A Price still to be PaidUKWatch.net - 27 Apr 2008(Sunday 27 April 2008) AS any labour movement activist will tell you, it is always useful, when facing an important event in the trade union calendar, to have some small preparatory events to publicise the major item in advance to make others aware of the event and book the date. There is one date in the movement’s calendar, however, that no trade unionist wants to see marked in that manner and that is Workers Memorial Day. Unfortunately, it is the one date on which one can almost always expect to see related and, in this case, unwanted events happening. This year, the weekend before today’s memorial was marked by the deaths on building sites of two, as yet unnamed, workers, who met their end by falling to their deaths from London sites. They were both men in their twenties and they will leave grieving families and friends who will be left with a gap in their lives which will never be filled. They will be remembered on Monday, but remembrance is simply not enough for them. Nor is it enough for the other 220 to 250 people in Britain who the Health and Safety Executive estimates will die each year as a result of their work. Neither is remembrance sufficient for the 20,000 to 50,000 people who die each year of illnesses caused by work-related ill health, including respiratory diseases, various cancers and heart disease. UNISON is demanding that Workers Memorial Day should be officially recognised as a national day of remembrance, and that is only right and proper. But much more is required. Rail and road drivers, pilots and shipping staff can be, and are, held responsible for deaths resulting while people and equipment are in their charge. Prosecutions occur frequently and stiff sentences are handed out for any negligence uncovered. But, as construction union UCATT points out, only around 30 per cent of companies involved in killing a construction worker are ever convicted of an offence and that statistic is broadly typical across the whole spectrum of British industry. And, despite the recent introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter Act, it remains virtually impossible for a company director whose negligence causes the death of a worker to be jailed. Scottish Trades Union Congress general secretary Grahame Smith has accurately described the new law as a “fudge,” pointing out that this legislation will not allow for prosecution of individuals, but only of the company and, “even then, only if the failures of a senior manager can be identified.” UCATT described it as “the dampest of damp squibs.” There has always been public outrage at the repeated collapse of prosecutions over disasters such as the Southall rail crash. And organisations such as Families Against Corporate Killings and the Construction Safety Campaign can attest to the private anger that has been generated among the families of victims. But, somehow, the HSE and the government always wriggle out of making bosses personally liable to punishment, claiming difficulty in allocating individual responsibility. Yet it should not be difficult. Decisions on how much of a company’s resources are spent on the health, safety and welfare of staff are made at directoral level. And it is at the level where the decisions are made that the buck should stop – where a boss weighs the firm’s profits and workers’ lives in the balance and decides that the cost of a worker’s life is insufficient reason to curtail company profits.
Caught up in the WhirlwindUKWatch.net - 27 Apr 2008Iraqi women’s organisations and international observers point to an escalating war against women in Iraq, aided by widespread chaos and lawlessness under the US occupation. In addition to violence by US troops inside and outside of prisons, women in Iraq face daily violence from militants under the guise of religion and “liberation”. In Iraq’s second largest city, Basra, a stronghold of conservative Shia groups, as many as 133 women were killed last year for violating “Islamic teachings” and in so-called “honour killings”, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The methods are brutal evidence of a backlash by previously subdued tribal forces that have been unleashed by the occupation: women strangled and beheaded, and their hands, arms and legs chopped off. With US forces in Iraq now funding both Sunni and Shia tribal leaders in an effort to stabilise the country, conditions for women grow deadlier by the day. Islamist leaders have imposed new restrictions on women, including prohibitions on work, bans on travel without a muhram (male guardian), and compulsory veiling. According to the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), formed in Baghdad in 2003, women are harassed if they appear in the streets of most Iraqi cities and towns, educational institutions, or work places. Now there are even “no woman zones” in some southern cities controlled by Islamist parties and tribal leaders. Honour killings of Iraqi women are justified by alleged promiscuity or adultery. In fact, the practice targets holders of PhDs, professionals, political activists, and office workers. “Politically active women, those who did not follow a strict dress code, and women human rights defenders were increasingly at risk of abuse, including by armed groups and religious extremists”, Amnesty International said in its 2007 report. Indeed, a top police official in Basra reported that as many as 15 women are killed every month in the city. Ambulance drivers in Basra, paid to “clean the streets” before people go to work, pick up many more bodies of women every morning. Ironically, the forces leading this assault on women had little or no power under Saddam Hussein. But, following the US-led invasion in 2003, southern Iraq was opened to forces known as Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV) – militant gangs and individuals committed to archaic Islamic rule and suppression of women’s rights. Some members of these groups now serve in government, others in militias or as self-appointed vigilantes or hired guns. The goal of the PVPV is to confine women to the domestic realm and end all female participation in public and political life. To date, Iraqi officials have not been willing to deal with this escalating violence against women, or even to discuss it. But, as elected representatives, they are obliged to address these crimes. So must the US. Under the fourth Geneva convention, the responsibility for protecting civilian populations in an occupied country belongs to the occupying forces, which, in this case, are clearly failing to protect Iraqi women. Two measures are urgently needed. First, the Iraqi government must immediately establish security patrols for the protection of women in Iraq’s southern cities. These patrols must receive gender-sensitive training and prioritise women’s security over tribal or fundamentalist religious values. Second, pursuant to its obligations under the Geneva convention, the US must immediately take steps to protect the lives and freedoms of Iraqi civilians. Unless the US does so, it must withdraw from Iraq, because the occupation would merely continue to sustain a breeding ground for violence against women. The timetable for action is not subject to debate. It must begin today.
There is an Alternative and it’s Called SocialismUKWatch.net - 27 Apr 2008James Purnell, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, recently declared that Labour was now ideologically neutral. He and his ministerial colleagues like to portray themselves as pragmatists unburdened by outdated ideology. According to Purnell: “Progressives want to make the world a better place. If people can do that using the private sector, the public sector or the voluntary, why not? We are ideologically neutral between all three; we want to use all three.” But ideology is not about dogma. Ideas are not the abstract product of human imagination. The human mind is given its content by the contemporary material world in which it exists. Political ideology reflects the different interests in society and, in particular, class interests. The dominant ideas of any society are those of the social class that operates as the ruling force in the economy and the production of wealth. That class is also the ruling intellectual force. We live in a capitalist society and so the dominant ideas are those of private enterprise and capitalism. The present Government has embraced these ideas. In every aspect of policy, private is best. Innovation is seen the preserve of the private sector with modernisation a codeword for the greater involvement of the private companies in public services. This Labour Government has privatised where even previous Conservative administration feared to tread: air traffic control and the London Underground. Privatisation of the National Health Service by stealth continues through foundation hospitals and the encouragement of independent sector treatment centres and polyclinics operated by multinational companies. Purnell has announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs in his department while promising private contractors up to 75 billion to deliver employment services and other welfare benefits.
Business people are encouraged to take over schools through the introduction of academies where, astoundingly, they even have control of much of the curriculum. No serious attempt has been made to reverse the restrictions imposed on the trade unions by Tories when they were in power. Throughout the current Government’s period of office, the unions have been held at arm’s length with even their financial contributions to Labour’s funds being at best grudgingly tolerated. By contrast, business leaders are enthusiastically courted for donations and advice, despite increasingly adverse publicity and allegations of corruption. Inequality continues to grow. The top 10 per cent of the population now take at least 28 per cent of the national income – the same as before the Second World War. Yet John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, insists: “Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.” In the post-war period, there was a temporary retreat by capital faced with a powerful and organised labour movement. Unions were significantly strengthened in the economic upswing in the 1950s with membership peaking at more than 13 million in 1980. Labour governments were elected which, particularly in 1945-51, delivered real improvements in the lives of working people. The gulf between rich and poor was significantly narrowed in the period up to 1979. However, this was not to last. The capitalist system remained fundamentally intact and, following the defeat of the Labour 1974-79 Government, there was a reassertion of its ideological dominance. Social democracy was deemed to have failed. The unions were blamed for many of the country’s ills. The ideological offensive of capital was immensely strengthened by the development of globalisation and the collapse of communism. The left did not weather the storm well. The unions suffered a series of defeats. The steelworkers lost in 1980. ASLEF’s appeal to the TUC for assistance in 1982 in the dispute over flexible rostering fell on deaf ears. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 was lost and the print unions were crushed at Wapping a year later. Labour was in crisis. In 1981, a section of the right wing of the party broke away to form the SDP, which ultimately collapsed into the Liberals amid bitter recriminations. However, this was not before the anti-Conservative vote had been split leading to huge majorities for Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and 1987. “New realism” became the order of the day. Post-modern ideas signalled the abandonment of any alternative to the current economic system and a capitulation to laissez faire ideology. The Labour retreat began under Neil Kinnock who condemned the miners’ leaders and launched vicious attacks on the left. The “new” Labour project was the culmination of this process, with Labour lurching ever further to the right and finally into the arms of George Bush and the neo-conservative Republicans with the disastrous Iraq war. But private enterprise has not proved to be the panacea for society’s problems. For instance, trains operated by private companies refuse to run on time despite receiving double the subsidy provided to British Rail. Private companies exist to make profit first and foremost. Where necessary, they will cut corners to do this – sometimes with dire consequences for service users. It was recently reported that 5,000 National Health Service operations had been cancelled because the private company responsible for cleaning surgical equipment was returning it dirty or damaged. It is no coincidence that the rise of superbugs in hospitals has accompanied the use of private companies to carry out cleaning. However, ministers are so in thrall to the “free” market ideology that they are blind and deaf to the results of their policies. They simply cannot comprehend why Labour is losing support. All that is needed, they argue, is a little more time to get their message across. That’s what John Major’s ministers used to say and Gordon Brown’s are likely to be similarly disappointed. Northern Rock underlines the real weakness in modern Britain’s capitalist economy. Globalisation has transformed capitalism into an increasingly monstrous system where a small number of companies and individuals own and control unparalleled wealth while much of the rest of the world’s population become increasingly impoverished. Regulation by national governments is increasingly difficult, with global corporations simply threatening to move their operations elsewhere. Inevitably, there will be a decline in living standards as one country is played off against another. The question is whether there is any realistic alternative. The left must have a positive answer if it is to recapture the political agenda. Without this, many of those who suffer most under capitalism will look elsewhere. In Britain, sections of the white working class who feel increasingly alienated and unrepresented are flirting with the far right. Internationally, increasing numbers have embraced Islamic fundamentalism.
Opposition to the worst iniquities of the capitalist system is not enough and nor are single-issue campaigns, although they can build into powerful movements. Stop the War mobilised two million people onto the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq. But the vast majority of those have not remained politically active. Inevitably, when an issue fades in importance, so does the movement it has ignited. Capitalism reasserts itself. If the left is to provide a viable alternative vision, it needs a coherent ideology that expresses the interests of those not served by the current system – principally ordinary working people and their dependents who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. That ideology remains socialism. Every effort has been made during the past 20 years to discredit socialism as outdated and irrelevant. No other ideology has been subject to such an onslaught. But socialism remains the only alternative ideology that can challenge capitalism effectively and offer humanity a future. Nick Toms is a barrister specialising in employment and discrimination law and a member of Streatham CLP
