Labour party predecessors.
This will come as a serious blow, to the children who
are doing better in class and eating a higher quality
of food both at school and at home and to the teachers
who find they get to spend more time teaching as they
have fewer discipline problems.
Research
Despite the Lib Dems’ disingenuous assertion
that the money could be better spent elsewhere, the
Hull University research warns that, despite the benefits
of the scheme, a significant number of parents would
not pay for the meals if charges were re-introduced.
Prof Derek Colquhoun, head of the
“There is a sustained high uptake of the free healthy
school meals, probably the highest uptake in the country
at 65 per cent. We have recommended the meals stay free
and healthy.”
The research used a mixture of interviews, surveys and
tests and found children who ate school meals performed
better during the course of the afternoon than those
who ate packed lunches.
About a third of parents also said they were trying
healthier foods at home as a result of the ‘Eat Well,
Do Well’ programme and complaints about children feeling
hungry after school lunches had fallen.
A spokesman for the Child Poverty Action Group, John
Dickie, said: “This latest research shows just how important
eating a healthy school lunch is to children’s health
and education.”
But council leaders remain adamant, arguing over percentages
and costs, when the real results are staring them in
the face. Not unlike the ruling parties at Holyrood,
who would argue black was white if it meant not having
to back an SSP policy.
Let’s hope
“My free School Meals bill may have been blocked but
the fight goes on and I intend to try and amend the
Executive bill to include free meals.
“But even if that is voted down, it will not stop the
massive campaign involving parents, health experts,
unions and others to get Free School Meals for all of
Labour’s lunch hypocrisy
by Eddie Truman
After reading Alan Johnson’s praise
of the benefits of free school meals the Voice took
at look at the records of the House of Commons - and
we’ve uncovered something quite astonishing.
Labour MPs representing Scottish constituencies in
Meanwhile, their colleagues representing the very same
constituencies in the Scottish Parliament have moved
heaven and earth to stop the measure being brought in
here. Labour MP for Hull North, Diana Johnson, laid
an early day motion on 3 July 2006 congratulating Hull
City Council for making school meals free.
The motion said: “That this House believes that a more
nutritious diet for schoolchildren has a central role
in combating this public health problem; applauds Hull
City Council’s three-year pilot scheme, combining increased
investment in healthier school food ingredients with
the abolition of charges for primary school meals.”
Signatories to the motion included Gavin Strang, MP
for Edinburgh East, Brian Donohoe of Central Ayrshire,
Jim Devine of Livingston, Jim McGovern representing
Dundee West and Michael Connarty of Linlithgow and
In an earlier adjournment debate on the Liberal Democrat
council in
“I am sorry that my Labour colleagues in the Scottish
Parliament seem to have been misled, seduced almost,
by the Liberal Democrat practices down in
The only conclusion that Scottish voters can draw is
that the only party to be trusted to deliver free school
meals in
A sick kind of politicking
Just a year since the Scottish Parliament
voted down the SSP’s plan to abolish prescription charges,
the Welsh Assembly has passed the proposal, with effect
from 1 April this year.
Although Scottish Labour joined forces with their Executive
chums, the LibDems, and the Tories to block Colin Fox’s
bill, Labour in
Scottish Labour had promised some concessions, saying,
for example, they would extend the number of chronic
conditions covered by existing free prescription schemes.
But, says Colin, there’s been no movement on this in
twelve months.
“For 40 years, no clinicians or doctors have been prepared
to play eugenics in deciding which conditions are more
deserving of free prescriptions than others.
“I’ve asked about ten questions in Parliament about
what changes are to be made, and the answer is always
the same - that proposals are imminent, it’ll be a matter
of days. But nothing has happened.”
The Welsh Health Minister Brian Gibbons announced the
agreement telling journalists:
“The main reason for providing free prescriptions was
to ensure people are not put off getting medication
they need due to cost. This will therefore enable those
people who need medication to get it to improve their
health and ultimately their quality of life.”
Perhaps he could put that in a letter to his Scottish
colleagues, who have wilfully obstructed improving the
health and quality of life of the 70,000 Scots who can’t
afford to pay for prescriptions.
—page four—
A year of living dangerously
by Roz Paterson
In the last two months, we’ve witnessed
a sea-change in
Where once we had snow in late December and early January, now we
have ferocious howling gales, endless, lashing rain and temperatures
so unseasonably high that occasional shrubs are still flowering and
crocuses are already starting to push through.
This is global warming; through mankind’s actions since the dawn of
industrialisation, we have changed the weather.
But if we think we’re suffering - and we are, people have died, whole
areas are flooded, thousands of homes have been left for days without
power - you should see what’s happening elsewhere,where rising seas
are starting to engulf entire islands, where drought is relentless,
turning once habitable land into desert, where diseases unleashed
by the changing climate are killing people in their thousands.
The World Development Movement (WDM) calls climate change the greatest
global injustice, in that rich countries, with their advanced, industrialised
economies, do all the polluting, and poor countries, with barely a
carbon footprint to speak of, bear the brunt of global warming.
To demonstrate this inescapable fact, the WDM has produced a climate
calendar that shows just how disproportionate our carbon emissions
are, and what impact they have on other peoples in other parts of
the globe.
By 3 January, the average
Adding insult to injury is the ‘aid’ delivered in the form of IMF
and World Bank interventions, leading to the forced privatisation
of the state marketing board and an end to subsidised fertiliser;
two major contributing factors to the 2004/05 food crisis.
By 9 January, the average
And by 10 June, the average
“The rich world is riding on the back of a vast pool of poor people
who make no net contribution to greenhouse gas emissions,” states
the WDM. “If every country in the world emitted as much CO2 per person
as the
The
“Moreover, the
“For the past 175 years, the
But the WDM adds an important caveat.
“Such figures only highlight the inequality between countries. They
take no account of the inequality within countries.
“Across both the industrialised and developing world, wealthy people
consume more and cause more greenhouse gas emissions than poor people.”
To address the global injustice, the world needs to cut its emissions
by 70 per cent by 2050 - 10 per cent more than Tony Blair has called
for, and he’s not even counting air traffic’s contribution (see Voice
292).
Because the
This is essential to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2
degrees C above pre-industrialisation levels, the generally held ‘tipping
point’ after which climate change will accelerate irreversibly.
On a person by person basis, this means reducing the global average
carbon footprint of 4.2 tonnes of CO2 to 1.1 tonnes.
As the WDM points out, a large proportion of the world is already
doing its bit for a sustainable earth in the sense that “69 countries,
containing 2.5billion people, already emit less than 1.1 tonnes per
person.”
However, this figure is a little misleading as individual’s contributions
are only 40 per cent of the story, at least in the
We could cycle and real nappy it for all we’re worth and still not
fully address the problem, as industry - from office buildings to
hospitals to buses to construction sites - is the major offender,
which means tackling carbon emissions on two levels.
Which means, of course, that our government must relinquish its faith
in market solutions and get regulating.
The government, like all right-wing, pro-business governments, urges
us to beware of regulation, hinting that it means diminished freedom
and an erosion of rights.
A bit rich coming from a government that fancies ID cards and the
prohibition of political protest!
Regulation in this context only really means diminished freedom for
corporations to make money.
The CBI, for instance, says tackling climate change on any other than
a voluntary (that is, you don’t have to do anything if you don’t want
to) basis would “create an undue burden on business”. Implying that,
for the ordinary punter in the street, this would mean fewer job opportunities.
Yet economic growth, flagged up by the likes of the CBI as the key
indicator of quality of life, does not deliver decreased poverty or
indeed any form of social equality.
In fact, the richer ‘we’ get, the more unemployment and poverty we
seem to have, as governments’ priority across the Western world is
increasingly about how to benefit business, rather than improve the
lives of its populations or tackle climate change.
The WDM, like the SSP, is calling for the government to take radical
action - taxes, regulations, whatever it takes - to “reign in the
worst excesses of corporate greed and abandon policies designed to
benefit business rather than people”, rather than try to push the
responsibility for change onto the shoulders of individuals, many
of whom cannot afford to convert to a low-carbon lifestyle at present.
Though measures like 100 per cent government grants to insulate homes
and make them energy efficient would certainly help, and ensure maximum
take-up.
It’s often said, usually by people sitting in oil company boardrooms,
that there’s no point in us doing anything if
That’s a get-out, in that
The WDM concludes that pressure must be exerted on government to act,
to introduce measures, laws, regulations, that will transform ours
into a low-carbon, perhaps one day even a post-carbon, economy.
“The climate change threat is so big and so urgent that politicians
cannot be given excuses for not acting. It is up to the masses of
the people to campaign for a transformation to a low carbon British
economy in order to see that global justice is done.”
n www.wdm.org.uk
—page five—
letters page
Is play not fit for
purpose?
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee is
‘commemorating’ Holocaust Memorial Week by staging readings
from Jim Allen’s play Perdition. (See Voice issue 292.)
According to Allen, the play “says quite plainly that privileged
Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their
own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state,
Perdition purports to be based on a well-known libel case
in
In fact, Allen used the libel case as a ‘peg’ on which to
hook the grotesque Stalinist and anti-semitic theme of ‘Nazism
equals Zionism equals
In summing up the play’s central argument, one character
talks of “the Zionist knife in the Nazi fist” and claims,
“To save your hides, you (Zionists) practically led them
(Jews) to the gas chambers of
Elsewhere in the play characters use more traditional anti-semitic
imagery, such as references to “all-powerful American Jewry”
and “Jews in fur-lined bunkers hurling money”. The play
also contains a fair few references to
Historians remain deeply divided in their verdicts on Kastner.
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in
The problem in attempting to pass judgement on Kastner was
summed up by one of the judges in upholding his appeal:
“A most difficult task has been imposed upon us in this
appeal - to scrutinise deeds and occurrences which seem
to have happened on a different planet, and to pronounce
judgment on the behaviour of men, hovering in the claws
of Satan himself.”
Perdition, on the other hand, ignores all such complexities:
Allen simply sets up Kastner to be found guilty.
Having done so, he then grafts onto that guilt the late-20th-century
version of the traditional anti-semitic blood libel: “privileged
Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their
own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state.”
Stan Crooke,
Glasgow
Channel 4’s legal
obligation
It is unfortunate for Gordon Brown that the Shilpa
Shetty racism allegations coincide with a major effort on
the part of his campaign managers to promote his political
image in the fast growing economy of
It says a lot about Channel 4’s mismanagement of the issues
that their narrow world view failed to recognise that Shilpa
is a famous Bollywood star and as such, a major property
of the Indian film going masses! And unfortunately for Gordon,
any experience that is negative or derogatory for Shilpa
is a major torpedo across the bows of the HMS Brown World
Statesman in India Campaign.
It is disingenuous of the Channel 4 management to claim
that the issues complained of are about ‘class and culture’
One of the pernicious aspects of racism is that it cuts
across class, culture, gender, age, ethnicity and national
identity.
It is perfectly possible for a person to detest another
on the grounds of a particular identity. So the claim, by
some, that there are people of a different ethnicity around,
does not negate particular acts of racism.
Channel 4 has a legal duty to “remove unlawful racial discrimination”
and to “promote good race relations and equal opportunities”
under the Race Relations Amendment Act (RRAA) 2000. It is
also obliged to train all its staff in the key RRAA principles.
In the face of 20,000 complaints about the Big Brother programme,
I am sure there are a few recriminations being exchanged
behind the closed doors of Channel 4
Maggie Chetty,
Via email
Editorial Comment
Big Brother storm should bring big debate
The confusion in Jade Goody’s
eyes seemed more panicked than normal when she emerged from
the Celebrity Big Brother house to be shown footage of her
comments about Shilpa Shetty being discussed in parliament.
Her apologies seemed earnest, even if it’s taken until the
follow-up interviews for Goody to sound like she’s even
beginning to understand what was wrong with what she said.
In her post-eviction televised interview, trying to explain
herself, she repeated her ‘poppadom’ insult an excruciating
number of times until an audience member called out “stop
saying it”.
For Goody, being racist is clearly a bad thing. Something,
she insists, she definitely isn’t. But there’s no doubt
that her comments, and even more obviously the comments
of her partners in bullying, Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd,
were racist.
That’s symptomatic of life in a
And the plainest of ironies is that it was discussed by
a government that has made every effort to engender fear
of other communities - particularly the Muslim community
- and for that, because of general levels of ignorance,
read anyone with brown skin.
The debate caused by Big Brother has been an easy one so
far for the government and the media. The Sun was able to
condemn Jade as a “racist pig”, cos The Sun don’t like racists,
geddit?
But in the next issue, they trot out their daily demonisation
of asylum-seekers, with a sorry tale of how £60,000 of “tax
payers’ money” is to be spent on trapeze workshops for refugees
- a story which, apart from being mostly made up, serves
only to stimulate a racist response, the choicest of which
from their website is “hopefully they will show them hoe
(sic) to tie the rope around their neck and hang themselves”.
Big Brother is a show which trades on a pretence of having
a contribution to make to sociological debate - in reality
it’s just cheap entertainment which relies on manufactured
conflict to make a fast buck for producers Endemol.
But in this case, it’s thrown up a discussion we cannot
and should not ignore. Asian commentators in the media have
recounted horribly similar incidents from their own lives.
Almost every Asian in
But at the same time, that doesn’t mean Endemol should have
censored them, although a ‘racist language’ warning would
have allowed people the choice of switching off.
As harrowing as it is, the racism is very, very real, and
we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, either in Big Brother
or everyday life.
Endemol and Channel 4’s mistake was not in subjecting viewers
to the full recordings, but in letting the housemates get
on with it. Effigies were being burned before Jade was summoned
to the diary room to be told her comments could be interpreted
as racist.
In Jade and co’s merciless bullying of Shilpa they created
an environment for themselves where they felt safe to spout
crassly ignorant views.
When that level of racism is meted out, often all it requires
is one person to say - ‘listen, that’s out of order’ - to
put a stop to it.
Ingrained, institutionalised racism is a different matter
altogether - it’s something we need to challenge collectively
and with force. And that’s where this discussion should
be going.
It can’t end with Goody’s eviction, not least because two
other culprits remain happy as Larry in the house.
Otherwise, we’ve just made a manipulated, ignorant woman
into a total scapegoat.
Gie’s peace
Morag Balfour
A little shade of Jade in us all?
Were you watching when Jade
Goody became a baddy? Like most folk I was appalled by the
recent scenes of racism and bullying in the current series
of Celebrity Big Brother. The gang mentality espoused by
Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd sent a pure chill through
me. I admit it freely... I am a Shilpa Shetty fan.
A long time ago I lived for several years in a city where
I was a racial minority. I could count on one hand the number
of white people I saw in a day. I was the only Scot for
miles and miles.
I was living in what was
The stereotypical white woman in an urban context was so
not me it was funny, most of the time. She is one of several
things; she is wealthy and makes visits to the city to buy
drugs, she is a prostitute with a crack addiction, or, finally,
she has come to the city to seek a sexual experience with
a man of colour.
Every encounter with a stranger was influenced by these
stereotypes. Men were left genuinely puzzled when I rejected
their sexual advances; the police kept a close eye on me
in case a purchase of drugs was imminent; our city’s homeless
followed me around on the off chance I’d give them what
little money I had so they could buy alcohol; and most dangerously
for me, the city’s young women viewed me as a threat.
I tended to dress down so I sent ‘ugly’ signals in their
direction, which left me in the prostitute-on-crack category,
but also meant there was less chance of my face encountering
razor-blades at dawn from a scrum of angry young women.
My accent cut through quite a bit of this crap though, because
I wasn’t an American white woman. The young people who I
worked with insisted that I wasn’t white at all. I was pink
and therefore cool.
There was a definite pecking order when it came to the valuing
of other cultures. Our city had seen a constant stream of
immigration and its most recent immigrants were those who
were treated the least favourably - back then it was the
Cambodians who had the hardest time.
I stayed long enough to adopt a general suspicion and distrust
of white people. I remember travelling home and being on
the brink of a panic attack standing close to the baggage
carousel at
Even now my inner bigot is easily roused in the company
of white Africans, and it’s not something I’m proud of.
I work hard not to be racist. Where I feel it happening
I activate my political correctness filter and then move
as fast as I can to the politically conscious one.
We are all racist at some point in our lives and for the
majority of us this is entirely accidental. This is fact.
Where we refuse to accept this fact we resemble Jade Goody.
I only hope that she is able to learn more about herself
through this horrible event. She should not be crucified.
She is after all socially inept.
I am relieved that she is no longer left unchecked to run
amok inside the Big Brother house. Only time will tell if
she is able to gain any true insight about her behaviour.
Her sort of ignorance is dangerous. The question is though,
how endemic is Jade’s brand of ignorance?
—centre pages—
War on humanity
This week we mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Roz Paterson looks at the Nazi slaughter of 11 million people, members of minority groups, of whom at least 6 million were Jews. But as genocide persists in our modern world, she asks, have we learned any lessons?
This Saturday is Holocaust
Memorial Day, created in remembrance of the
victims of the Holocaust and to mark the anniversary
of the Soviet liberation of
Auschwitz, to be found 37 miles west of Krakow
on the German/Polish border, was the largest
and most notorious of the Nazis’ death camps;
a complex of concentration, extermination and
forced labour camps that herded an estimated
1.3 million people through its gates and gave
up less than a few thousand upon its final liberation.
In January 1945, the Auschwitz SS were taken
by surprise at the speed of the Soviet advance,
and began a hasty and crude attempt to hide
the evidence of the horrendous torture and murder
that had occurred at their hands. Thousands
of prisoners were gassed and cremated in the
days preceding the German evacuation. And those
prisoners left standing, around 60,000, were
forced to march westwards, where they joined
up with other forced prisoner marches from other
camps, before being herded aboard unheated,
overcrowded trains bound for German camps such
as Buchenwald and
Many thousands died on these death marches,
through starvation, cold, disease, or being
shot dead by guards for falling behind. Many
thousands more died on the trains. The rest
died at destination.
The sight that greeted the Soviet soldiers was
a pitiful one. Only the very weak and dying
were left behind. Emaciated children, kept alive
solely for use as medical research tools, and
adults sickened by disease, overwork, abuse
and starvation.
But the Nazis had left evidence of their handiwork
behind, in the packages of human hair, some
14,000 lbs of it, destined for use in the upholstery
industry, that stood testament to the murder
of at least 140,000 women. In the warehouses
holding vast heaps of clothing, including babies’
dresses and men’s smart suits. In the mounds
of gold teeth, extracted from dead mouths.
Auschwitz is a horror story, of a kind we tell
ourselves over and over again, to ensure such
a thing could never again occur. It is a place
we, all of us, have heard of, read about. We
are all familiar with the brutal architecture
of its main gates, through which the trains
of the condemned passed.
Yet isn’t there something a little comforting
about the story of the Holocaust? In the sense
that, as so many insist, it never happened before
and has never happened since and was, in short,
an aberration on the part of mankind?
It would be comforting to think that, but it
isn’t true.
When the Nazis were drawing up the final solution
to the ‘Jewish problem’, and that of political
opponents and despised minorities, such as homosexuals
and Roma, they had a precedent to hand - the
1915 massacres of Armenians, organised and executed
by the Turkish government.
Not only had a government committed such an
atrocity, but the world had all but stayed silent
on the matter. If you were powerful, they could
only have concluded, you really could get away
with murder.
And they did get away with it - until they started
losing the war.
Churchill knew as early as 1941. The Americans
refused a request to bomb the camps. On 12 May
1943, Szmul Zygielbojm, leader of the Polish
government-in-exile, committed suicide in
The world has watched and permitted untold such
atrocities since.
Three short years after the liberation of the
concentration camps, and the worldwide circulation
of news footage that left people literally gasping
with horror, the systematic annihilation of
another race of people began, this time in the
As the Israeli academic Ilan Pappe describes
in his fearless book, The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine, Zionists - including Jews who had
borne witness to what had just happened in
Even today,
And what about the extermination of some 200,000
(out of a population of only 690,000) East Timorese
by anti-independence militias, backed by Indonesian
troops?
The invasion and occupation of East Timor by
In truth, East Timorese were rounded up into
concentration camps, their land napalmed (ensuring
they starved to death, if nothing else), raped,
tortured, and killed. An estimated 66 per cent
of East Timorese women were sterilised, through
forced injections or implantations.
Despite these echoes of something very dark
and familiar, the
These are not isolated examples. There’s Srebrenica,
It is so very easy for someone like Tony Blair
to condemn the Holocaust because it is so long-gone,
so neatly sealed in its historical bubble as
to be politically inert.
That said, it shouldn’t be overlooked that anti-Semitism
has never been fully extinguished, and continues
to bubble under, occasionally bursting through
in the guise of, for instance, holocaust denial,
a pseudo-academic rewriting of history, ostensibly
focussed on the ‘inaccuracies’ of generally
accepted holocaust records, but in reality a
direct attack on the Jewish people, implying
that the genocide of six million Jews is just
a story concocted by Zionists hellbent on world
domination.
Anti-semitism remains undead across
But it’s a form of racism of which Blair is
not guilty, and in loudly condemning the Holocaust,
and thereby suggesting it was a one-off, he
hopes to deflect attention away from the racism
and atrocities in which he does play a part.
How could we seriously compare him to a Nazi,
he seems to be saying, and not be laughed at?
Actually, someone surprising sort of did, if
not intentionally.
Professor Yehuda Bauer is a Zionist, formerly
of the Palmach, one of the militias that helped
establish the Israeli state. He is also a leading
light in the field of Holocaust analysis.
He says the Holocaust is unique, for a number
of reasons, including that the ideology employed
by the Nazis regarding the Jewish people was
“totally unpragmatic”.
The Jews were not a military threat to Nazism.
They weren’t killed so that the German government
could confiscate their property - they did that
anyway, when they herded them into the ghettoes.
They continued killing Jewish slave labour even
when they desperately needed it to provide armaments
and build roads.
Nazi ideology traded in nightmares, of Jews
killing non-Jewish children in ritualistic slaughters,
of Jews taking over the world as part of some
ancient global conspiracy.
Does this ring any bells today? What about the
nightmares our government trades in, of Islamic
fundamentalists taking over the world as part
of some ancient global conspiracy?
The Nazis hated the values of democracy, socialism
and humanitarianism, continues Bauer, and the
Jews of twentieth century
“They... wanted to eliminate (those values)
and the destruction of the Jews followed.”
But they could only destroy those values by
creating the nightmare ideology, just as now
the US/UK hegemony seeks to stamp out the values
of democracy in the
The Holocaust is a theme that is still being
played out, in all its variations.
None of us should ever forget what happened
to the Jewish peoples of
But we should also all remember that it’s still
dark out there, for many hundreds of thousands
if not millions of us. Very dark indeed.
Genocide
in
by Neil Bennet
If you were to have asked
someone in 1994 if they had heard of a genocide
happening in
The British government went out of its way,
together with the US and China, to make sure
the word ‘genocide’ was never used in connection
with events in the small country in east-central
Africa, and to prevent anything from being done
to stop the tragedy.
In April 1994 extremist Hutu fighters began
a campaign of mass slaughter intended to ethnically
cleanse members of the minority Tutsi ethnic
group, as well as the political opponents of
the Hutu government. As the killings began the
UN - at the suggestion of
It is estimated that in total almost one million
people were killed by the end of the conflict
in mid-July the same year. Most were Tutsi but
many moderate Hutus were also targeted by the
extremists.
Those few that survived in towns and villages
wiped out by the extremist fighters were left
scarred as only people who have seen all their
friends and family violently murdered at once
can be.
The conflict came to an end when the Tutsi-dominated
Rwandan Peoples Front of Paul Kagame seized
power. However Kagame’s government has gone
on to be responsible for much of the continued
violence in the long-running civil war in mineral-rich
neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, yet
again with the complicity of the Western governments
- thankful for Kagame’s support of their neoliberal
economic project in Africa.
Srebrenica massacre
by Donnie Nicolson
As the victims of Nazi terror
are mourned this week, it is worth remembering
another genocide which happened only 12 years
ago in
The massacre in Srebrenica, a small mining town
in Eastern Bosnia, is the largest mass murder
in Europe since World War II, and the first
legally established case of genocide in
As people fled their homes at the start of the
Balkans war, Srebrenica became a Bosniak enclave
surrounded by Serbs. In April 1993, the United
Nations declared the town a ‘UN safe area’,
guarded by 400 armed Dutch ‘peacekeepers’.
Despite this so-called protection, Srebrenica
was captured by the Serb Army of Republika Srpska
(VRS) in July 1995. Approximately 8,000 unarmed
Bosniaks were massacred by Serbian forces.
As the VRS approached the town, the UN sent
urgent requests for NATO air support, but to
no avail. NATO claims that plans for air strikes
were abandoned following the VRS’s threats to
kill Dutch troops.
The role of the UN troops has been described
as ‘deplorable’ and ‘cowardly’ by the Bosniak
government. UN Commander Thomas Karremans, who
was in charge of Dutch troops in Srebrenica,
was filmed at the time sharing a toast with
Serb general and war criminal Ratko Mladic.
UN soldiers however say that they were abandoned
by their command in
The tragedy was mixed with horrific farce. As
the VRS advanced, many Bosniaks tried to escape
into the surrounding factories and fields. People
that fell were trampled on by Dutch soldiers
retreating from their post.
The following genocide that took place included
the ‘methodological rape and killing of people,
including pre-teen children’, and the eye-witness
accounts are as chilling as they are numerous.
In a unanimous landmark ruling in 2001, the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) stated that:
“Bosnian Serb soldiers targeted for extinction
the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica,
a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian
Muslims in general. They stripped all the male
Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly
and young, of their personal belongings and
identification, and deliberately and methodically
killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”
The victims’ bodies were then dumped in mass
graves.
The massacre is now officially known as the
Srebrenica genocide, following an admission
and apology by the Republika Srpska government
in 2004.
—page eight—
No welcome to
by Rosie Kane
On Tuesday last week the anniversary of
the Act of Union was marked, provoking much discussion of
I commemorated the Act by crossing the border into
It all started when Zahra Byansi and her sons, aged five
and 12, were arrested when they went to sign on at the Home
Office building in
I have worked with Zahra for some time now and my friendship
with her is built on respect and admiration. Zahra is a
strong woman who sticks up for vulnerable people, despite
the danger of deportation hanging over her own head.
She has two wonderful children who are loved by all their
little friends and neighbours and she is a highly respected
member of the community here in
They were held for almost a week at Dungavel Detention Centre,
then moved to Yarlswood detention centre in
At 6am on Tuesday morning, ten of us got in a minibus in
I have to say it is one of the most sinister places I have
ever seen.
It sits in a business park, which is fitting because the
private company which runs the place makes a fortune out
of locking up innocent people and little children.
It has the look of a maximum security Travelodge.
There are no signs anywhere telling you what it actually
is and the next door neighbour is the fabulously wealthy
Formula One Racing Centre.
I was struck by the contrast between the rich and the so,
so poor.
Standing outside, we gathered together. One of the women
with us said a prayer for those inside and we took a couple
of photos with us holding up pictures of Zahra.
We were immediately pounced upon by security guards, some
of whom were very forceful and extremely rude.
We remained peaceful and put our banners away as we did
not want to jeopardise our visit.
Inside, we filled in visitors’ forms, were photographed
and given passes to visit.
However, just as we were about to be led through the doors,
a very officious woman appeared and told us we could not
visit and that we were to leave the building immediately.
I asked her why, and was told that it was because we had
held up photos of Zahra and had taken pictures outside the
building.
We could not believe what we were hearing - we had made
this huge journey, had taken some innocent pictures to commemorate
it, and now we were being punished by the employee of a
private company that is making a mint out of misery.
We begged, pleaded and negotiated. I pointed out that this
was a breach of Zahra’s human rights, to which the woman,
who refused to give her name or position, coldly replied
“yes, maybe”.
I was dumfounded and saddened that a human being could be
so callous.
A couple of passing lawyers intervened on our behalf but
were given short shrift, despite challenging the legality
of her decision.
We were stunned, and just stood there, not knowing what
to do next.
Then the police arrived.
We had not raised our voices and clearly posed no threat.
I explained what had happened and, I have to say, they were
very sympathetic and I’m sure felt their time was being
wasted.
The police spoke to her and tried to get us in but still
she stood her ground and told us to get off Home Office
land.
We did not get to see Zahra but we did get to see why we
must tear up this useless Act that is supposed to unite
our nations.
The British Home Office are using and abusing the border
between Scotland and England - they drag innocent women
and children away from their Scottish lawyers, friends and
neighbours and, make no mistake about it, they know what
they are doing.
You can guarantee that when Zahra and the kids were being
transported out of
It was a sickening display of unaccountable power and all
I could think was, if this is how we are being treated on
the outside, then what on earth is happening on the inside?
With full powers in the Scottish Parliament, we could welcome
people like Zahra and her children who have so much to offer
and want to be part of our future.
We could ensure that our taxes are not ploughed into the
bank accounts of big company directors who make a fortune
running these immigration gulags.
It’s high time we tore up the Act of Union and determined
a future for
The Kindertransport
Between December 1938 and September 1939,
nearly 10,000 children arrived in British ports, trailing
all their worldly goods in little bags behind them.
Their parents were god-knows-where, after saying their goodbyes
in
These were the children of the Kindertransport - the rescue
mission that brought unaccompanied refugee children, most
of them Jewish, from the Nazi Reich.
In July 1938, an international conference in
They failed to reach any conclusion, or condemn the Nazis’
treatment of the Jews, and refused to take more refugees.
The international community, including the British government,
offered platitudes, but would not give them sanctuary.
The Jewish community in
A few days after Kristallnacht - two nights of brutal violence
which saw Jews massacred all over
The government would allow in an unspecified number of children
under 18. They were not to be accompanied by adults.
Individuals or organisations would have to guarantee the
care of the children - the government would not take responsibility.
Networks were set up immediately and children whose parents
were already imprisoned in camps were prioritised.
Then desperate parents volunteered their children - even
babies travelled, looked after by other children - anything
at all their parents could do to keep them safe. It was
better to say goodbye now than when the Gestapo came.
Nearly 70 years later, and our government is still turning
its back on refugees. Mums and dads trying to keep their
families together, fleeing violence we cannot even imagine,
are locked up in detention prisons.
We remember the Holocaust this week, but it looks like our
government is far from learning lessons.
—page nine—
Cyber-fascists forced off ‘land’
by Simon Whittle
When Linden Lab created alternative virtual
world Second Life (SL), they probably expected its inhabitants
to just all get along.
In this virtual paradise, you can, through your avatar (virtual
person, controlled by you) meet other people, chat, dance,
socialise, shop, even have ‘sex’.
The ‘world’ has nearly 3million inhabitants and is growing
daily. Global news agency Reuters has a dedicated journalist
who reports the goings on in SL.
The BBC rents an ‘island’ there to stage virtual gigs. Duran
Duran have played there.
Alleged comedian Jimmy Carr is planning to perform stand-up
in an SL venue next month.
Adidas and Reebok sell virtual sports shoes there.
Which is why Second Life Left Unity (SLLU) is already up
and running in SL, with members and affiliates joining from
across the (real) globe.
“The SL Left Unity group was set up by members of the Scottish
Socialist Party in November 2006,” says ‘Plot Tracer’, aka
Neil Scott.
“It has outgrown it’s original kernel of SSP members into
a world wide left unity group comprising of people from
many countries and all walks of life who are interested
in social justice and whom are critical of the current world
wide neo-conservative capitalist system.”
Aside from forging links with other like-minded socialists
and potential socialists, the SLLU came into its own recently
when the party of French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, Front
National (FN), ‘built’ offices in the Porcupine area of
SL.
FN avatars ‘attacked’ a peaceful, protest outside their
virtual HQ. Commenting on the FN users’ reaction to the
protestors, Mark Lock, aka ‘Marco’, from
Wagner James Au, the SL owners’ official reporter, described
what happened next: “After Front National took root, at
least two groups, antiFN and SL Left Unity, rose to oppose
them.
“They had placards and T-shirts, and billboards on the land
of sympathetic neighbours, all making plain that FN’s arrival
in Second Life was distinctly unwelcome.”
Then things got creatively ugly, with flying saucers spiked
with pig-grenades being launched into the offices of FN.
There was even an air-attack by a swarm of terrifying holographic
Thomas the Tank Engines on the nazis’ offices.
Wagner James Au added: “And so, while
The techno-shrapnel was so intense that the ‘server lag’
slowed the action down to a virtual standstill, rendering
the HQ useless to the FN users, who left the area defeated.
An SLLU spokesperson said: “While SLLU welcomes the decision
of the FN to move from Porcupine, this has been to the detriment
of the residents of Axel [another area of SL where the FN
are now buying land].
“SLLU can promise residents that our organisation has no
want to stay in Axel any longer than it takes to rid residents
of the FN.”
Naturally there are strong concerns that FN are using the
sim to recruit new members, including youngsters in PG areas
of SL, which the SLLU believes is against SL’s user policy.
“The whole idea of a ‘Race Hate’ group is in direct violation
of Linden Lab’s own terms of service, and if the rules are
being read to say they aren’t in violation, then Lindens
need to look at the rules again,” an SLLU spokesperson added.
“We would urge the Lindens strongly to consider whether
they want to allow this group to be represented within SL.
“This, of course, would not happen if SL was fully democratic.”
San Francisco based solidad Sugarbeet added: “The presence
of a fascist organisation in SL is an outrage. SL should
be about building bonds, not breaking them.
The SLLU group are set to boost their numbers by a further
100 members when two anti-racist groups and an anti-Le Pen
group join them in the near future.
n See www.secondlife.com - and for Wagner James Au’s report on the Battle of Porcupine, see http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/01/stronger_than_h.html#more
Anti-war exhibit crosses the line
On 22 January, anti-war protestor Brian
Haw won his latest legal battle to keep his one-man demonstration
in
In May last year, police restricted his protest under 2005’s
‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’, and seized 90
per cent of his placards, flags and even anti-war teddy
bears.
Section 132 of the Act made it an offence to organise or
to take part in a public protest within a one-kilometre
radius of
But desperate police claims that terrorists could hide bombs
under Brian’s banners and placards were rubbished this week
as District Judge Quentin Purdy ruled Mr Haw had not breached
conditions imposed on him by the Metropolitan Police as
they were unclear and invalid.
Mr Haw, whose protest now occupies a space of just three
by two metres, said after the hearing:
“We won as we should have done because it was wrong and
the police were wrong. I am a peaceful person. These conditions
were absolutely incredible - just ridiculous.”
Last week an exhibition by artist Mark Wallinger went on
display at
Every banner, photograph, peace flag, painting, teddy bear
and doll has been painstakingly reproduced.
A taped line on the floor, which continues throughout the
building, marks the edge of the one-kilometre Exclusion
Zone. State
A Tate spokesperson said Wallinger was raising “challenging
questions about issues of freedom of expression and the
erosion of civil liberties in
The display runs until 27 August 2007. Entry is free.
Tuned in
Keef Tomkinson
Saturday 27 January
Gorillas Revisited, BBC4, 7.40pm
We all have embarrassing ancestors, be it a great uncles
who collaborated with the Spanish armada or grandmothers
who voted for Disraeli. One ancestor I will never be embarrassed
by is the ape. David Attenborough returns to
Sunday 28 January
The Castle, Five, 1.45pm
Better than Mad Max, Priscilla and Crocodile Dundee put
together, this Aussie flick is lovely. Faced with a compulsory
purchase order from
The Downhill Racer, BBC2, 10.10pm
Filmmaker Darren Hercher follows a season in the life of
a
‘Catch The Chicken Night’, BBC4, from 9pm
Not sure if that’s how BBC4 will advertise it, but three
boxing docs in a row mean I’m pretty close. Starting off
with a look at boxing kings of
Wednesday 31 January
Storyville: Heir to an Execution, BBC4,
10.30pm
In 1952, Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed
for “conspiracy to commit espionage”. This is the story
of their two orphaned sons and of the impact the event had
on them.
Thursday 1 February
Mortgaged to the Yanks, BBC2, 11.20pm
Consecutive governments have been keen to tell citizens
about their duty to pay their way but as usual they’re hypocrites.
On 31 December 2006
Friday 2 February
The Hustler, Film4, 10.50pm
Jackie Gleason and George C Scott prowl around a James Dean-esque
Paul Newman in this pool hall classic (a genre often ignored).
Newman is ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson, the new kid on the block
who takes on the legendary pool master Minnesota Fats, as
well as his own demons.
—page ten—
New year,
new
by Patrick O’Hare
In the new year,
The pace was set in late December, when Chavez announced the formation of
the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which will incorporate all
the Pro-Chavez, pro-socialist political organisations which up until now
have been scattered in an ‘alphabet soup’, each with its own leadership
and structure.
“(But) the new party cannot be the sum of old faces,” said Chavez, nor will
it merely incorporate the smaller parties into the MVR - the largest party
in the governing coalition - because the MVR has served its historic purpose.
The PSUV will be “formed from the base.”
There are elements within the pro-Chavez movement that wish to halt any
socialist reforms which cannot be implemented within the constraints of
capitalism, but the new party will have a clear socialist program.
On 8 January, Chavez underlined the shift towards socialism.
“People voted for a project, a line of march, which has been clarified as socialism. It is socialism
that people need and the country needs.”
The new phase will be powered by five ‘motors’: an enabling law, constitutional
reform, popular education, reorganisation of state power and an explosion
of communal power.
Key industries that were privatised during the 1990s will be brought back
under state control, including telecom giant CANTV and the strategic electricity
utility, already partly controlled by the state.
Chavez also plans to renegotiate the government’s minority stake in oil
projects controlled by multinationals in the
With regards to constitutional reform, Chavez announced plans to end the
independence of the central bank.
Bolivarian popular education would “deepen the new (socialist) values and
demolish the old values of individualism, capitalism and egotism,” he continued,
and reorganisation of state power would mean the inclusion of marginalised
poorer areas and decentralisation.
Explosion of communal power would be the most important motor of the drive
to socialism, noted Chavez.
He announced an investment of $5billion in the communal councils; regarded
as essential in moving from representative to participatory democracy.
Set to increase from around 13,000 to 21,000 this year, Chavez suggested
they become the basis for a new Venezuelan state, superceding the old bourgeois
state.
“We need to build communal cities, socialist cities. They need to be able
to make a diagnostic assessment of their local area. We need a confederation
of communal councils on a national level.
“Economic, political power needs to be transferred to these local bodies.
So that we can...move away from capitalism...”
The cabinet reshuffle itself is a significant shift to the left, with the
appointment of Communist party deputy, David Velasquez, as Minister for
Popular Power and former union leader, Jose Ramon Rivero, as Minister of
Labour. Before his appointment, Rivero approached the President to inform
him of his Trotskyist sympathies: “What is the problem?” Chavez responded,
“I too am a Trotskyist! I follow Trotsky’s line, that of the permanent revolution.”
Chavez asked the cabinet to swear an oath, not only to Venezuelan independence,
but also to “never rest arm or soul in the construction of the Venezuelan
path towards socialism.”
Criticism flew in from Washington and the right-wing press, which seized
in particular upon the decision not to renew the license of anti-Chavez
TV channel RCTV, as a sign that
What they failed to mention is the shameful history of RCTV, which helped
plan and coordinate the 2002 coup and continues to associate with extreme-right
wing elements of the opposition.
RCTV is not even being closed, but merely having its public TV license revoked
and such an act is perfectly legitimate within the Venezuelan constitution,
especially as RCTV has been repeatedly warned about its behaviour. After
all, why should a small elite of media magnates,
tied to the Venezuelan oligarchy and international financiers, and unrepresentative
of public opinion, be allowed unconditional access to a public service?
Grassroots
What seems likely now is that some access to the airwaves will
be given to the millions of pro-Chavez Venezuelans, in the form of a grassroots
TV channel.
But even without RCTV , six out of the eight public
television channels remain privately owned and venomously anti-Chavez, alongside
nine out of ten daily national newspapers.
Recent developments in
But for anyone who believes another world is possible, these socialist measures
offer a beacon of hope, as the millions of Venezuelan poor look to take
more control in their communities, workplaces and in government.
—page eleven—
by Bill Bonnar
The
In fact, the airstrikes in the south of the country are simply the latest
chapter in an American intervention stretching back decades.
Strategically located at the entrance to the Red Sea, the
In 1969, a military coup brought Muhammad Said Barre to power.
In 1970, the government declared
The government did try to introduce progressive legislation, particularly
in relation to women, but was blown off course by a devastating drought
in 1974/75.
Hundreds of thousands died in the famine that followed, while a further
2 million were displaced.
The fragile Somali state simply could not cope with the scale of the crisis
and began to disintegrate.
In 1977, Somali forces invaded the largely Somali-inhabited Ogaden region
of
Key to the Ethiopian victory was the support of the Soviet Union and
This led to a break in relations between the Soviet Union and
Throughout the 1980s, the disintegration continued until 1991, when the
government finally collapsed, Barre fled the country and
The former British protectorate of
The rest of the country collapsed into civil war and tribal and clan violence,
which has continued to this day.
In 1992, the
This was portrayed in shamelessly propagandist terms in the film Black Hawk
Down. The
In 2000, the first central government in a decade was formed; a fragile
alliance of warlords which began to disintegrate almost immediately.
As a result
A direct response to the fighting, lack of law and order, economic collapse
and poverty, was the emergence of the Union of Islamic Courts.
Last summer, they succeeded in taking over large parts of the country and
Despite applying harsh Sharia laws, they were welcomed by many Somalis because
they imposed law and order, ended the almost constant warfare and began
to kickstart parts of the economy.
The prospect of
By January, the new Ethiopian and US backed government had taken the capital,
with the Islamic Courts withdrawing, no doubt to wage guerrilla war against
the new and certainly unpopular government.
With no real support in the country, the government will have to rely on
Ethiopian and American support to stay in power, while many of the warlords
and the Islamic Court Movement are still out there ready to take up arms.
The most likely outcome is years of further fighting.
The conflict in
In this period,
The first of these are tribal-based movements, mostly reactionary, with
strong links to the west and former colonial powers, who, for the most part,
ruled
Most of the conflict in
The second are religious-based movements, most notably Islamic, and also
deeply reactionary, which seek to build Islamic States where there are Muslim
majorities. The Islamic Courts are such a movement.
The third are national-democratic movements, often left-led, which aim to
build modern, post-tribal, secular states in direct opposition to the post-colonial
settlement in
Many such states emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s:
In
This is about imposing western control in a strategically important part
of the world.
That they are unlikely to succeed will be of scant comfort to the millions
of Somalis who will be the victims of this latest colonial adventure.
Armenian journalist shot dead in street
by Stephen Kaczynski
On 19 January, a well-known Turkish-Armenian
journalist, Hrant Dink, was shot dead outside his newspaper office in
However,
In October 2005, Dink received a six month prison sentence for “insulting
Turkish identity”.
The conviction was only obtained by distorting what Dink had written as,
ultimately, his avowal of an Armenian identity was the at the root of it.
Dink was criticised by some Armenians for not adopting a sufficiently hardline
attitude towards
However, particularly after he was convicted, death threats flooded in from
His alleged killer was reportedly a member of one of these groups.
Vitriolic chauvinism is encouraged in
A recent TV competition, for example, called upon schoolchildren to sing
the national anthem. The winner was a schoolgirl who cried and waved the
Turkish flag as she sang.
The gunman who killed Dink is said to have shouted, “I have killed the ‘gavur’”
- ”gavur” is an abusive term for a non-Muslim foreigner.
He was not a lone “extremist”, but an example of attitudes the state in
Good morning, midnight
Climate change predictions to date, gloomy
as they may have been, have been far too conservative. So says the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body comprising thousands of climate change
experts from across the world, who warn that the wild storms and deadly
heatwaves of recent years are only a taste of things to come.
The Report, due for release on 2 February, predicts that sea levels will
rise by half a metre by mid-century, laying waste to low-lying lands and
islands, that snow will retreat to the highest peaks and frosts and cold
days will become rare while hot days and heatwaves will become relatively
common, all of which will have devastating consequences for human health
and agriculture.
What makes this report so alarming, says one
Thousands of views went into making it, so those who took an extremely pessimistic
view were countered by those infused, relatively speaking, with optimism.
The IPCC has no truck with the idea that the changes in our climate are
borne of natural causes, such as sunspots, insisting it is all down to human
activity that global temperatures have risen an average of 0.6 degrees centigrade
above pre-industrial levels.
Catastrophic
And if greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, continue to rise,
we’re looking at an increase of 3 degrees centigrade by 2100, if not 4.5-5
degrees, which would be absolutely catastrophic.
This report broke surface just days after the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
(BAS), recently convening in
And they think nuclear annihilation is as close as it has ever been since
the early days of the arms race between the
Domesday
In 1947, the BAS - founded by scientists who worked on the Manhattan
Project, which built and tested the first atomic bomb, and who have campaigned
for nuclear disarmament ever since - devised a Domesday Clock, on display
in their Chicago office, which spells out the risk of nuclear annihilation
in terms of minutes to midnight.
In 1949, when the US and USSR were testing nuclear bombs, it stood at two
minutes to midnight, but has since been pushed back, thanks to nuclear arms
treaties in the 60s, 70s and 90s, to a rather more comfortable margin.
Now, as
Never before has climate change been cited by this body as being anything
like as dangerous as nuclear war.
“These environmentally driven threats - ‘threats without enemies’ - should
loom as large in the political perspective as did the East/West political
divide during the Cold War era,” said Martin Rees, English Astronomer Royal.
Both the nuclear menace and runaway greenhouse gases are the result of technology
that has slipped from our control, said the BAS.
But it remains within our power to grab it back.
Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at
“I’m optimistic we can address climate change. We dealt with such problems
before,” he said, in reference to the nuclear treaties that reined in the
arms race, “and we can do it again.”
—page twelve—
PCS vote for action
by Richie Venton
Members of the Public and Commercial
Services union (PCS) have voted by nearly a two-thirds
majority for the biggest conflict with their employers
- the government - in 20 years.
Over 61 per cent of members voted for strike action
and 78 per cent in favour of action short of a strike
- which will mean a one-day stoppage by over 280,000
workers on 31 January, a two week overtime ban, and
further action to be planned.
Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, commented:
“This overwhelming vote in favour of industrial action
illustrates the depth of anger amongst the government’s
own workforce against crude job cuts and below inflation
pay offers.
“Patience has worn thin with services suffering as
a result of job cuts, billions being spent on private
sector consultants and some of the lowest paid facing
a pay cut in real terms.
“The people who have said they will go on strike to
defend the services we all take for granted aren’t
high flying mandarins or faceless bureaucrats, but
hard working and often low paid civil and public servants
delivering everything from passports, tax and benefits
to supporting our armed forces and driving tests.”
Strike action two years ago halted the immediate attacks
on staff sick pay and compulsory redundancies. But
with Gordon Brown’s declaration of war on civil servants
in July 2004, announcing the target of 104,000 job
losses without rhyme nor reason behind his butchery,
compulsory redundancies were inevitable.
Smaller departments - the DTI and DEFRA - have crossed
the Rubicon by issuing compulsory redundancies in
recent months. Workers in bigger departments (and
smaller agencies) fear they will be next.
United action
So now, from over 200 departments and agencies,
workers will join forces on 31 January, striking,
picketing and marching together. The timing of the
one-day strike is designed for maximum impact, being
the deadline for tax self-assessment.
The immediate two-week overtime ban will stop senior
management clawing back and undermining the immediate
effect of the strike. And as New Labour faces the
electorate in May, PCS and its supporters have a golden
opportunity to further escalate the pressure on the
government if they fail to concede assurances and
real cash for job security, above-inflation pay rises
and public funding of public services.
Even as these workers voted for industrial action,
they faced almost daily announcements of job losses,
pay cuts and privatisation.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is to close
its
The MoD refused to even consider an in-house bid and
handed a £19billion contract to the private Metrix
consortium, which could land 2,000 workers with compulsory
redundancies.
In the Passport Agency, 2,500 workers have started
a work-to-rule after voting by 11 to one to reject
a derisory pay offer.
Sharon Edwards, chair of PCS branch in Glasgow Passports,
told me:
“Although we do not face compulsory redundancies or
relocation in Passports, we all need to stand together
as civil servants. We have to safeguard each other’s
futures. We never know what is round the corner, so
it’s simple, it’s solidarity, it’s sticking together.”
PCS members working at the Information Commissioner’s
Office voted for the first time in the organisation’s
22 year history on strike action in a dispute over
pay that should have been settled in 2005.
Low pay
Low pay blights the lives of hundreds of
thousands of civil and public service workers.
Office closures, centralisation of services, huge
call centres replacing locally accessible offices
- all these measures are cost-cutting at terrible
cost to services and jobs.
And privatisation and outsourcing is then punted by
Labour as the way to fill the gaps left by their own
maniacal cuts. It’s all down to them putting profits
before people, junkets before jobs, share-holders
before services.
The Scottish Socialist Party takes the opposite standpoint.
We give 100 per cent, unqualified support to PCS strikers.
Gerry McMahon, PCS Scottish Committee member and worker
in Glasgow DWP, told the Voice:
“Members have voted to strike because we realise the
union has got to take a stand; it’s now or never.
Otherwise the redundancies in DTI and DEFRA will surely
be followed by compulsory redundancies in the bigger
departments.
“This is different from the past. The huge YES, YES
vote is for more than just a one-day protest, it is
for the start of an escalating action.
“SSP members in our union call on the PCS to not just
campaign against job losses, pay cuts and privatisation,
but against New Labour’s Thatcherite policies. We
need to put an alternative vision, where we have jobs
with dignity, decent rates of pay and job satisfaction.
“We need to take this campaign to the wider trade
union movement. It’s a question of what kind of society
we want. Do we want £76billion wasted on Trident missiles
over the next 30 years, or invested in jobs, people
and services?
“The Tax Justice Network a year ago estimated that
anything from £25billion to £88billion is uncollected
in tax from big business, through a combination of
legal and illegal tax avoidance. If instead of shedding
25,000 jobs in Revenue and Customs these jobs were
retained, and even just a proportion redirected to
collecting that missing cash, what a difference it
could make!
“Public transport could be free and PFI hospitals
made history. A small fraction of this could fund
a decent national pay system to end these outrageous
anomalies.
And the full £88billion would make a colossal difference
to society.
“The SSP want the rich to pay their share. New Labour’s
craven attitude to the rich means business barons
and supermarket billionaires in the government.
‘That’s the stark difference, and one of many reasons
why PCS members should join the SSP - the party with
many PCS members already, the party with an unrivalled
track record in struggle, solidarity and socialism.”
n Labour has slashed 36,000 civil service jobs , but has a target of 104,000, plus budget cuts of 20 per cent
n One in four PCS members earn below £15,340
n Unequal pay is rife, with discrepancies of £5,000 between departments for the same job, and female civil service workers earning on average 21 per cent less than male colleagues
n The UK government has spent £7.2billion on private consultants - some of them paid £2,600 a day!
Defending jobs
by Richie Venton
When part of the Ministry of Defence
(MoD) was privatised a few years ago, it was hailed
as the bright new future. Not for the 500 workers
now employed by American multinational EDS.
Over 350 Public and Commercial Services union (PCS)
members at the MoD are conducting a work-to-rule,
overtime ban and selective strike action, starting
with a one-day strike on 31 January, to coincide with
the national civil service strike. They are demanding
pay progression, having fallen drastically behind
even the paltry pay rates of their former colleagues
in the civil service.
EDS bosses rely heavily on weekend overtime, and many
staff rely on it for an income. So the fact that not
a single worker turned up all Saturday is a huge result
for the union, and should push management to meaningful
offers on pay.
Three women on the PCS picket told me why they are
taking this action:
“A lot of overtime is worked. Since EDS took over
a lot of staff have been cut and not replaced, and
what has been taken on are inexperienced agency staff.
“Pay has been eroded since privatisation. We are now
13 per cent behind former colleagues doing similar
work, and we all know civil servants are not well
paid. Most of us are on £14,200, which is poverty
pay in this day and age, a shocking wage. We want
a framework to raise all to a decent threshold, on
a par with our MoD colleagues.
“The overtime ban has been a big success, nobody has
come in. Agency staff are supporting us. We are trying
to get them union recognition, and even before we
achieve that the PCS has got them a 50p an hour pay
rise.
“We would appeal through the Scottish Socialist Voice
for trade unionists to write to their MPs in support
of us. We were made promises when privatised but lost
out.
“Of course we would support other workers facing any
similar situation, or facing privatisation. We are
living proof that privatisation doesn’t work.”