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May 26th 2000 |
Fight the fees |
Fight the fees:
MOST UNIVERSITY students can’t afford to pay tuition fees - and many are
not doing so. But more and more universities are taking severe action against them. By Paul Hunt, Coventry University. |
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THE PRIVATE referendum currently taking place in Scotland on Clause 28 may turn out to be the last throw of the ill-fated ‘Keep The Clause’ campaign led by Brian Souter, the anti-gay and right-wing Christian boss of Stagecoach. |
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LAST SEPTEMBER British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL's) reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria was hit by a major scandal. Safety checks on fuel rods supplied to a Japanese nuclear power plant had been faked. The company's credibility plummeted as new allegations were made by Swiss and German customers. GEOFF JONES asks: Is this the nuclear industry’s dying days? |
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Review: Lenin: A biography by Robert Service.
Published by Macmillan, and reviewed by MARK WAINWRIGHT |
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IN BRAZIL there has recently been an upsurge in public-sector strikes in the education sector affecting universities and secondary schools, including the University of São Paulo (USP) the country’s largest university. |
MOST UNIVERSITY students can’t afford to
pay tuition fees - and many are not doing so. But more and more universities are taking
severe action against them.
Paul Hunt, Coventry University
Many students are now facing examinations. But that hasn’t stopped the authorities at Coventry University sending threatening letters to those who haven’t paid their fees. They say that if students don’t pay up within two to four weeks, they’ll be expelled and their debts turned over to a debt-collecting agency!
This affects hundreds of students. At the height of the exam period the university threatens to block students’ access to computers and libraries unless they pay.
Some students will be frightened into paying if they have any money. The rest will disappear off their courses and won’t be back next year.
We’ve done everything possible to fight these attacks through official channels, including meeting the vice-chancellor, who insisted that no-one would be thrown off their courses!
Time is running out for us and we decided that urgent action was needed. We are building for an occupation. This is a last resort but people will be chucked out if we do nothing.
We need support from around the country. If you’re not at university or if you are and you’ve already paid your fees, try and think what it would be like in our situation. We haven’t the money to pay and we need everyone to show solidarity.
SEND
MESSAGES of support through our national fax number 020 9899 8787. Also send messages of
protest at the authorities’ actions. These will be passed onto the University.
SAVE FREE Education (SFE) is fighting for students throughout Britain not to pay their tuition fees. We consider this the best way to win back free education for all, to make the fees uncollectable and the system unworkable. SFE will be supporting the students both this term and next year in Coventry and across Britain. We’ll be fighting the fees and fighting for the reintroduction of a living grant. SFE demands: * Abolish tuition fees - build the campaign of mass non-payment * A living grant for all * Immediate withdrawal of all expulsion notices * No sanctions * Amnesty for all non-payers |
THE PRIVATE referendum currently taking place in Scotland on Clause 28 may turn out to be the last throw of the ill-fated ‘Keep The Clause’ campaign led by Brian Souter, the anti-gay and right-wing Christian boss of Stagecoach.
Lionel Wright
So far the bus tycoon has spent £2 million of his £300 million fortune on his bid to keep Thatcher’s anti-gay clause, known as Section 2a in Scotland, on the statute-books. This includes retaining the Media House PR firm of ex-Sun executive Jack Irvine at £10,000 per week.
Souter’s poll was never intended as an objective inquiry into the views of Scots. It has been mounted on the back of a vicious homophobic campaign, with Scotland saturated by poster hoardings filled with disinformation about children in post-repeal classrooms being taught ‘gay sex lessons’. Youth workers in Scotland have reported an increase in the already high level of anti-gay assaults in the wake of Souter’s campaign.
Whatever its supposed ‘result,’ the Keep The Clause private ballot is an ominous precedent not just for campaigners for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights, but also for trade unionists, anti-racists, environmentalists, civil rights campaigners and others.
Gay rights campaigners on both sides of the border have correctly launched a counter-offensive against Souter and the religious right, with lobbies, torchlight vigils and other actions.
An organised boycott of the referendum has been supported by Scottish Socialist Party’s MSP Tommy Sheridan, whose public burning of his ballot paper has been followed by others. It is thought that a majority of the 500,000 Freepost envelopes returned to Keep The Clause so far are empty.
While the key battle for repeal has yet to be won, it is important that the shambles of Souter’s referendum doesn’t distract us from the fact that assorted reactionaries the length of Britain have already succeeded in breaching the defences of the campaign for repeal of Section 28/2a.
In January Conservative leader William Hague fumbled around with the policy of repealing Section 28 ‘except’ for teachers who ‘demanded pupils become gay’.
Labour’s Hilary Armstrong told the Tories: “Trying to water down bad law is a complete nonsense and they clearly don’t think their amendment is going
anywhere”. The Liberal-Democrats’ Lord Tope added: “Let’s have no truck with weasel amendments...”. A few weeks later “weasel amendments” were precisely what both parties were promoting.
Then David Blunkett, the Cabinet member with the most high-profile anti-gay attitude, prepared ‘safeguards’ to the government’s Local Government Bill designed to placate the tabloid press and anti-gay peers. Blunkett met religious leaders, who had already prepared post-Section 28 ‘guidelines’ which didn’t even contain the word ‘homosexual’.
The final 10,000-word document stresses the “significance of marriage and stable family relationships as key building blocks of community and society”. Given that gay people cannot marry, this approach entrenches discrimination. Also, enhancing the status of marriage stigmatises large swathes of the population generally.
The guidelines also imply that both individual parents and religious interests can exert a veto over the sex education policies of local schools.
While the offensive “promotion of homosexuality” formula of Thatcher is gone, the new position is arguably worse, because Section 28 has not applied to schools for many years, but the new guidelines will have legal force within education.
In Scotland the Lib-Dem/Labour executive has adopted a parallel “comfort clause”. This omits any reference to marriage, and confines itself to pushing “stable family relationships”. The intention is that everyone can read into the policy what they want.
However, a Working Group with prominent religious representation is preparing lengthy policy guidelines, and the Scottish National Party is calling for further “safeguards” to be incorporated before the Scottish Parliament votes on repeal later in the summer.
The lessons of the Section 2a/28 campaign are that the capitalist parties cannot be relied on to repeal anti-gay legislation. Gay rights activists and socialists must fight for full repeal in Scotland, Wales and England, and for the scrapping of the current discriminatory guidelines.
LAST SEPTEMBER British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL's) reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria was hit by a major scandal. Safety checks on fuel rods supplied to a Japanese nuclear power plant had been faked. The company's credibility plummeted as new allegations were made by Swiss and German customers. GEOFF JONES asks: |
50 YEARS ago, nuclear power was hailed as Britain's saviour. Clean, environmentally friendly nuclear power stations were to end the back-breaking toil of coal miners and save importing oil - and at the same time provide electricity so cheaply that it might not be worthwhile metering it. What went wrong?
This latest crisis marks the last step in the terminal decline of Britain's nuclear power industry. The Japanese, Swiss and German nuclear industries refuse to have anything to do with BNFL, and the Japanese are demanding that BNFL take back the defective fuel rods. This will require armed naval escorts and will cost millions.
BNFL's new £300 million reprocessing plant stands idle with little chance of the government allowing it to start work. And last month, the company was denied permission to build a nuclear waste incinerator in the United States.
The Irish government is pressing for an immediate closure of the site until it stops pumping radioactive waste into the Irish sea and worries still remain about the long-term effects of low levels of radiation on the plant's workers.
TO AN extent, the British nuclear power programme was a confidence trick. At the end of World War Two the capitalist powers looked aghast at the strength of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary armies sweeping across China. In their eyes, nuclear weapons were the only way to stop the Red Army.
When President Truman, under the pressure of the US military-industrial complex, decided to keep US nuclear know-how to itself, the only way in which the British government could assert its independence was to develop nuclear weapons of their own.
The first nuclear reactors were built to provide weapons-grade plutonium for bombs. But the revulsion against the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so great that the programme was kept secret even from the Labour cabinet.
The fact that these nuclear reactors produced heat which could be used to generate electricity, became the public reason for building them. The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Cumbria, opened in 1956. It was a converted plutonium factory.
The nuclear reactor programme gathered momentum. Lucrative government contracts were jumped at by the big mechanical and civil engineering contractors. There were several possible designs, and millions were handed out to engineering firms.
But the design and construction of nuclear reactors was complex and needed much higher production standards than British industry was used to. The materials used were difficult and dangerous to handle and the consequences of design failure were much more serious than in a conventional power station.
In 1957, a fire in the core of a reactor at Windscale (now known as Sellafield) released unknown quantities of radioactive Iodine and other gases into the atmosphere. This led to a ban on distribution of milk from an area of 200 square miles around the plant for a month. Today, higher safety standards would mean a ban over a much greater area, for much longer.
Afterwards the government insisted that all subsequent reactors had to be covered by a huge 'containment' dome to prevent gases escaping in a similar accident, massively increasing costs. This safety provision was not enforced in other countries, resulting in the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster reaching as far as Britain.
The huge profits expected by the engineering firms did not materialise. Losses forced them to close or amalgamate their construction teams. At the same time, the cost of nuclear power was non-competitive as the cost of oil and gas fell dramatically.
Even as late as the early 1970s, experts were predicting that oil supplies would run out in 20 or 30 years. Supplies were under the control of Middle East states which sometimes could not be held reliably under the thumbs of the major capitalist states. But improvements in geological survey and drilling techniques meant that huge new, apparently inexhaustible, oil and gas fields were discovered across the world in the 1980s and 1990s.
The British nuclear industry contracted. No new nuclear power stations have been commissioned since the late 1980s. When the Tories privatised the energy supply industry in 1988, the cost of electricity from the ageing nuclear stations was so much greater than that from oil or gas stations that the Tories imposed an obligation on electricity providers to buy a certain amount of electricity from non-fossil fuel sources. This was ostensibly to conserve fossil fuels, but actually to ensure that the government didn't find itself lumbered with unsaleable nuclear power stations which produced electricity too expensive to sell.
BUT, APART from economic considerations and dangers due to accidents, nuclear power stations have one great problem - their waste is radioactive. Nuclear reactors produce large amounts of radiation which makes materials used in the reactor radioactive - from metal ducting down to protective clothing and storage materials.
This so-called 'low level' waste cannot be cleaned but has to be stored so that the radioactive components decay naturally - a process which may take centuries. It is estimated that 40,000 cubic metres of such waste are produced by nuclear reactors every year in Britain, a large quantity to handle and dispose of safely.
More difficult to deal with are the waste products of the nuclear reaction itself. Spent fuel rods or pellets still contain large quantities of highly dangerous material such as plutonium. Reprocessing separates out reusable uranium and plutonium from other unusable wastes.
The uranium is converted back into fuel; plutonium is stored either for use in a different form of reactor or as material for nuclear weapons. Reprocessing seemed a good idea because it enabled the British government to be independent of US control of uranium supply. Then it was marketed as a commercial solution to problems of other countries' nuclear industry - getting paid for becoming the world's nuclear dustbin.
Now the commercial rationale has disappeared as other countries are cutting nuclear power programmes. As far as world capitalism is concerned, nuclear energy is a dead end and has been shown to be expensive and dangerous.
For British capitalism, nuclear power generation and the reprocessing of radioactive waste have become an expensive irrelevance. The oldest nuclear power plants are being quietly closed down. For example, the reactor at Bradwell in Essex is to close in March 2002 with the loss of up to 150 jobs.
At the same time, accidents at the ageing power stations receive a disproportionate amount of publicity. The latest was at Trawsfynydd, North Wales, on 2 May when there was a fire in the old reactor building.
BNFL stated that there were 'no radioactive implications', but after Sellafield people are less likely to trust them. The nuclear industry is an embarrassment to New Labour, not least because many members of the government spent their youth campaigning against it!
ACCESS FOR all to cheap energy is a must for any socialist plan. The supply of fossil fuels is not inexhaustible. As supplies get shorter, capitalist firms will be quite happy to allow 'rationing by price', but that is not an option for socialists.
A first obvious step is to take back into public ownership the electricity and gas industries. There should only be compensation on the basis of proven need for the greedy multinationals who picked them up for peanuts from the Tory government.
A socialist energy policy will have to plan sustainable energy production, using present technologies. It will be developed under democratic working-class control and will require major investment in energy saving, such as house insulation. But it will also need an immediate investment in new, renewable, sources of energy.
The present wind and hydroelectric projects represent a fraction of what is possible, even with present technology. What nuclear power stations remain will be phased out as quickly as possible and the reprocessing of nuclear materials ended immediately. The skills of workers in the nuclear industry will be required for many years to close down and make these units safe. As this work tails off, workers can be re-trained to produce socially useful products.
But such an energy policy has an international perspective. Quite rightly, people of the Third World demand the right to cheap energy, a right denied them by global capitalism. They see attempts to cut the increase in fossil fuel usage in the name of slowing global warming as an attempt by the rich to hang onto what they have at the expense of the poor.
A socialist energy policy would have to be international, ensuring that supplies of energy from renewable sources such as hydroelectricity and possibly more advanced sorts of nuclear reactors are distributed world wide.
How a nuclear reactor worksSOME HEAVY elements, notably Uranium, are unstable. In a lump of uranium, some of the atoms will split, producing lighter elements but also giving out particles known as neutrons and energy in the form of heat. The neutrons can hit other Uranium atoms and cause them to split in their turn. Uranium occurs naturally in two varieties, known as isotopes. One isotope, Uranium 235, is more unstable than the other. In a block containing a high proportion of this isotope, the neutrons can produce a chain reaction, with more and more atoms splitting and giving out energy. In special circumstances this leads to an explosion. If the Uranium is in the form of pellets or rods in a block of some material which absorbs neutrons (known as a moderator), the chain reaction can be made to proceed slowly and controllably. The block heats up but this heat is conducted away like in a car's cooling system. This heat can be used to drive turbines to produce electric energy. The first British reactors used gases as coolants but more modern reactors use a liquid, usually water. If something happens to the moderator, the chain reaction may run too fast, producing excessive heat which melts the structure - this is what happened at Windscale and Chernobyl. The reactor core can catch fire, releasing radioactive gases into the environment. But the shape and size of the fuel elements is also critical. Hot spots might occur which could produce the same disastrous result. This is why BNFL's customers went ballistic at finding safety checks hadn't been carried out. |
Sellafield's chequered history1951 Nuclear reactors built at Windscale to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. 1957 Nuclear reactor fire spreads radioactive gases over western Britain. 1971 Name changed from Windscale to Sellafield. 1981 Following a series of leaks of radioactive material, Health and safety Executive (HSE) reported, "Safety standards had deteriorated to an unsatisfactory level." 1986 Four leaks and a fire in three months. HSE highlighted "insufficiently thorough" attitude to safety. 1988-1990 reports find possible effects of Sellafield on childhood leukaemias in the area. 1999-2000 Damning HSE report on safety standards. 2000 Irish government demands Sellafield's closure.
New Labour shelves plan to sell off Sellafield to private industry |
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More of this feature in The Socialist
Lenin: A biography by Robert Service. Published by Macmillan, and reviewed by MARK WAINWRIGHT
I HALF expected this new biography about Lenin to be in the new tradition, such as in the critical and unbiased manner of Francis Wheen’s superb work on Karl Marx. Well everyone makes a mistake occasionally!
What is good about the book is that Service uses access to newly released documents in Moscow to confirm Lenin’s last campaign fought from his deathbed was for the removal of Stalin as the general secretary of the Party. As a consequence Service admits that the Bolsheviks led by Lenin had not set out to establish a dictatorship, which later followed under Stalin.
Service also asks: “Is Lenin really done for?... [because] when surveys of Russian public opinion are undertaken he measures among the most popular rulers in history”.
You could safely say the book lacks balance. It is full of quotes like “he (Lenin) displayed a virtual lust for violence” or “he was a cheerful repressor”, or “his indifference to the scale of common suffering was colossal”.
The very last paragraph concludes: “Lenin was unexpected. At the very least his extraordinary life proves the need for everyone to be vigilant. Not many historical personages have achieved this effect. Let thanks be given”.
His lack of balance is illustrated in a number of respects. As the example below show this undermines his claim to an ‘objective’ historian’s approach. Or could it be he shows a certain inclination to believe things without actually checking it? I lean to the second explanation.
For example he says: “(Lenin) would not even condone the formation of famine relief bodies in order to use them for the spreading of revolutionary propaganda”.
Yet if you read the collection of writings, Lenin on Britain, at the beginning you will find two letters to the then Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald from Lenin thanking him for the donations to the Famine Relief Committee!
Another example was over the military offensive by Kerensky’s provisional government in June 1917, during the First World War. Service writes: “After initial success the Russian forces were held up by a spirited defence”.
That’s it. What he omits is that 58,000 Russian troops killed were during this offensive and that the mass armed uprisings in Russia known as the July Days developed as a result. Neither does he mention that the Bolsheviks led by Lenin - a party Service implies was purely determined on seizure of power -actually held these movements back. The Bolsheviks waited until they had won a majority of the working class and poorest peasants before assuming power in October 1917.
More seriously, Service claims that Trotsky personally supervised the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1920. Trotsky certainly was in favour of ending the revolt but he didn’t supervise it at all; he was not there.
Service says that people “tend to overlook the fragility of the regime, chaos and confusion was the norm”. He makes the nearly comical point that Lenin’s car was stopped on at least three occasions by armed youth in Moscow in 1918/1919; in fact he was nearly killed by Red Guards who refused to believe it was him.
The distinction is important because you need to be reminded that the regime was holding on for dear life. In the very harsh conditions of civil war and no political reinforcements from successful revolution abroad, the regime survived and consolidated itself, albeit on a grotesquely deformed basis, that lasted for almost three-quarters of a century.
Maybe what irritates Robert Service most is that despite the crimes and repression of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that went on to rule in Lenin’s name but which violated every Marxist principle Lenin had stood for, he still cannot explain the long-standing and inspirational effect of Lenin and his ideas.
IN BRAZIL there has recently been an upsurge
in public-sector strikes in the education sector affecting universities and secondary
schools, including the University of São Paulo (USP) the country’s largest
university. ANDRE FERRARI of Socialismo Revolucionario (the Socalist Party’s
counterpart in Brazil) reports on the occupations and protests sweeping the state of São
Paulo.
A UNIFIED demo of students, teachers and civil servants of the state of São Paulo took place on 18 May despite intense police repression. Professors and university workers are demanding better pay to compensate for the fall in the value of their salaries over the past five years.
They are supported by students who are also demanding more resources and teaching staff, an end to backdoor privatisation through the setting up of private foundations, and direct elections for the university rector.
On 16 May there was a 24-hour occupation of the rectory building at USP.
The militarised police force attacked the demonstrators with tear gas, smoke bombs, rubber bullets, dispersal gas, dogs and horses.
Several people were hurt during the protest, some quite seriously such as a photographer hit in the eye by a rubber bullet and a teacher whose arm was seriously injured by a smoke bomb.
Two Socialismo Revolucionario (SR) executive members were hit, one with tear gas bomb fragments in his arm and the other hit twice by rubber bullets, one in the lower leg and another in the thigh, as well as tear gas bomb fragments in the arm. Fortunately, the comrades are in no danger and continue to organise the struggle.
The occupation of the USP university rectory had been lifted so that the students could attend this demo. But at another occupation that SR members are also participating in, (the central administration offices for the technical schools of the state of São Paulo), violent police action was taken to dislodge the occupiers.
In spite of the intense repression, the protest march went on to the State of São Paulo Education Secretary building with about 40,000 workers and students. The march had originally been meant to go to the State Legislative Assembly but union leaders changed plans due to the police repression.
In the days leading up to the demo, SR members had already been subject to repression. Teacher comrades in the Cotia teachers union committee organised a mobile picket to solidify the strike and were followed and harassed by police.
In Taboão, another area where we have members on the union committee, the police went to schools where our comrades are active. In the Guarulhos district too, police clashed with a local teachers’ demo.
The government’s repressive action has further angered education and public-sector workers and students.
Continuing and building all the strikes underway has now been posed by all the unions. The repression appears to have had the opposite effect of rallying support for the strikes.
On 25 May there is another unified demo planned at the São Paulo Governor’s Building (Bandeirantes). The expectation is that this demo will be even larger than the 18 May.
There may be further police repression but they will not succeed in intimidating workers and students.
There is now much discussion on the authoritarian turn of the Cardoso government and the São Paulo state governor Mário Covas. Some activists talk of the ‘Fujimorization’ of Cardoso and his government [Fujimora is Peru’s autocratic president who combines state repression with neo-liberal capitalist policies - eds]. Cordosa has indeed been replaying some features of the repression and political persecution of the dictatorship eg invoking the National Security Law, resurrecting surveillance services along the lines of the infamous SNI, repression against the landless rural workers with 14 arrests in São Paulo and one worker shot dead in the state of Paraná.
However, the balance of class forces today rules out a constitutional coup (a la Fujimori) in Brazil at this time. But political agitation against the authoritarian measures and denouncing this government is crucial. Socialismo Revolucionario is calling for the defence of the unification of the struggle and “Out with Cardoso and the IMF” [International Monetary Fund].
There are many strikes and mobilisations by different sections (mainly students and public-sector employees) throughout the country. The trend is for a greater generalisation of these struggles. Even without a political leadership consciously unifying the struggles and taking serious and determined measures to step up the mobilisation, the movement has been going forward.
E-mail messages of support for the USP protest to: dce2000@yahoo.com.br
Send copies to SR at sr-cio@uol.com.br