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SEP (UK) public meetings: For a general strike to bring down the Cameron government!

February 2, 2012

On November 30, more than 2 million public sector workers struck against government plans to make them pay more, and work longer, for reduced pensions. It was the biggest strike for decades. The Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party seized upon the stoppage as proof of the revival of the trade unions as organs of class struggle.

But within weeks, the Trades Union Congress Public Sector Liaison Group announced it was suspending any further action and had accepted the government’s “Heads of Agreement” proposals for public sector pension schemes.

The pseudo-left now claim that the Trades Union Congress can be pressured to reverse its betrayal. But all the unions are complicit in the scheme-specific approach to negotiations that has facilitated the TUC’s divide and rule policy. Their actions have given the green light to the government to step up its assault on pensions across the board as seen at Unilever.

From the outset, the Socialist Equality Party has explained that the trade unions are bitterly opposed to any genuine struggle against the attacks on pensions or any other aspect of the government’s austerity programme.

Britain: Observer exposes police spy in the Socialist Party

April 14, 2010

A secret police operative, “Officer A”, spent years spying on the Socialist Party of England and Wales’ predecessor organisation, the Militant group, and its youth organisation, Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), in the mid-1990s, according to the Observer newspaper.

Officer A was part of a covert police unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), an adjunct of the secret intelligence service MI5. The SDS employed around 10 full-time undercover officers to infiltrate and disrupt left and anti-racist organisations from at least 1968, when large anti-Vietnam protests erupted on the streets of London.

The Observer explains how Officer A joined the police straight from school in 1986, where he had “discovered an interest in political ideology and public affairs” and developed an ambition to join the secret service.

No doubt Officer A’s anti-communist sympathies marked him out as a suitable candidate for the intelligence services. But his lack of university education precluded a career in the upper class environs of MI5, and he was advised to work in Special Branch instead. He spent his first four years working in counterterrorism in Northern Ireland, gaining valuable experience for his later role.

Britain: Official parties pledge austerity, cuts, militarism and war

April 16, 2010

Britain’s main parties—Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—have released their manifestos for the May 6 General Election. Each made clear that the purpose of the election is to provide a democratic fig-leaf for a major assault on living standards, while maintaining the neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan.

On the economy, all three parties are committed to massive cuts in public spending in an effort to recoup the billions handed over to the banks and major financial institutions following the 2008 global financial crash. As the manifestos indicate, this is only the first stage in a fundamental restructuring of economic and social relations in Britain.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched Labour’s “A fair future for all.” While making no accounting for the global economic crisis, much less its own role in facilitating it, the manifesto makes only passing reference to the need for greater banking regulation, and then only when agreed internationally.

Labour has said it will halve Britain’s £160 billion budget deficit within four years through spending cuts and higher taxes, but claims this will be achieved while ensuring “maximum protection to frontline services”. In reality, its manifesto sets out a major extension of its privatisation of the public sector, coupled with a clamp down on pay.

Britain: What will a 20 percent cut in public spending mean for workers?

April 20, 2010

With the international financial institutions demanding that Britain rein in its ballooning debt, all the main political parties are committed to deep-going cuts in public expenditure to pay for the bank bailout and further enrich their corporate backers.

The government’s budget deficit has risen to nearly 12 percent of GDP. The total accumulated debt is £952 billion and this is set to rise to £1.4 trillion in 2014-15 as a result of the bank bailouts, subventions, guarantees and quantitative easing measures—not far short of Britain’s entire GDP. With no curb on their activities, the banks continue with their reckless and semi-criminal practices.

While none of the parties are spelling out their spending plans very precisely, most estimates suggest that to reduce the deficit by 50 percent in the lifetime of the next parliament, as Labour has promised, departmental budgets will have to be cut by nearly 20 percent over the next four years.

To understand the implications, it is necessary to review the employment situation in Britain today. The years 1992 to 2007 saw the longest boom in the post war period. Real output rose by an average of 4 percent a year, but the results as far as the vast majority of working people are concerned have been meagre.

Britain: Details of hundreds of students handed to CIA

April 21, 2010

The details of up to one thousand Muslim students at University College London (UCL) have been made available to the CIA jointly by the university and the Students Union. The move represents a grave attack on democratic rights and another step towards tighter controls over academic institutions in the UK.

An article appeared in the Independent on April 1 confirming that the Metropolitan Police had, on behalf of the CIA, approached UCL’s Islamic Society for details of its members between 2005 and 2008. The request was in connection with the investigations into the failed Detroit bomb plot on Christmas day last year. After being told by police that the data of the entire membership would be kept on file for at least seven years, the Islamic Society president Mojeed Adams-Mogaji refused to disclose the information.

The police then approached the Students Union, which provided names and email addresses of all members of the Islamic Society at the university between September 2005 and summer 2009. Subsequently after discussions, the university’s registry divulged the home addresses and telephone numbers of these individuals to the police, which were then passed to the CIA.

Climate scientists exonerated in hacked emails inquiry

April 25, 2010

An independent inquiry into the conduct of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain has found “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever.”

The inquiry, led by Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the House of Lords science and technology select committee, was investigating allegations of scientific misconduct.

Emails from the scientists, particularly from the director of the CRU Professor Phil Jones, were hacked into last November and given extensive media coverage in the run up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Nobody has been prosecuted for the email thefts, involving hundreds of documents and emails dating back over 13 years that were hacked from the university computer system. But they were pored over by climate sceptics, many of them backed by the oil corporations and rightwing think-tanks, opposed to action over global warming.

Britain’s general election: An historic political shift

April 29, 2010

Whatever the outcome of the UK General Election on May 6, British political life has already undergone a tectonic shift.

The most extraordinary feature of the election campaign is the ongoing meltdown of the Labour Party. Predictions vary as to what form a coalition government—the most likely outcome of the election—will take. But the likelihood of a coalition government arises above all due to the collapse in support for Labour.

Labour secured only 33 percent of the vote in 2005. But the latest polls warn that it could slump to third place, behind the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with the worst prediction putting Labour’s share of the vote at just 18 percent. This would be the first time Labour came behind the Liberals since 1922.

To this point Labour has calculated that it might still manage to emerge as the majority party in government thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post constituency-based system, and might be able to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, whose support has risen mostly as a result of voter disenchantment with Labour. But talk is now of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

Perspectives

UK: All political parties plan attacks on public sector pensions

May 2, 2010

For months now, Britain’s corporate bosses, right-wing think-tanks, the media and the political parties have been waging a ferocious attack on occupational pensions in the public sector, calling them “gold plated” and unfair when compared with the private sector.

The Institute of Economic Affairs, just such a right-wing think-tank, wrote a pamphlet whose title, Sir Humphrey’s legacy: an update. UK public sector unfunded occupational pensions, implies that all public servants get the pension of a fictional top civil servant. The Taxpayers Alliance talks of £1 million pensions in the National Health Service.

Conservative leader David Cameron said, “We have got to end the [pensions] apartheid…. There is an issue of fairness between the private sector and the public sector”. The Tory manifesto says it will cap public sector pensions of more than £50,000, adding that the party would be “working with the trade unions, businesses and others to address the growing disparity between public sector pensions and private sector pensions, while protecting accrued rights”.

Britain: No agreement yet on coalition government

May 9, 2010

The past weekend was dominated by horse-trading between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats to patch together a coalition government, following the inconclusive outcome of Britain’s May 6 general election.

The frenetic efforts have nothing to do with realising the “wishes of the electorate”, as asserted by Liberal leader Nick Clegg and Conservative leader David Cameron. They are dictated by the desire of all the official parties to reassure the international financial markets of their ability to impose severe public spending cuts, and thus stave off a run on sterling that would produce a Greece-style scenario for the UK.

It is a measure of the crisis facing Britain’s ruling class that an immediate resolution to the political impasse has taken longer than they hoped.

With all the constituencies now declared, none of the official parties are able to form a majority government on their own. Labour recorded its worst result since 1983, losing 91 seats to hold just 258. But the Conservatives were unable to benefit significantly from disaffection with Labour and now hold 306 seats—20 less than required to give them a working majority.

Britain: Legal challenges likely after thousands turned away from polls

May 10, 2010

Britain’s May 6 general election witnessed extraordinary scenes of people being turned away from polling stations and denied the right to vote.

Legal action is being considered by individuals and groups that could even lead to the overturn of the results in some constituencies. The Electoral Commission has launched a review of what took place, and aims to publish an interim report next week and a full report in July.

David Monks, the leader of Britain’s 400 returning officers who preside over elections, publicly urged those unable to vote to seek a rerun of the ballot. He cited those turned away from 20 polling stations; eight of the constituencies involved had recorded majorities of fewer than 6,000.

These results were narrow enough to be contested. They include seats with two Conservative gains, five that are Labour-held and one held by the Liberal Democrats. In Oldham East and Saddleworth, the Lib-Dem candidate lost to Labour by just 103 votes. In Sheffield Central, the Liberal Democrat candidate lost to Labour by just 165 votes.