The
Socialist 21 July |
Brown's Spending Mirage
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GORDON BROWN’S Comprehensive Spending Review
for the years 2001-2004 made heftier spending promises than this ‘prudent’ New
Labour chancellor has done before. But this is no ‘socialist’ give-away budget. |
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WORKERS AT Peugeot's Coventry plant
have voted for strike action, in reaction to new shift patterns, despite the opposition of
the union leaders. By a Peugeot worker |
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THE M25 Three, Raphael Rowe, Michael
Davis and Randolph Johnson, wrongly jailed for life in 1990 for murder and armed
robberies, have had their convictions quashed at the Court of Appeal. |
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BORN IN 1970, a history teacher by
profession, Oleg has participated in the workers' movement in Russia Shein throughout the
1990s with an internationalist perspective. A member of the Astrakhan regional council,
Oleg was elected as an independent workers' deputy (MP) to the Duma (Russian parliament)
in 1999. On a recent tour of Europe organised by International Solidarity with Workers in
Russia, he spoke to The Socialist. |
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THE NET result of the state of
emergency called by the Mayor of Alma Ata to defeat organised crime was that by the end of
the week over 120 policeman had sold their machine guns to the crooks! Report of the Congress of the Kazakhstan Workers' Movement held in Chelyabinsk, Russia, at the beginning of July by Rob Jones, CWI representative at the conference. |
GORDON BROWN’S Comprehensive Spending Review for the years 2001-2004 made heftier spending promises than this ‘prudent’ New Labour chancellor has done before.
But this is no ‘socialist’ give-away budget. He’s kept to Tory spending limits for years, including keeping pay low in the NHS, education etc despite the problems that causes. Now the fragile boom has given Brown extra cash including £12 billion more for education.
Schools in richer districts can give kids a better start to life than those in working-class areas. Brown’s plans mean that by 2004, funding per pupil will have increased by £300 per pupil compared with 1997. But even this sum will make only marginal impact on a class-ridden education system.
What’s more, Blair and Brown’s government has also introduced university tuition fees which discriminate against working-class students. Obviously once the employers have got a certain level of literacy and numeracy from their future employees, that’s as equal as you’ll get!
Even then Brown says that schools will only get the money if they achieve literacy and numeracy “targets”.
Meanwhile local councils are still underfunded. Tory controlled Hillingdon is already on the verge of bankruptcy (see page 2) and councils are still making huge cuts.
Health gets the £13 billion increase already announced. But how much of this will go to improving the crisis-ridden NHS and how much will be swallowed up in building schemes under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI)? The wasteful PFI system enriches rich profiteers at the expense of public services.
Some of the priorities are less welcome. Military spending’s up for the first time since 1985. Labour’s priorities are new smart missiles for RAF planes! Why not use workers’ talents to produce something useful?
This budget is about as good as we’ll get from capitalism. There’s a relatively booming economy. The government faces an election and has loads of money in the bank. What type of budget will they come up with when the bottom falls out of the economy?
A socialist society could use the colossal wealth available today to seriously tackle the huge problems which capitalism has created. Join us in the fight for socialism.
SAVE FREE Education (SFE) and Socialist Party Youth and Students. Lobby of Gordon Brown for hypocrisy in condemning elitism at universities whilst supporting tuition fees. Wednesday 26 July, 5.30pm. The Treasury, Parliament Square, London SW1. |
WORKERS AT Peugeot's Coventry plant
have voted for strike action, in reaction to new shift patterns, despite the opposition of
the union leaders.
By a Peugeot worker
Car workers here and at Rover,
Longbridge and Nissan face the problems of massive overproduction in the car market and
the international nature of the major manufacturing groups.
The demand for ever-increasing
profit is making this overcapacity unviable. So workers pay the costs. Attacks on working
conditions are carried out under the guise of making plants competitive with sister plants
in other countries, to compete for new investment and new models.
Workforces comply with every measure
asked of them, to secure their plant's future. Then they find that they can't rely on
guarantees of future investment. Companies continue to pit workforce against workforce,
asking them to carry out an unending list of improvements.
This is starkly shown at Peugeot.
The company say that we must have "parity" with hours worked in French plants,
but French workers don't work 200 hours a year contractual overtime. Contractual overtime
is due to be introduced to French plants, meaning further deterioration in conditions
throughout the combine.
Car workers are prepared to fight
back as shown by threats of action from Ford and Peugeot. Unfortunately our union leaders
are trying to prevent effective industrial action. Our national officials try to diffuse
action with false ideas of co-operation and partnership with the employers.
The union leaders should be mounting a campaign of industrial action to remove the
anti-union laws which are the biggest barrier to solidarity action including international
action which workers need to take.
Workers at Peugeot fear a union
sell-out after union officials hailed new company proposals, which offer nothing to meet
workers' demands, as significant. The negotiating committee grasped this opportunity to
put strike action on hold pending the outcome of a second consensus ballot.
New ballot papers will be issued on
19 July for A and B shifts, and 21 July for C shift. The result will be announced on
Wednesday 26 July, the day before the original strike action was due to commence.
This is a blatant attempt to derail
this dispute, This recommendation was defied in the first consensus ballot by 86%, as
workers forced a ballot for strike action, this time there is no recommendation either way
as officials wash their hands of any responsibility.
There were angry scenes at union
meetings as workers insisted that there were no significant changes therefore no need for
another ballot. At the meeting I attended, workers voiced their determination to press on
with strike action.
In the new ballot we must return a
strong vote for action and avoid the mistake of four years ago, when we passed up the
opportunity to strike against the introduction of contractual overtime. Enough is enough.
THE M25 Three, Raphael Rowe, Michael
Davis and Randolph Johnson, wrongly jailed for life in 1990 for murder and armed
robberies, have had their convictions quashed at the Court of Appeal.
The three men have always protested
their innocence. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled unanimously that their trial
had been unfair.
Valerie Davis, Michael's sister, has
fought long and hard for the M25's release. She told us: "I am absolutely relieved.
The judges have found that the police acted corruptly."
They quashed the conviction because
the defence were not told that prosecution witness Norman Duncan had received £10,000
reward money. The judge and jury at the first trial were not privy to this information.
Duncan gave different accounts of his role.
Yet Lord Justice Mantell's judgement
actually said that the judgement had not proved the M25 Three innocent!
Barrister Alan Masters: (who was at
the trial ten years ago) commented: "That is illogical. Both the court in Europe and
this court found that the trial was unfair. There is a presumption of innocence until
proven guilty in British law."
The court found that collusion took
place between the police and Norman Duncan. The judges spoke of a conspiracy to give
perjured evidence.
BORN IN 1970, a history teacher by
profession, Oleg has participated in the workers' movement in Russia Shein throughout the
1990s with an internationalist perspective. A member of the Astrakhan regional council,
Oleg was elected as an independent workers' deputy (MP) to the Duma (Russian parliament)
in 1999. On a recent tour of Europe organised by International Solidarity with Workers in
Russia, he spoke to The Socialist.
Tell us about your work and what you
hope to get from this visit.
IN 1995 the independent Left trade
union in Russia called 'Defence' a Workers Trade Union was established and in 1999 we
began to build a Movement for a Workers' Party which is an attempt to unite various
Marxist groups in Russia under a common platform through workers' struggle.
We believe we cannot win in Russia
unless we establish very good contacts with workers in other countries who too are
suffering under the same capitalist conditions.
What has capitalist restoration
meant for the lives of working class people in the former Soviet Union?
THERE HAS been a catastrophic
decrease in living standards and the destruction of access to good education and health
care. Significant sections of industry have been destroyed and there's mass unemployment
which has added to the 'de-proletarianisation' of the population.
This will result in the drastic
reduction in the budget of the Russian state and the lowering of social services. Last
spring 26 social programmes had to be cut.
Also, the government is trying to
raise the retirement age. At present, women in Russia retire at 55 men at 60, the
government wants to raise the retirement age for both sexes to 65. In Kazakhstan this is
already the situation.
They also want to impose a system of
payment for local telephone calls (at the moment local telephone calls are free).
The government is imposing taxes on
soldiers and on other categories of workers who up to now have been exempt tax. This is a
naked programme of ruling class self-interest. You can see this in the imposition of a
flat tax where both workers and bankers pay 13% despite the huge disparities in incomes.
Putin is centralising state power.
How has this increased authoritarianism affected workers rights?
RIGHT NOW we are starting to see the
end of the 'bourgeois-democratic' period of the growth of capitalism in Russia.
The coming to power of Vladimir
Putin and the beginning of an authoritarian state is a defining moment in this transition
period.
Since 1994 there have been attempts
by the bourgeoisie to impose a new labour code, to break the rights of workers under the
existing law. The new code will make it easier to sack workers and liquidates all the
rights of trade unions to organise.
Matters came to a head during the
government of Sergei Kiriyenko [1998] who was a servant of international finance capital.
The IMF and World Bank demanded that Kiriyenko change the labour laws.
The new code establishes a 12-hour
working day - a four hour increase! It eliminates maternity leave. It establishes
individual employment and allows for the collection political information about workers.
Workers have become used to striking
and fighting back against their employers (winning about 95% of strikes and about 60% of
actions brought before the courts) so now the bourgeoisie want to change the legal
structure under which labour is regulated.
Trade union protests delayed the new
labour law which will be reintroduced into Parliament in December. We are doing all kinds
of protest actions then and we are counting on the support of workers in the West.
What are the prospects for advancing
the struggles of the working class? In particular the development of a new workers party.
RIGHT NOW there is no working-class
political party in Russia that defends workers interests. All the bourgeois parties (and I
include the KPRF - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) are discredited.
The active working-class movements
in Russia today are generally of a socialist character. The union [Defence] includes
socialist trade unions, left-wing trade unions but also other independent trade unions.
While there is every possibility of
forming a workers party in Russia, we also have barriers.
One problem is the collapse of the
bourgeois-democratic state that had allowed us some political leeway. Another problem is
the relative weakness at an organisational level of our movements as well as problems of
lack of resources.
Since 1990 [collapse of the former
Soviet Union] there has formed in Russia a class of people who want to live free. These
people have gone through many experiences - strikes, blockades, pickets, railway
blockades.
Our group has set itself the task of
uniting these people and giving them the tools to fight for and liberate themselves from
capitalism and to found a society based on equality.
THE NET result of the state of
emergency called by the Mayor of Alma Ata to defeat organised crime was that by the end of
the week over 120 policeman had sold their machine guns to the crooks!
This was one of many examples of the
corruption and collapse in the former soviet republic of Kazakhstan - under the capitalist
rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev - given by delegates to the Congress of the Kazakhstan
Workers' Movement held in Chelyabinsk, Russia, at the beginning of July.
Rob Jones, CWI representative at the
conference
30 delegates attended the
conference, whose aim was to re-establish the movement throughout the country. It has
suffered from the repression meted out by Nazarbayev's regime.
Many of the delegates had spent
months in prison, suffered beatings or been forced into exile. The fact that they managed
to gather together was a testimony to their courage.
All the delegates were workers'
leaders. Genaddi Nikitin led the hunger marches of the miners of Kentau a couple of years
ago. The President of the Karaganda Independent Miners' Union said he wanted to make his
union a stronghold of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) in the region. Many
of the delegates had been elected by regional conferences. That in Ust Kamenogorsk, for
example, was attended by 200 people.
A programme for the Movement,
written by Ionur Kurmanov was accepted unanimously. This programme, which opens by saying
it is based on that of the CWI provides a firm platform for taking the struggle forward in
Kazakhstan. It sets the strategic aim of the movement the formation of a genuine workers'
party based on "struggle, solidarity and socialism", to quote Madel Ismailov,
newly elected Joint President.
The only real disagreement was over
tactics for the formation of the workers' party. Delegates from the miners in Karaganda
were arguing that a party should be announced immediately. But most delegates argued that
as the workers were currently not very active, the current task was to prepare. This
included continuing with attempts to win over the best people from the communist party.
The Workers' Movement of Kazakhstan
is already an associate member of the CWI. It strengthened its links with the election of
three members of the CWI amongst its six joint presidents. Now preparations are well under
way for a delegation of trade unionists from Belgium to visit Kazakhstan to see the
conditions at first hand.
Usually, the most controversial
debates are over the constitution. Not here, however. It was unanimously agreed to adopt
the International as the official anthem of the movement.