ORGANIZED RAGE

Sadly the only people in the USA today who are engaged in class warfare, are the rich fat cats and their media cronies.

2012-01-27T06:30:00.000Z

Setting the Truth Free: The inside story of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000Z

Setting the Truth Free: The inside story of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign

Friday 3 February, 6.30pm

Julieann Campbell and Gareth Peirce, will be at Bookmarks on 3 February at 6:30pm all welcome.

On 30th January 1972 the British army in Derry shot dead thirteen people during a Civil rights march in Derry. The British Government then covered up what had happened and blamed the marchers for the violence. Yet after thirty-eight years of relentless campaigning the Prime Minister David Cameron had to apologise for the ‘unjustified’ and ‘unjustifiable’ acts of Bloody Sunday.

Setting the Truth Free is an account of the Justice Campaign by the campaigners, relatives and the wounded themselves. Julieann Campbell was Press Officer for the Bloody Sunday families in the lead up to the publication of the Saville Report. She is also the niece of Jackie Duddy who was one of those killed that day.

Gareth Peirce is a leading Human Rights lawyer who represented many wrongfully jailed Irish men and women in the 1980s and has spent much of the last decade working for Muslim terror suspects.

‘Setting the Truth Free is a wonderful book because it documents eloquently events that go to the heart of the struggle for justice and freedom...the inspiration is universal’ JOHN PILGER

At Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3QE

Call 020 7637 1848 or email to reserve your place.

A list of those who are now deceased and whilst alive refused to be enticed with one of Betsy Windsor's establishment Gongs. [honours]

2012-01-26T10:54:00.001Z

One of Betsy's newer lickspitles signs the pledge.

The list, which covers anyone who snubbed an honour from the Queen between 1951 and 1999 and has since died, was released by the Cabinet Office.

It also includes details of honours rejected by Trevor Howard, the actor, Alfred Hitchcock, the Hollywood director, Aldous Huxley, the author, and Henry Moore, the sculptor.

The list is the first official confirmation that scores of people have rejected honours in the annual New Year or Birthday Honours lists.

The information has previously been kept so secret that it was not even disclosed in the regular release of government documents under the 30-year rule.

Until now, reports of people turning down honours from the Queen were based only on leaked lists, or resulted from the nominee volunteering the information.

The list was published last night after an order from the information watchdog following a 15-month battle under the Freedom of Information Act.

Meanwhile Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that a Whitehall committee will meet today or tomorrow to discuss whether to strip a knighthood from Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced banker.

The 277 names on the once secret list include many of the most famous figures from the arts and journalism over the past 40 years, including Bacon who turned down a CBE in 1960, and Freud who refused a CBE in the 1977 New Year’s Honours list. Snubbing an honour was not a barrier against being asked again.

The list shows that Lowry rejected an honour on a record five occasions, including an OBE in 1955, a CBE in 1961, a knighthood in 1968 and an invitation to become a Companion of Honour in 1972 and 1976.

Among the famous writers to snub an honour were Dahl, who rejected an OBE in the 1986 New Year’s Honours, Graham Greene, who turned down a CBE in 1956 and CS Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia who rejected a CBE in 1952.

Some of them accepted honours at a later date.

Actors on the list include Robert Morley, who accepted an OBE in 1957 but rejected a knighthood in the 1975 Birthday Honours list, and the Brief Encounter actor Trevor Howard, who turned down a CBE in 1982.

The only case of a life peerage being rejected was that of the playwright JB Priestley, who turned down the honour in 1965 and an invitation to be made a Companion of Honour in 1969. Henry Moore refused a knighthood in the 1951 New Year’s Honours, although he subsequently accepted other honours.

Huxley, the author of Brave New World, refused a knighthood in 1959, while Evelyn Waugh, who wrote Brideshead Revisited, snubbed a CBE in 1959.

Hitchcock, who directed films including Psycho and The Birds, turned down a CBE in 1962, although he subsequently accepted a knighthood just before he died.

Among the poets on the list are Robert Graves, who turned down a CBE in 1957 and an invitation to join the Companions of Honour in 1984, and Philip Larkin, who rejected the offer of an OBE in 1968.

The list also shows that the Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan’s wife Audrey refused an offer to be made a Dame in 1979’s Birthday Honours, the year he led Labour to defeat against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. She later acquired a title when her husband accepted a peerage in 1987.

A smattering of journalists also turned down honours, including Hugh Cudlipp, who edited the Daily Mirror in the 1950s and 1960s, and Kingsley Martin, who edited the New Statesman from 1930 to 1960. Both turned down knighthoods.

The list also discloses that Hughie Green, the television entertainer, refused an OBE in the 1960 New Year’s Honours, when he was at the height of his fame as presenter of Double Your Money.

The list did not include honours that were accepted and then later returned, as was the case with the former Beatle John Lennon, who sent his MBE back to Buckingham Palace in protest at British involvement in the Nigerian civil war in 1966.

Normally nominees for an honour are contacted by Downing Street well in advance to see if they will accept being put forward for an honour. They are then able to reject the offer without the information being made public.

The Cabinet Office had initially rejected the FOI request more than a year ago on the grounds that it was up to individuals to disclose if they had turned down an honour.

However, officials were forced into a U-turn after a successful appeal to the Information Commissioner on the grounds that those named in the list were deceased.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “It is entirely an individual’s choice as to whether they accept an honour. People refuse honours for a variety of reasons but the numbers are very small and represent around two per cent of nominations.”

Last night a spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s office said: “We welcome the Cabinet Office’s decision to release this information.

“This is in recognition of the commissioner’s decision that this information should be disclosed in the public interest and is in the spirit of greater openness.”

First published here.

Obituary: Matt Lygate: Life long campaigner for a Scottish socialist republic.

2012-01-26T07:00:00.000Z

Matt Lygate was born on 26/12/1938 in Govan Glasgow. From early on, he became an accomplished artist, orator, and thinker. He always loved the great outdoors and would often dissapear for hours up hills and down gullies to the distress of his parents. As a teenager, he moved to Sunderland with his family and became one of the best renouned tailor's cutters of his time. Matt loved his family and family life, however when ordered to join the British Army (forced conscription was still in place at that point, even after the war), Matt, like his father during WWI, refused stating he would never join an imperialist British Army. That same week, he was on a boat to New Zealand before the powers that be could abscond him.

Matt had been an avid member of the British Communist Party as well as a devout Christian, believing that Christ himself was a revolutionary socialist. Once in New Zealand, Matt's fervour and passion for justice as well as adventure blossomed. In his years on the islands of New Zealand, he travelled from village to village without map or tent, taking on local hard labour jobs as he went. He was institutional in the setting up of the first railway worker's union and fought for the rights of the Maori people across the island. His travels took him from the heights of the Alps, picking deadly weeds in the snow, to the fields of grain where he worked along side many of the industrious indiginous people of the island. On leaving New Zealand to return to his family, the New Zealand secret service met him at the docs to make Matt aware he would not be allowed back any time soon. Such was the impact Matt left everywhere he went. Many took inspiration from his great work and polemics on justice, liberty and equality, others saw him as a grave threat to the established order. Matt excelled at and loved playing both the saint and the sinner in the eyes of different beholders. He was never one for cult status. He always insisted people judge him on what he said and not who he is.

On return from New Zealand, Matt's political and social work continued. He became heavily involved and a leading figure in the Scottish and Irish republican and socialist movements. He was a leading founder of the Workers Party of Scotland which was a Marxist-Leninist Republican party advocating the establishment of a Scottish socialist republic in the same tradition of John Maclean's vision. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the John Maclean Society which did much work to reserect the memory and life's work of Maclean. He believed in the emancipation of mankind worldwide. He was a true internationalist, involved in the struggle for Irish and Palestinian independence, meeting many world figures over his time. In fact when nominated years later for Glasgow University Rector, he stood down to allow votes for Yassar Arafat. Over his time he has been nominated and rejected two honourary degrees from both Glasgow and Edinburgh University.

He rejected them on the political grounds that they might corrupt him and remove him from his working class route, but in truth it was also because Matt was a brutally modest man and shunned any idolisation or cult status. In 1972, Matt and 4 others were convicted of bank robbery and handed out the longest sentences in Scottish legal history for non murder crimes. During the case, Matt dismissed his defence team and represented himself. Knowing the fact he was to be tryed, not on bank robbery, but his politics, he used the court rather than to defend himself, but to attack the very system he knew aimed to destroy him. In his closing statment, he told the judge it was not his violence that had brought him to court, but that of the state against the working class. The same violence that had put 150,000 people out of work at the time in Scotland and stolen children's milk leading to the return of Rickets in Scotland. He announced that the day would come when those who judged him would themselves be judged, an announcement that Lord Dunpark did not take too kindly too. On announcement of his 24 year sentence, Matt looked to the public gallery and with clenched fist shouted "Long live the workers of Scotland" and with that began the longest bank robbery sentence in Scottish history. Although the judge himself admitted the crimes to be political and although it was proven in court, none of the alleged stolen funds went to Matt, he was not allowed political prisoner status. He was also denied appeal, a basic right in Scots law based on the statement by the presiding Judge that Matt openly supported bank robbery and so did not require appeal. A political belief in the redistribution of money in s capitalist society did not account to acceptance of guilt of specific robberies, yet the judge refused to accept this and Matt was denied appeal against his unequivically long sentence.

Once in prison, Matt's work against injustice continued and as ever, he remained a thorn in the establishment's side. On issue of a boiler suit and ID number for instance, Matt refused both. The suit did not fit nor did the shoes. He was told to like it or lump it and lump it he did, choosing to spend his first experiences in prison in solitary confinement naked and on hunger strike. Matt's flare for art and creativity never dulled at any point in his life. Many of the prison inmates were illiterate and Matt spent much of his time actively teaching some of Glasgow's most hardened criminals to read, write and paint. He would often write poems and paint minature Burns portraits and the likes for other inmates girlfriends and mothers, so much so that he was called to the Governor's office in Peterhead and told "You've outgrown this place". By this point much of the mail leaving Peterhead had Matt's imprint directly or indirectly. Matt seen this as an opportunity to address the hypocricy of a system that refused to help and educate those in need and instead punish those who tried to do so.

Matt was eventually moved round from prison to prison, however not before forcing the governor to introduce reading, writing and art classes for Class A prisoners in Peterhead for the first time ever. He set up organisations to protect the rights of prisoners and object to the antiquated Victorian style prison systems where 'slopping out' and three to a cell were still common place. Despite often spending much of his sentence in solitary confinement, under constant light (even through the night which is a documented form of torture) and regular movings, Matt never capitulated or lost his passion for his beliefs. If anything, Matt only ever became stronger in the face of adversity.

After 8 years behind bars, Matt was offered his first parole hearing. Matt's response was unique in denying his opportunity for parole. In a letter of explanation to the hearing, he demonstrated his view that the parole was a sham and had no intent of releasing him yet. As such he chose to not waste his time in their presence and in doing so giving his family false hope that there was ever a chance of his release at that time. Matt knew the system and was never afraid to challenge it, even (and most often) at the expense of his liberty. He had a clean record his entire time in prison and yet was kept in Class A for 8 years, much of which in solitary confinement. One lawyer once commented publically on Matt's case that he was given 8 years for robbery and 16 for his politics.

His fight against adversity and injustice continued further after his eventual release 12 years later. He reinstated the Workers Party of Scotland and began one of the biggest political movements Britain has ever seen. From humble beginnings, the anti-poll tax movement was born in Maryhill. Some of the earliest 'non-payment of poll tax' movements began when Matt and a friend tramped the entirety of Scotland, just like he had back in New Zealand. They knocked on people's doors and explained what the poll tax was and how they could resist it. The movement picked up pace, however to begin with neither the Labour party nor the Communist party nor any of the left would support Matt. They all claimed the anti-poll tax to be a Scottish phenomenon and thought nothing of it. How wrong they were.

During this period, Matt met his first love who helped create the success that was the anti poll tax movement ran initially from their small Phoenix Press shop. After the success of the anti-poll tax movement, Matt began to move out of public life and became the family man, raising 3 happy children and looking after countless others. Matt the family man was just as passionate a man as Matt the political fighter. He raised his children open mindedly and lovingly but just as they flourished into their own lives, Matt himself was struck with the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This however never for one day removed Matt's ultimate passion for life, liberty and nature. Over the next 8 or so years, Matt's short term memory slowly deteriorated, but his character remained the same as ever. He remained the firebrand optimist he ever was and every day was greeted with a smile and a laugh. Every leaf on every tree was just as beautiful and every moment just as fullfilling. Right up until Matt's final moments on this earth, he never passed another human being without acknowledging them and offering comment on how beautiful a day it was. He never walked without noticing a new colour or pattern on a bush or flower he maybe had passed every day for years. He never lost his love of nature, walking and talking. He remained a thinker and philosopher of epic proportions. Even in the latter stages of his Dementia, he could still recite Burn's quotes that could epitimise the feeling of a million words. He still loved his beloved books from the many book stores he had ran in his life, and his house was always adourned with many of the great artworks he and others had completed.

His life is a story of adversity, a fight against injustice and for the liberty and freedom of all men and women. His life is a story of love, of love for his fellow man, of every creature and living thing on earth, of his beloved partner Linda whom he shared so many of his adventures and loved so dearly, of his children who he passed so much of his wisdom and passion for life, for his beloved dog/s who saw him through to the end, sharing in his delight of nature and his epic walks, a story of love of all life itself. His life is a story of passion and adventure, adventures that spanned the globe, that influenced untold thousands, and whose ripples can still be felt today. His life is a story of hope, hope for humanity, of never ending optimism in the face of all adversity and seeming impossibilities. Hope that even in all our darkest hours, light, laughter and beauty can always be found. His life is a story of many lives, of many faces, of many chapters hardly even touched upon here.

His exit from this world in fittingly dramatic circumstances ends the final chapter in a life that touched so many, that changed so much and that even today, continues to inspire and motivate others. In that way his life lives on after a death that outlived the old enemies like the News of the World,a life that saw Scottish republicanism move from a fringe movement to the very centre of Scottish politics and watched over all of his children becoming the flourishing adults they are today.

In the end, Matt Lygate was never consumed by his disease. He died the "giant inside a small man's body" he ever was. He died a fundamentally happy and independent man on his own two feet living by no one else's but his own will. What more could any of us ask from the game of life and death?

German State plans center to combat right-wing extremism

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000Z

German Family Minister Kristina Schröder announced plans on Tuesday to devote 2 million euros ($2.6 million) to the establishment of a nationwide information and research center to combat right-wing extremism.

Meeting with Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, representatives of trade unions and members of the religious, sporting, immigrant, welfare, and youth communities at a summit in Berlin, Schröder said the center would combine knowledge and skills in the fight against extremism from groups across Germany and make them widely available.

She stressed that the knowledge to fight extremism was already available, but said what was lacking was an effective way of sharing that knowledge.

Friedrich said the government was obliged "to offer any help, encouragement and support" to prevent the spread of right-wing extremism, calling on the federal government and states to support individual communities in the fight.

"There must be no room in this country, in this society, for right-wing extremism," said Friedrich, adding that Germans must not be intimidated by extremist violence.

Law enforcement criticized

Tuesday's announcement follows last week's decision by the German government to create a national registry of thousands of neo-Nazis considered likely to commit acts of violence.

The idea for the registry came after the discovery of a right-wing extremist cell suspected of at least ten murders since the year 2000. The cell, known as the National Socialist Underground, is suspected of the murders of nine people in Germany with an immigrant background and one German policewoman. Two of the three suspects are now dead, while the third is in police custody.

Germany's law enforcement systems have been heavily criticized for their failure to coordinate their investigations into the neo-Nazi scene or to connect the suspects to the murders. Each of Germany's 16 states operates its own police force and intelligence agency, and they are often reluctant to share information.

Author: Martin Kuebler (dapd, epd, KNA)
Editor: Joanna Impey

Interview; The untold story of Anti-Fascist/Red Action.

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000Z

On its 75th anniversary, much attention was given to the Battle of Cable Street, where Oswald Mosley's blackshirts were prevented from marching through the predominantly Jewish working class East End of London. But Cable Street itself was the culmination of a wider tradition of direct physical confrontation with fascists both at the time and throughout most of the 20th century.

We are happy to praise those who made a stand in the 1930s. But what of those who literally fought the fascists more recently, in the shape of the British Movement, the National Front or the pre-Griffin British National Party?

The publication of Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (Freedom Press) has re-asserted the importance of this disparaged and neglected tradition. Michael Calderbank spoke with Gary and Andy, longstanding members of Red Action who helped to initiate AFA, about their controversial new book.

Michael: Maybe we could begin by talking about the history of physical confrontation with the fascists in Britain?

Andy: Well, if you're a Jew living in the 1930s or a working class Communist then it's in your face, you're dealing with Blackshirts who are on your street corner. It's something you've got to react to and deal with in the here and now. You've also got people looking at the wider strategic picture - what was going in Spain was very real, what was going on in Italy and Germany was very real - and people with foresight understood that if you don't put something in place to prevent that then you're going to be in trouble yourselves.

After the war, when it was totally clear what fascism could lead to, you had the '43 group which, although it had CP members in its ranks, was largely an apolitical purely paramilitary body who would go round attacking the fascists. They were tough people, physically aggressive who had often served in the armed forces, many from Jewish backgrounds, who had seen a lot in their few years - these are young people - if you've been through that and don't understand it, you're never going to understand it. So people who have gone through that, seen it in the cinemas, or even in your own family over in Europe - and then you're just going out and minding your own business, and you see some geezer on a soapbox talkin' about the same stuff, it's gotta be obvious to you, yeah?

Gary: There's an example when a group of Jewish lads went past Mosley's secretary [Jeffrey Hamm] after the war speaking up at Jack Straw's Castle [near Hampstead Heath], and they were incredulous. I'm mean, here was the same old Jew-baiting going on after the war as you had before the war - with everthying that had gone on! So they gave 'em a good shoeing and found: 'these fuckers are everywhere!' I mean, y'know, it's ridiculous, we're not havin' it.

There was a huge strain of anti-semitism in the British establishment that Mosley hoped to profit from but never did. And so when Jews who had just got back from the war met fascists on the street they weren't gonna petition the council to get see if they could do something! They were just gonna get on and do it themselves.

Andy: When people's whole family lines have been wiped out and turned to ashes, what are you gonna do with people like that, try and debate with them in that situation?

Gary: And they wouldn't wouldn't debate with you either, that's the point. If you went up to them and said, 'excuse me, I'm a member of the Jewish faith and could you...' [laughs] they're not gonna argue the point, you'd be hit be a cosh. But, you might not be out looking for any trouble particular, but they're there. And that situation doesn't go away, it's like that later on. You've gone to the football or something and you're standing next to some guy who gets a bottle smashed over his head, a black kid who they've chased down, do you stand back and say 'right we'll get onto the council to do something!'?

Andy: It'd depend what kind of circles you moved in to. I mean I don't want to generalise too much, but many of the people involved on the left at the time would have come up through a university background and lived in this sealed kind of world from what I could tell. But I didn't know, I didn't come from a political background. Everywhere I went I met these people, they were in your face. And Britain at the time was a violent and anarchic sort of place in some ways. I mean you'd go out round the pubs on a Friday night, have a disagreement, or you've gone to the football or a gig or something, and you run in to these geezers with all sorts of badges, handing out leaflets, maybe taking the band off the stage and attacking the band! I've seen that happen! It's not like you'd read in some textbooks about what should or shouldn't be done, it was an instinctive thing. These people are bullies, they're not people who can debate with. It's not alien if you come from that kind of background.

Gary: Yes, and the left has to understand that as soon as they appear, it's because your own side has been making mistakes. Fascists won't appear in very small numbers, they'll wait until it's right for them. I mean they look at it strategically as well, they'll take it onto a physical level when they think there's something for them to gain. So it's not a matter of waiting until they attack our people - we've got an investment in smashing up their meetings, their paper sales and the rest of it. You don't want to wait until they're some kind of respectable opposition. If it gets that far, you've already lost.

The full interview can be read here.

The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action can be brought online and all good book shops.

Cap rents not housing benefits: By penalising tenants and supporting landlords, Cameron opens the door for the return of Rachmanism.

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000Z

Tony Blair was right. At least once. “Why don’t you tackle directly the excessive rents being charged by private landlords rather than making tenants the victim,” he wisely said when leader of the opposition. As the House of Lords are debating whether families should have their benefits capped at £26,000 per annum – regardless of how many children they have or how much rent they must pay — the PCS has produced a pamphlet which calls for steps to be taken to curb high rents, including Mr Blair’s surprisingly useful quote.

The pamphlet, Welfare — An alternative vision, doesn’t stop there. It includes sections on unemployment, low income, disability, children and pensions as well as housing. And it can be downloadedhere. It summarises its conclusions like this:

What we need

A welfare state that ensures everyone has a decent standard of living free from poverty
A government that commits to full employment
A welfare system based on need not moral judgements
A government that acknowledges and respects the work of dedicated DWP staff
To end low pay that leaves people dependent on means-tested benefits.

What you can do

Challenge the myths when you read them in the press, hear them in the media or if they are repeated by people you know
Discuss the issues raised in this pamphlet in your trade union, community organisation or political party
Lobby your MP against welfare cuts and privatisation, and for full employment
Support our campaigns and those of others like Gingerbread, the National Pensioners’ Convention and Defend Council Housing.

By Jon Lansman.

More on this here.

Whilst ruthlessly cutting the Welfare State, the coalitions policy of subsidising private business goes into overdrive.

2012-01-24T07:30:00.000Z

Whilst the Tory led coalition government are serving the NHS on a platter to the private health care industry, and taking a hatchet to the welfare state, they are also channelling ever greater sums of money to the corporations which dominate the retail trade. Some of the most 'successful' UK businesses in this field have the tax payer to thank for their profit margins, which since the turn of the century have risen to levels which would have been unthinkable in the 20th century. They have achieved this by manipulating the welfare state and tax system to their own advantage.

Take any one of the major hyper-markets such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda or Morrisons, and look at their balance sheet, and you will see their high level of profits would not have been possible without the government subsidising the wages of a sizeable section of their workforce. True they would still be able to make a reasonably healthy profit, but nowhere near the astronomical sums they have been accumulating this century. It is this level of profit which has allowed their CEOs and senior management to receive salaries and bonuses which previous generations of senior executives could never have imagined.

There're's a single denominator which has allowed these Corporations to make such fast profit margins and it has little to do with good business acumen or practice. Whether it be Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, or Morrisons, they all fail to pay a sizable section of their workforce a viable living wage. Not because they cannot afford to, but due to their corporate greed and powerful political and media support, they have created a climate in which the tax payer takes up the slack by subsidising their workers pay with 'in work benefits.'

Whilst all this has been going on, the MSM has been complicit by its silence, using the old sleight of hand trick of exaggerating the level of fraud in the benefits system and totally ignoring the bigger 'fraud' the hypermarket chains have been perpetrating, with the connivance of government, against the tax payer.

If multi national corporations like these cannot afford to pay all their workers a viable and livable wage, they should not be in business. It's a national scandal these corporations continue to short change their workforce with government connivence whilst at the same time, paying their senior management massive salaries, bonuses, and share options, whilst receiving what in reality amounts to a state subsidy funded by the tax payer.

There are good arguments for some in work benefits, for example new start ups, when companies take on 'proper indentured apprentices,' support and encourage employee training, skills updating, and further education opportunities. Plus when they offer employment opportunities to disabled people who are well enough to take advantage of them, and emergency state funding to see the company through a major slump without resorting to layoffs and redundancies.

Sadly, as far as I can judge very few of these scenarios are relevant to the large hypermarket chains. Since the economic crash in 2008, and the continuing depression, they are all still making a tidy profit, in the case of Tesco £3.54 billion is the latest figures to be released. Thus there should be no question of a government subsidy as they are well able to invest in their entire workforce by paying them a decent, liveable wage.

Last week the Guardian top floor finally woke up to what anti poverty campaigners have been telling them for years; and allowed Zoe Williams to publish a piece on this matter, whch until now has been kicked into the long grass by the political and media elites.

She wrote:

“The first time I heard the phrase 'state subsidised corporate super-profits’ was last June, at a conference of the pressure group Compass, in a discussion about meeting child poverty targets by 2020 [the title was intended as a bleak joke, I think]. Someone in the audience said that the very existence of "in-work benefits" was evidence of the government subsidising the bloated profits of huge corporations.

This was underlined by the arcane terminology – a "working family tax credit." Why a "tax credit" and not a "benefit"? Clearly, because otherwise some smart-Alec might have said that if a company is paying a worker less than it takes to break through the breadline, and that's legal, then there's something wrong with the minimum wage.”

“The Fair Pay Network publishes a report on the impact of low pay in national supermarket chains. It looks at the big four supermarkets: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons – the largest employer block in the country outside of the NHS. The report finds that the working poor now dominate poverty equations, with nearly two-thirds of children in poverty living in working families. It gives case studies for individual members of the 900,000-strong supermarket workforce: workers such as the mother who has to hold down two part-time jobs, never sees her kids, and still can't afford to use the tube – so they probably end up blowing what quality "me-time" they have schlepping across town on a bus. Life would be untenable for many families without in-work benefits, and even with them it is backbreakinly hard.

Who wins, when the government makes up the shortfall, between the poverty pay a shelf-packer earns and what he or she needs to live on? Not the worker, evidently; not the taxpayer, who may get a certain empathy boost from the fact that nobody's starving, but reaps no economic advantage from this bizarre system; not the supplier to the supermarket, who often has his or her own case to make about deals so bad they often amount to a mugging.

The only winners are the chains themselves: Justin King, the CEO of Sainsbury's, receives £3.2m a year; Philip Clarke of Tesco, £6.9m; Dalton Philips, of Morrisons, £4m; Andy Clarke of Asda's pay is not in the public domain. What justifies these amounts? Their profits, of course: well done, guys. You don't pay the London living wage, or the UK living wage (a non-binding rate set by the Centre for Social Policy Research) to your lowest-paid employees. You were abetted in this by the last government, and now have this government, with its soaring unemployment, over a barrel.”

There is little doubt, with the acquiescence of the Coalition government, the senior executives whom Zoe Williams mentioned above, have come to believe they are free to skim off as bonuses, etc, the extra profits their business makes due to the taxpayer subsidizing their wage bill.

It is the equivalent of how the Mafia used to operate in Las Vegas and still do in the New York construction industry, although whilst it was the consumer whom they ripped off, in the UK today, the hypermarkets rip off members of their own workforce, the consumer and the British tax payer.

To get an idea of the gross hypocrisy of these political elites, it was David Freud, whom both Labour and the Coalition governments commissioned to draw up reports on how best to cut the benefits of some of the most marginalized people in the UK, including the sick, disabled and single mothers. A shady millionaire, City banker, with a history of underpricing state assets prior to their privatization. Whilst going about his dirty deed of cutting other peoples welfare payments, his friends and former associates in the City of London where actively involved in using the tax payer as an ever open cash cow.

Something Freud understood perfectly as he was amongst the first neo liberal banker's to push his snout deep into the public purse, when he managed to scoop up countless £billions of government subsidies for the channel tunnel project, whilst insisting to the media it was self financing, an example of private enterprise at its best.

Talk about turning the fox loose in the hen house. As the Russian oligarchs living in London say, steal under £10 million in the UK, your in trouble, over that amount and you are welcomed into the heart of the British establishment.

Mick Hall.

More on the impact of low pay in supermarket chains here.

The Iron Lady: A film about a lonely old woman with dementia, who was once one of the most powerful leaders in the West.

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000Z

Meryl Streep is Margaret Thatcher’s doppelganger in this film, to such an extent that she arouses deep-seated feelings of hostility towards what is really only a character, so powerful and persuasive is the performance.

Equally, I suppose, for one ignorant of the real Thatcher, the opening scenes of the film with its close-up examination of the cruelty and tragedy of dementia can be quite moving. I can understand why her family would consider this aspect an invasion of their mother’s privacy and vulnerability, and why David Cameron would much prefer the film to have been more about her ‘political’ success — and perhaps more a hagiography?

The film is about three days in the life of a frail, isolated and fairly lonely old woman with dementia, who was once one of the most powerful leaders in the West, and who looks back on her life in fragments, the fame and the glory, the Falklands victory, but not the infamy and the inglorious, or the suffering that her policies inflicted on people in Ireland and mainly the working class in Britain.

To say that Thatcher was controversial would be an understatement. The way she is depicted in the film, mistreating her own ministers, humiliating Geoffrey Howe to such an extent that reportedly he was reduced to tears, is telling of the way she would treat those beyond her circle, beyond her experience, beyond her class.

Ironically, she herself emerged from the lowly, lower middle class, but she had plenty of attitude and ambition, took on the Tory grandees to overcome their resistance to a female leading the party, only later to be ditched by the men in grey suits when she became an electoral liability.

Her policies in Ireland, her obduracy and intransigence, was, of course, responsible for many deaths (and not just the 10 hunger strikers). She was PM during the shoot-to-kill operations, was PM when Pat Finucane was assassinated and when collusion was at its height (to judge by the limited extracts Sir John Stevens was permitted to publish).

For me, the most enjoyable parts of the film, were, surprisingly, those scenes involving Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent) playing the knave, the jester, and sometimes rebuking her for ignoring the home. If that was the ‘real’ him, it was a side we rarely witnessed.

By Danny Morrison.

As the Tory, Lib-Dem coalition are socialising the losses and privatising the gains, to avoid tax the rich transfer ownership of their property offshore.

2012-01-23T11:56:00.000Z

A Land Registry inventory of title deeds, just published, is yet another piece of evidence revealing the hypocrisy of Osborne’s “we’re all in it together” in austerity. What it shows is that in just two central London boroughs the ownership of property worth £88.5bn has been transferred offshore to escape payment of stamp duty and inheritance tax. It is estimated that this costs the Exchequer about £1.7bn a year in tax evaded.

Whilst this is concentrated in the richest areas of London, this tax dodge is now spreading to other cities like Manchester, Derby and Leeds. We are told that money is so tight that the cap on housing benefit and the cutback for families of disabled children must be maintained whilst the super-rich are laughing all the way to their offshore bank.

It’s not as though the government didn’t know about these wheezes and have been surprised by these latest revelations. The truth is they’ve consistently followed a policy of ignoring tax-dodging by rich individuals and big corporations, always preferring to look the other way or, like Nelson, put the telescope to their blind eye.

Dave Hartnett, the head of HMRC, was rumbled letting off Goldman Sachs – the giant vampire squid itself – a huge tax levy in a secret deal. Vodaphone was allowed to walk away with a £6bn tax let-off – why did it require UKUncut to draw this to the nation’s attention? The number of tax inspectors has been reduced, after lobbying from Big Business, by 26% from 99,200 in 2005 to just 73,700 in 2010, and tax collected has correspondingly dropped in the last 3 years from £462bn in 2008 to £436bn in 2010.

This is a case, as everything else with this government (and New Labour as well), of the rich socialising the losses and privatising the gains. The bankers crash the economy, but keep their bonuses, and the rest of the population picks up the tab. The super-rich make stratospheric gains in both wealth and income and then don’t pay their taxes, and the rest of the population have to pay more tax. How long is this country going to go on tamely accepting austerity when, if the super-rich were made to pay their due taxes, there need be no austerity at all?

Michael Meacher.

With its continued demonisation of the sick and disabled the UK Coalition is engaged in the same ideological process which led to the Nazis euthanasia program, with its accompanying defamation of the sick and disabled.

2012-01-23T07:30:00.000Z

Illness as ‘Deviance’, Work as Glittering Salvation

By Gill Thorburn

“The one thing I am absolutely unreservedly and implacably opposed to in all of this is a real world test.” – Chris Grayling, Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, 2011.

An ongoing British government mission of ‘inclusivity’ which has sought to draw into paid employment those previously depicted as ‘excluded’ by conditions of personal circumstance, such as lone mothers, or through lack of ‘skills’ such as NEETS, or to some extent disabled and older claimants, has recently been expanded much further, venturing into territory previously delimited by, and existing under the protection of, certain ‘norms’ – that is the widespread area of sickness and disability. Characteristic of government rhetoric towards an end of ‘including’ the sick and disabled within the work-not-welfare paradigm is the adoption of an ‘abandonment’ discourse when referring to those on long-term health-related benefits (Grayling, quoted in BBC, 2011) – work being posed as their ‘salvation’.

Chris Grayling

It is necessary to concede, first of all, that the right kind of work, with the appropriate support, can contribute to the well-being of those disadvantaged by illness or disability, and afford them at least a share in the positive benefits that accrue to the ‘able-bodied’ from engaging with paid employment. This is particularly in contrast to the poverty level that welfare benefits are set at, it must be added. It is a highly contingent situation, however, and subject to factors beyond their control, such as the concessions employers are willing to make to the irregularities that the physically or mentally impaired worker brings into the workplace, those for whom adaptations or adjustments must be made. Modern employers in a competitive business environment are increasingly disinclined to adapt working conditions to the worker, seeing it as the latter’s responsibility to ‘fit in’ to an established work structure, evidenced in their reported attitude towards young UK adults, perceived as “ill-equipped and poorly prepared to face the working world due to their reluctance to take on menial jobs, especially those involving dirty or monotonous tasks and over-long or anti-social hours” (Learning and Skills Council, 2006). This is also a tacit admission by employers of the adverse conditions that prevail in the modern workplace.

This wave of inclusivity, then, has now broached an area that, until recent times, had embedded within it certain norms, which could be said to be part of a prevailing ‘humane’ discourse around sickness and disability in our society. For instance the revulsion that is held towards the German Third Reich’s euthanistic program, with its accompanying defamation of the sick and disabled, is illustrative of the sense in which that sector of the populace is acknowledged as vulnerable and deserving of support. Intrinsic to this perception is the notion that the ‘forced independence’ on this group of responsibility for their own wellbeing, through the removal of the social support it relies upon on, would be regarded as a cruelty. Further there is a sense of “there but for the grace of god…” which determines the moral values inherent in these shared norms, and a recognition that infirmity is an inevitable consequence of the aging process which touches all. It is in this sense that until recently the place of work in any ‘illness’ discourse has been marginal and tempered by notions of relevant limitations as to its positive effects.

Nazi poster that reads "60,000 Reichsmark is the lifetime cost to the community of this genetic defective. Member of the [German] race, that's your money.

To contravene these established compassionate norms, then, requires a compelling and strongly persuasive argument, one which is capable of overturning common sense conceptions; that work can cause further difficulties for the sick and disabled, or indeed that work has played a significant part in contributing to illness in the first place. Despite these moral inhibitions, this has now been achieved within the context of welfare policy changes around sickness and disability, and it is an argument which has emerged from a very deliberate theoretical and ideological process. This process has led to the embedding into social policy of the simple, abstract idea that “work is always good for you” (no matter what the circumstances), and has provided the ideological foundation for the implementation of the ‘medicalised bureaucracy’ of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), administered by the government’s private sub-contractor, Atos Healthcare. The WCA is constructed as a filtering instrument by which those claiming incapacity for work can be ‘streamed’ into categories of; the “work ready”, those “having some barriers to work” and those who are “unlikely to ever be capable of working”. Increasing evidence is accumulating to the effect that this instrument is failing to be fit for purpose (Harrington, 2010; Royston, 2010; Black Triangle, 2011; After Atos; and countless other blogs, campaigns and personal accounts distributed both across the internet, and out on the street)

Unless of course that purpose is to remove welfare from the sick.

The full article can be read here.

Whose interest are the credit rating agencies serving? Not the 99% that's for sure.

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000Z

Video: Construction workers Rank & File meeting held in Birmingham on the 14.01.12.

2012-01-22T06:00:00.000Z

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons.

2012-01-21T12:59:00.000Z

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lizette, "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a $14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World War, the US has:

- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.

- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century", the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries", wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life". No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things...
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust...

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"

I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

First published on johnpilger.com

Far from allowing six hunger strikers to die, their friends and comrades on the outside were frantically trying to move a mountain of intransigence in Thatcher and her ministers.

2012-01-20T07:00:00.001Z

Richard O’Rawe’s account of the 1981 hunger strike has suffered yet another major blow which might actually finish off once and for all his scandalous accusations.

Recently Brendan Duddy’s archive, which includes his ‘diary’ for the hunger strike, was released and can be read here. Until now, O’Rawe has relied on partial interpretations of Duddy’s archive and British papers taken out of context, and often citing the wrong dates, to shore up his case.

In summary, the documents show the Republican Movement desperately beseeching the British to respond to the prisoners’ conciliatory 4^th July statement right up until hours before Joe McDonnell’s death; that it proposed to the British an honourable way-out involving two statements, one public, one private, with the private statement dealing with the detail and pointing out what would be available to the prisoners if the hunger strike ended immediately.

The archive shows that the British would not budge beyond a certain position.

Interestingly, nowhere in the republican statements does the phrase objecting to ‘the tone’ appear in reference to the British offer, a phrase which O’Rawe has relied on heavily to depict the republican negotiators as callous.

In the ‘Andersonstown News’, O’Rawe was trying to put a spin on Call Number 4 between Duddy and the British, where the British state “that it was important, before drafting any document for consultation by ministers, that we should possess the Provisionals’ views.” O’Rawe was claiming that that must be a reference to his famous “substance of our five demands”, allegedly brought to the jail on Sunday 5^th July by Danny Morrison. However, it is now clear from the detailed exchanges contained in the archive that nothing preceded the calls which would allow O’Rawe to make that claim.

O’Rawe’s argument that Morrison brought in such an offer on the 5^th July now falls. Duddy logs the British offer as having been telephoned to him by the British at 11.30pm, Monday 6^th July.

O’Rawe’s argument that in a letter on the afternoon of Monday 6^th July the Army Council ordered Brendan McFarlane to reject the offer and so allowed six men to die, now falls, because an offer had yet to be delivered.

O’Rawe’s argument that the republican negotiators merely disagreed with the ‘tone’ of the offer, now falls.

We know from the telephone transcripts that it was Duddy who first phoned the British on 4^th July and gave the impression that the Republican Movement had been in contact. He gave the Republican Movement the reverse impression about who initiated the contact. This is substantiated by the bewildering reaction of the republican negotiators when the British refuse to improve upon the Monday night 11.30pm offer, despite republicans believing that they were involved in a process to resolve the hunger strike and save men’s lives.

This is an extract from the republican reply to this offer as contained in the Duddy archive. The reply appears to have been transmitted to the British at 3.30am, Tuesday 7^th July:

“When this present phase of exchanges was initiated we were informed (1) that you sought agreement on a document which would have our endorsement. (2) that you sought agreement on a mutual public position. (3) that your interest centred on the prisoners’ statement of 4^th July 81.”

The republican negotiators, presumably wary of the British reneging on woolly promises, stated: “If it is your intention, as outlined in the Atkins [statement] of June 30^th ‘to improve the prison regime’… on these points (following the ending of the hunger strike) then we and the prisoners need an outline of the specific improvements envisaged by you.

“We also require your attitude to the detailed proposals outlined by the prisoners. Because of this unsatisfactory method of exchanges we request acknowledgement on receipt of this communication from you and request approx time of reply. We also request access to the prisoners.”

The background to these desperate attempts to save lives should not be forgotten. Having refused to engage for 128 days, during which four hunger strikers died, the British on the night of the 6^th July, 1981, gave republicans until 9am the following morning to take or leave an unsatisfactory offer. Just 9 ½ hours.

Sometime in the afternoon of Tuesday 7^th July (Duddy doesn’t note the exact time) the British sent a hard-hitting message, refusing to answer the questions that were asked but stated that (1) they “cannot move from 30^th June principle” (Atkins’ statement which O’Rawe had described as containing “nothing of value”). “(2) Position / Jul (July?) went to the limits that we could do within our prisons. (3) By suggesting we do more the SS (shop stewards – the code name for the republican negotiators) are inviting us to abandon our principles. This we cannot do.”

The British described the republican response as amounting to a rejection, stated that their discussions with the ICJP “have come to an end and they will be no further part in our efforts to resolve the problem”; seem to say that they are sorry if the problem has been exacerbated, and hopes raised through false impressions given by the ICJP; and complain that the republicans abused the channel by telling the ICJP of its existence and this placed the future of the channel in question.

The republicans reply complaining that the British have not answered their previous communication and requesting acknowledgement of receipt of this message. There is no British answer. They send another message at 7pm reminding the British that they were informed that when the exchanges were initiated the British wanted to end the hunger strike and that there would be an agreed statement centred around the prisoners’ position as outlined on 4^th July. They say that the issue can be resolved without loss of principle by any side.

Just hours before the death of Joe McDonnell on Wednesday 8^th July, the British send a reply. We know from the minutes in the state papers that Atkins had agreed with Thatcher that they should send “a draft statement enlarging upon the message of the previous evening but in no way whatever departing from its substance”. In this statement they elaborate upon the issue of work but state that “little advance is possible on association”.

There is a page with 5am as the time it was written. This is tragedy writ large. Duddy notes the reply from the British with regard to the republican proposal for a private document to back up the public one. It says:

“The management (British) cannot contemplate the proposal for two documents set out in your last communication and now therefore the exchanges on this channel to be ended.”

Up the side of this page Duddy has written a comment sometime after 7am: “Joe McDonnell died at seven minutes past five. We first heard it on the 7am news.”

So, far from allowing six hunger strikers to die we can see that their friends and their comrades were frantically trying to move a mountain of intransigence in Thatcher and her ministers.

By Pat Mc Larnon.

Student rejects Magdalen College, Oxford, because it does not meet the standard of the universities she will be considering.

2012-01-20T06:30:00.000Z

Every year, thousands of students are rejected by Oxford university, one of the most elitist and class prejudiced in the world, often receiving the news of their rejection in a pompous if not insulting letter. However, how many times has Oxford been rejected by a student? The answer is at least once, thanks to Elly Nowell. In a twist on the usual application process, she said she had decided to withdraw her bid to read Law at the university after her experience while visiting Magdalen College for her interview.

In a parody of the rejection letters sent by universities like Oxford and Cambridge to unsuccessful applicants, which she posted online, Miss Nowell launched a withering attack on the college whose alumni have included over last two hundred years, most of the UK’s ruling class. Which today include David Cameron and George Osborne, who are currently engaged in a vicious class war in defence of their classes privileges. Like the right of their children to be given preference in British universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

Magdalen was also the college which in 2000 refused a place to Laura Spence, a former comprehensive pupil from a working class background, with five A’s at A-level to her name, in a decision described by Gordon Brown as an "absolute scandal." Laura was quickly snapped up by Harvard, who offered her a £35,000 scholarship to study at the America University.

In her letter to Oxford’s Magdalen College, Elly wrote:

“I have now considered your establishment as a place to read Law.” {Jurisprudence}

I very much regret to inform you that I will be withdrawing my application. I realise you may be disappointed by this decision, but you were in competition with many fantastic universities and following your interview I am afraid you do not quite meet the standard of the universities I will be considering. Should the university wish to reapply,

Her letter continued,

"While you may believe your decision to hold interviews in grand formal settings is inspiring, it allows public school applicants to flourish, and intimidates state school applicants, distorting the academic potential of both."

She also criticized Magdalen College's "traditions and rituals," and the gap between "minorities and white middle class students."

Ms Nowell, of Winchester, Hampshire, told the BBC that the Oxford’s interview process made her feel like:

“The only atheist in a gigantic monastery.”

She also said:

"She only applied to the university to keep her options open but now hopes to be accepted into University College London. It was while I was at interview that I finally noticed that subjecting myself to the judgement of an institution which I fundamentally disagreed with was bizarre."

Ms Nowell's letter politely, but with a slight hint of sarcasm, wished the university "every success" in the future.

A spokesperson for the college confirmed Ms Nowell had rescinded her application and called it a “non-story.”

Nevertheless actions speak louder than words. Oxford's Magdalen College's PR people went out of the way to defend their clients by contacting the BBC, the U.S. TV network, ABC News, the Daily Telegraph, and countless other newspapers and media outlets.

Elly seems to have struck a raw nerves within this elitist establishment. As Private Jones would have said;

“Well done me gal, they don’t like it up em.”

Stop the campaign of terror against Iran and its scientists.

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000Z

Another Iranian Scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, has been assassinated in Iran by a car bomb. This is the fifth Iranian scientist targeted by assassins working in Iran in two years. Four attacks succeeded. This is a deadly escalation of the covert criminal activities conducted by the U.S.A, Israel and their terrorists and domestic spies in Iran against the government and people of Iran.

While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has denied any U.S. involvement, the important and undeniable truth is that the governments of the U.S. and Israel have openly declared Iran as an enemy and have publicly stated that they will use all means necessary, not excluding military attack, to change the Iranian government using Iran’s efforts to produce nuclear energy as an excuse.

The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists is an effort to create fear in the Iranian people, opposition to their own government and monopolize nuclear research and development of nuclear power. The aim is to stop Iran’s drive for industrial and technological independence on which the independence of Iran and the freedom of its people depends.

Those who forget the past are condemned to its repetition. Do we remember the Shah, who ruled Iran for 25 years on behalf of the U.S., had a huge nuclear energy program intended to replace depleted fossil fuels? Do we realize his billions of dollars of arms purchased from the U.S. with wealth of the Iranian people helped fund U.S arms research, development and production that now threaten Iran?

In the decades since the Shah fled, sanctions, sabotage and threats have escalated into dangerous new decisions to send a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier, destroyers and nuclear submarines into the Persian Gulf and impose harsher sanctions on trade, and an oil embargo. All of these threats are threats against peace and violations of international law.

A just society can have no interest in stopping the peaceful progress of other nations and peoples.

No to another war for oil, no to foreign government domination and foreign corporate exploitation of Iran, or any other country.

Ramsey Clark

We urge all who oppose another war of ever greater massive destruction and death to speak out and act in this hour of maximum peril and sign petition here.

Obituary: Janey Buchan; Socialist, working class intellectual, cultural and political activist, local councillor, parliamentarian, and internationalist.

2012-01-19T11:04:00.000Z

The sad death of Janey Buchan at the age of 85 brought back a lot of good memories and provoked a few reflections on the current state of left-wing politics in Scotland and beyond, for Janey and her late husband Norman really did represent the best of a political tradition that has now almost expired.

Theirs was a humane and practical form of socialism founded in the great struggles of their youth – anti-fascism, the plight of a people who had survived the Holocaust, the evil doctrine of apartheid, the advent of nuclear weapons. And through engagement in addressing these issues, it was possible to believe in politics as a transformational force for a better world and our own society.

And how was this to be achieved? For Janey and Norman, political debate was never just about making speeches or votes in parliament. They believed in and endlessly practised the joy of campaigning. They propagated the power of the written word, however humble the publication or pamphlet; the use of humour as the most deadly of all weapons; and above all the power of song in the armoury of activism.

There is not much of that left in what we see around us today. Most of politics has been dragged down to the lowest common denominators of superficialities, sound-bite and spin. The battle of ideas matters a great deal less than who can get their press release out first. And the biggest loser from that deterioration of debate is the Left who must always, in order to succeed, be able to inspire a belief that change and betterment are possible.

Norman, who died in 1990, was in my view, our last real political intellectual with the cultural and political hinterland to justify that description. I remember meeting Sir Ian McKellan on a plane and mentioning that we had a mutual friend in Janey, by then widowed. He recalled how he first met the Buchans when a Royal Shakespeare touring company played a school hall in Johnstone. After the performance, he spoke to the guy stacking the chairs and was impressed to find that it was Norman, the local MP.

That was Norman – the life-long educator and enthusiast. Janey had left school when she was 14 and the couple met through mutual membership of the Young Communist League. They left the Communist Party in 1956 over Hungary, but by then the style of politics their wider commitment to cultural and internationalist politics was already well-honed and they carried it into the Labour Party.

It is my unfashionable thesis that the old CP is in some ways sadly missed, for the intellectual rigour that it instilled in its adherents. The vast majority who passed through it between the 1930s and the 1960s ended their political days elsewhere, many of them as virulent critics of communism, but they never lost their CP training. Wherever they moved on to – generally the Labour Party – they took with them an ability to analyse and to think strategically. That is what has become so dangerously diluted over the years.

My first contact with the Buchans was not particularly propitious. In 1968, protests against the South African rugby tour were met with a range of police reactions around the country. At Murrayfield, some of Edinburgh’s finest removed the identification numbers from their uniforms, to clear the way for handing out beatings to the demonstrators.

I was editor of the student newspaper in Dundee at the time and we produced a special edition, detailing case studies of police misconduct and calling for an inquiry into the affair. Norman was the Scottish Office minister for the police and it was upon him that our opprobrium fell when that demand was, inevitably, refused.

Years later, he told me that he had wanted to have an inquiry but had been persuaded not to by Jim Callaghan, the Home Secretary who had been the parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation. If there had been an inquiry in Scotland, the pressure would have mounted for the same thing to happen in the rest of the UK. Most politicians would have harboured resentments about having the finger pointed in this way. But the Buchans were made of different stuff and were anti-apartheid campaigners to their core.

A short time later, Janey came to Dundee to speak about media ownership, then a hot topic. Probably for the first time, I articulated very hesitantly the idea of starting a radical newspaper in the Highlands, which became the West Highland Free Press.

Janey became one of the great encouragers and supporters of that idea, just as she supported quite literally hundreds of other young people in whatever they wanted to do in pursuit of their political commitment. Be creative, get involved, write songs, keep cuttings… these were the kind of watchwords on which the Buchans thrived.

She was a fantastically generous person. A decade later, I had personal reason to be grateful for that. I was involved in a doomed effort to start a radical weekly newspaper for the whole of Scotland. Most of the copies never got beyond the John Menzies censor. It was Janey and Janey alone, by then an MEP, who bailed the project out and allowed those involved to move on.

Her love of political song was absolute. From Woody Guthrie to Adam MacNaughton, there was no episode in history that could not be turned into a song or a satire. She knew them all. One of her finest memorials was the establishment at Glasgow Caledonian University, based on the Buchans’ enormous collection, of a Centre for the Study of Political Song.

But Janey was not into memorials. There is not even to be a funeral since she has donated her body to medical science. This is probably just as well, since she sent letters to various foes at the time of Norman’s funeral, telling them not to come. The list of those barred from her own would have been enormous, since Janey did not take prisoners.

I will always associate her with one song in particular and I think it was her favourite – the great work of the Dundee jute worker, Mary Brooksbank: “Oh dear me; the world’s ill-divided; them that work the hardest are the least provided…”.

The simplest messages are the most unchanging. The Buchans did more than most to try.

Jane O'Neil Buchan, politician and activist, born 30 April 1926; died 14 January 2012, She is survived by Enoch, Alasdair, four grandchildren and one great-grandson.

By Brian Wilson. (First published here.)

Louise Devine, daughter of hunger-striker Mickey Devine talks about her heartbreaking visits to see her dad in the Maze Prison.

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000Z

Louise Devine, the hunger-striker's daughter talks about her heartbreaking visits to see her dad in the Maze Prison.

The daughter of a H-Block hunger-striker has slammed the Sinn Féin leadership claiming they let her father "die for nothing."

Louise Devine says she's "sickened" that the party top brass allegedly rejected a secret British offer which could have saved the last six hunger-strikers' lives – including her father's.

The claim that a substantial British proposal was on the table – first made by ex-Blanketman Richard O'Rawe – was confirmed by recently released British state papers.

Louise Devine is now demanding an urgent meeting with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and other key republicans who ran the hunger-strike from the outside.

"I want answers. I'm asking them to meet me face-to-face. They owe me that at the very least," she told the Sunday World.

"I was just five-years-old when I watched my daddy die in agony in a H-Block slum. I sat on his bed and he couldn't even see me and my brother because he was blind. I remember the tears running down his face as we left him for the last time."

The Devines are the first family of a dead hunger-striker to denounce the Sinn Féin leadership following recent revelations.

"There's now a mountain of evidence backing Richard O'Rawe's claim that the British made an offer effectively granting four of the prisoners' five demands and that this offer was accepted by the IRA's prison leadership but rejected by the outside leadership," Louise says.

"Had the British proposal been accepted, my father would be alive today. Instead he spent 60 agonising days as his body wasted away on hunger-strike.

"He died for nothing because the British were already willing to meet nearly all the prisoners' demands."

Sinn Féin strongly denies allegations an offer existed which could have saved the men's lives and it unnecessarily prolonged the hunger-strike for electoral gain.

But Louise (35) says she's "beyond anger" at those republicans who reportedly rejected the offer: "How do they live with themselves?

"They knew the suffering the hunger-strikers endured and the filth and squalor in which they lived. They're cold, heartless men."

Mickey Devine, a 27-year-old father of two – know as 'Red Mickey' because of his bright red hair and left-wing politics – was the last of the 10 hunger-strikers to die.

Louise claims Sinn Féin didn't inform her father, nor the INLA of which he was a member, of the secret British offer. "Had daddy known, he would have ended his hunger-strike.

"He was a young man with two children he adored and less than two years left to serve in jail. He'd everything to live for."

Mother-of-five Louise stresses she's "very proud" of her father and his sacrifice: "He died for his comrades. But the knowledge that he didn't need to is destroying me."

She's calling for an independent public inquiry into the hunger-strike: "Sinn Féin demands inquiries into everything that suits them. Let's see if they agree to this."

Louise was just five months' old when her father was arrested for arms' possession in 1977.

"As a baby, the prison officers searched my nappy on visits to Long Kesh.

"When I was older, I hated visiting the jail. The screws were very aggressive to Blanketmen's children." Louise's parents' marriage broke up when her father was in prison but she and her brother continued seeing him.

"When he was on the dirty protest, I was afraid of him at first," she admits. "Here was this skinny, smelly man with a beard wearing an old army blanket – and people told me he was my daddy.

"I cried and threw a tantrum, refusing to sit on his knee during one visit, and he looked so sad."

But Louise says her father did everything possible to reach out to her and her brother, Michael og: "He couldn't buy us presents in jail so he made us hankies. They were all he could give us."

She breaks down in tears as she shows the Sunday World one hankie. On it, her father has drawn Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, the Seven Dwarfs and other cartoon characters. "To Louise and Michael from Daddy," Mickey Devine has lovingly written.

Another hankie shows her father and his comrades with faces like monkeys. "Despite everything he was suffering, he was trying to make his kids laugh. He loved us that much," Louise says.

She remembers, in graphic detail, visiting her dying father in the prison hospital. She was only five-years-old and her brother was eight.

"Daddy was lying in bed, covered in bed sores, and in terrible pain. I climbed onto the bed to be near him and my Aunt Margaret said, 'Get down, you'll hurt him.'

"But daddy said in this wee weak voice you could hardly hear, 'She's all right, let her be.' He was just delighted I wasn't scared of him anymore. He held me close and I was so happy."

But Louise is riddled with guilt too: "I remember somebody feeling sorry for me and giving me a bag of cheese and onion crisps when I was on the bus going to the jail.

"I visited daddy stinking of those crisps. How selfish that was of me when he was starving.

"The prison authorities kept a bowl of fruit by his bed. I longed for the big red shiny apple. I knew not to take it but I feel guilty for even wanting it."

Her last visit to her dying father was heart-breaking: "Daddy's organs were collapsing. There was a terrible smell of his rotting flesh as his body broke down.

"He was blind so he couldn't see me or my brother. We sat beside him and he was told, 'Michael is on your left and Louise is on your right'. He held our hands and then he reached up and felt the shape of our faces.

"I remember his cold, skinny hand on my flesh. He mumbled words to us which I couldn't understand. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. His eyes were half open. As we left, tears streamed down his face.

"Michael and I should have been allowed to stay with him to the end. At his wake, I wouldn't leave his coffin."

The children were woken at 8am on August 20 1981 to be told that their father was dead. They were terrified as the INLA fired shots over his coffin. At the graveside, they threw red roses on his coffin.

The rest of Louise's childhood was "hell", she says: "Michael and I were bullied at school. 'Your daddy rubbed shit on his cell wall', 'Your da starved himself to death', other kids shouted.

"We'd come home crying and not go back to school for a week." On her birthday, first communion and Christmas, she'd envy other children "with their intact families and perfect lives".

Mickey Devine's own life – even before prison – was tragic. When he was 11, his father died of leukaemia. A few years later, he came home to find his mother dead from a massive brain tumour.

"Daddy had no family," says Louise. "I've five children. My wee boy Caolan is the image of his grandfather with his red hair and sense of humour. I just want daddy here now to be part of my family. But we've been robbed of him and he's been robbed of us."

By Suzanne Breen of the Sunday World.

"Why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam." The speech Martin Luther King made at the Ebenezer Baptist church, on April 30, 1967.

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000Z

By introducing ever more self scanning tills,Tesco unable to outsource its checkout staff to India, intend to make their customers do the job themselves.

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000Z

When recently visiting my local Tesco store, I noticed they had removed a row of check out work stations and replaced them with even more self scanning tills. Given we are in a recession with unemployment into the millions, with youngsters being hardest hit. Far from trying to lesson the burden of unemployment, the curse of the modern age, and reducing the pressures customers come under when using these self scanning tills. Tesco have decided to increase the number within their stores.

Make no mistake the only purpose of these tills is to reduce wage bills. It seems stores like Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury, unable to out source to India their in-store staff, have decided to replace their checkout workers by forcing their own customers to do the job themselves; and woe betide us if we make a mistake, for if we do, we may find ourselves up before the beak.

With a healthy bottom line, it is not as if Tesco could not afford to take a little less profit and employ more young people on their checkouts. It is reprehensible that instead, when the country is suffering from high unemployment, they are introducing more of these these self scanning tills, which makes it inevitable they will also be reducing their workforce. The unacceptable face of capitalism is the only way to describe Tesco's behavior.

We have come to expect such behavior from the Banks, oil companies and utility providers of electricity and gas. But from Tesco’s and the other supermarket chains who have come into the heart of our communities, we hoped, perhaps naively, they at least would act more responsibly. It seems not.

It seems making even more workers unemployed is how they intend to repay their loyal workforce, and the communities whose high streets they have helped decimate, In her Observer column, Carole Cadwalladr summed up Tesco’s arrogance towards their employees, customers and the communities they clearly regard as nothing more than a cash cow:

“Congratulations, Tesco. Replacing check-outs with self-scanning tills and CCTV is a means of treating both your employees and your customers with contempt. What a brilliant coup! Remove all human contact, destroy jobs and imply potential criminality in all. Apart from your senior executives, who are simply acting "within the rules".

Poor Tesco. Profits down 16%; £5bn wiped off the value of the company. A packet of cheese and some onions gone mysteriously AWOL from its Henley branch. Oh, how the heart bleeds for chief executive, Phil Clarke, who, after a shareholder rebellion in June last year, was forced to limit his pay packet to a maximum of just £6.9m this year.

For who can't feel a twinge of sympathy in their hearts for the lovable corporate behemoth? Apart from the nation's pig farmers who protested outside Tesco's AGM last year that the supermarket had squeezed them so much, they were now subsidising them to the tune of £10 a pig, perhaps? Or the whales and dolphins that Tesco's subsidiary company in Japan sells as a tasty snack? Or the nation's wind-blasted high streets empty bar the occasional piece of tumbleweed?

Carole goes on to put out, the transnational corporations who have benefited most from 21st century capitalism are little different from the robber barons of the 19th centure who plundered the British Empire and the american west by animating the native tribes and driving the majority of their own populations into abject poverty. Whilst these wreched captains of industry lived in luxury whilst the overwhelming majority lived in hovels and poluted communities.

Carole Cadwalladr goes on:

In fairness, Tesco is simply applying the logic of early 21st-century capitalism. This, as eagle-eyed viewers of The Apprentice know, works roughly like this: take any old crap and then charge as much as you can possibly get away with for it. Or ideally more.

That's capitalism. Just as cutting open women and inserting exploding bags of industrial-grade silicone into their breasts, and charging them handsome sums of money for it, is too. As is sacking all your check-out staff and outsourcing the labour to your customers. Industrial-grade silicone is cheaper than medical grade, after all. And may not cause cancer. And having no staff at all and letting your customers flail helplessly with unauthorised items in the bagging area is significantly cheaper than having lots. So what if breasts explode and shoppers despair? It's simply called increasing your margins.

So who can blame Antony Worrall Thompson who was caught after self-scanning? That was all he was trying to do. The small technicality of the law aside, is there really so much difference?

Worrall Thompson broke the law. But in other circumstances, if he was, say, a limited company and Tesco was, for example, a single mother, from whom he'd successfully managed to make an extra 31p profit, then there'd be no case to answer. Making money out of poor people is what we call "business".

Besides, we expect companies and corporations to rip us off. To overcharge us. To pass off substandard goods if they can get away with it. To pay their chief executives more money than existed in all of ancient Rome and have BBC programmes endorsing the sale of cat food sandwiches as simply sound commercial sense.

Carole seems to think:

It's probably not a good idea to break the law and helping yourself to items from Tesco's deli counter isn't to be recommended. But when the chief operating officer sells his shares eight days before last week's profits warning, netting himself £200,000, isn't that a bit obvious and offensive too?

The company has defended Bob Robbins's actions. Of course. But there are some who say pocketing £200,000 is a greater offence than taking a tub of reduced-for-quick-sale coleslaw. That Phil Clarke's multimillion pound bonus somewhat overshadows the price of a packet of cheese.

Indeed, as too does introducing more of these wretched self scanning tills, whether in Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose, or Sainsbury, they bring absolutely no benefit to customers, indeed the opposite is the case. Perhaps it is time we customers came together and organized a boycott of the worst offending stores; and a campaign to put a spanner in their works. It does not need much ‘creative thinking’ to come up with ways to do just that. Approximately for every self scanning till which is put out of commission, the supermarkets would have to employ on average three new checkout workers.

Worth thinking about, surely?

Mick Hall

Carole Cadwalladr’s article in full can be found here.

Obituary: Rob Windsor; Socialist, internationalist, political activist at local and national level, local councillor, advocate for homeless.

2012-01-18T06:30:00.000Z

Cross-party tributes have been paid to Coventry's well-known former Socialist councillor Rob Windsor following his untimely death, aged 47.

They demonstrated the respect the former St Michael’s councillor earned throughout years of passionate and compassionate campaigning for justice for thousands of people - and helping them individually in his work as a city charity housing adviser.

He died peacefully on Saturday following a liver transplant and six weeks of characteristically battling at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital.

Fellow Socialist Dave Nellist led the tributes as Tory and Labour Coventry councillors including Kevin Foster paid their respects to a “decent” man, while others like Labour’s Ram Lakha recalled his prominent role in Coventry’s fight against Margaret Thatcher’s “poll tax”.

Coun Nellist, who sat alongside then councillor Windsor at the Council House until the latter lost his St Michael’s seat in 2010, said it was the anti-poll tax campaign which first brought Mr Windsor to prominence 25 years ago.

Coun Nellist said his colleague became an acknowledged expert on the legislation which introduced Mrs Thatcher’s community charge in 1990s, and connected laws concerning bailiff powers.

He became a national campaigner on the issue which led to Mrs Thatcher’s downfall as Prime Minister.

In Coventry, Mr Windsor set about advising hundreds of people summoned before the city’s magistrates for non-payment of the “poll tax”, called the Community Charge - which had the principle of charging the same rates for everyone, regardless of income.

He helped many more in his work as an officer for homeless charity Coventry Cyrenians.

He was first elected to Coventry City Council in May 2000 for four years, and again in May 2006 for a second term.

First published here.

Dixie Elliott on why he supports Ricky O'Rawe: I owe it to six brave men who had the courage that I lacked; the courage to die for what they believed in.

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000Z

It was the winter of 1978 and Christmas was about a week away, Big Tom McElwee and myself waited and listened as the screws got closer.

On up the wing locks rattled, doors flung open and we listened as bare feet scurried on the corridor as those before us tried to escape the heavier sounding boots of screws. There was no escape, this was the H-Blocks, we were naked except for a blue towel wrapped around our waists and encased within a concrete hell on earth, officially called H4. There was no escape from the hatred that lined the wing, blocked the way at the grilles and either took physical form in beatings or looked on in white shirted command. The wing shifts and forced washing had begun what was clearly another attempt at breaking us.

That winter was the worst in years, so bad we thought it would surely reach through the broken windows of our cells and that it’s icy touch would claim some unfortunate comrade in the night.

Big Tom waited by the cell door with fists clenched. He had a low tolerance of bullies and he fully intended taking these bastards on. I stood near the window and silently cursed his courage as fear chilled my very bones. Screws moved around outside our cell, it was too soon we thought as there were several cells before us to go yet.

The hatch opened, a set of eyes peered through at us, keys rattled and they were in on top of us; pushing, punching and grabbing at our matted hair. We had been taken by surprise and before we could react we were being run down the wing, through the various sets of grills and across the circle towards a newly cleaned wing. There they waited, the cleaning crew with their tools of torture; ordinary everyday things like a bath, a scrubbing brush, scissors and a mirror. Depending on their sick sense of humour the bath would either be filled with scolding hot or freezing cold water and we would be plunged into it and scrubbed until our skins almost bled. Our hair and beards would be shorn from our heads with the scissors. The mirror was the final act of degradation, we would be forced to stand spread eagled over it, then beaten down until we almost sat on it.

There were two chairs; the plastic type you would find in a waiting room and most definitely not those used by barbers, but that we knew was to be their purpose.

Big Tom stood with defiance in his eyes and his mouth locked in grim determination. I knew what was going to happen next as they tried to force him into the chair. I wrestled with those trying to force me down, a screw was poking me with the scissors. Then Tom drew out and caught a screw with one of his big fists, sending him crashing backwards onto the cold polished floor.

Fuck this I thought, before hitting the screw who had the scissors.

We took a terrible beating from boots and batons; I know that much, but strangely I can remember little else about it. I do remember being flung into the back of a van, naked, like some piece of dead meat. The screws were waiting for us in the punishment blocks where we got another beating.

Later, Big Tom was still defiant as he called to me out the door. I was just too fucking cold and sore to be defiant so I felt sorry for myself.

They starved us as part of the punishment. The Number One Diet, as they called it, consisted of dry bread and black tea for breakfast with watery soup for dinner and the same dry bread and black tea again at tea time.

A ‘Christmas amnesty’ said a screw as they let us go back to the wing on Christmas Eve. The cheers of the lads did nothing to lift my spirits as I followed Big Tom down the wing banging cell doors as he went. Later that night we had the first decent meal in a week - when you’ve been starved anything’s a decent meal. As we ate, somewhere in the distance I heard for a brief moment ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ - Boney M’s Christmas hit of that year. Some screw had decided to remind us that it was indeed Christmas before turning it back off.

From H4 Tom and myself were sent to a wing in H6 along with the Blanket leadership in early 1979, even though we didn’t hold positions of leadership ourselves. This move was an attempt to break the protest by isolating the staff from the bulk of the Blanket men. We were both then moved to H3 later that year when that failed.

Before Tom went on Hunger Strike that summer in 1981 he called me aside at mass one Sunday and slipped me his Rosary beads. He still had that defiant look on his face as he told me to ‘hold on to them.’ I didn’t believe that Tom wouldn’t be back; he was a fighter, a hard man with a big heart.

Big Tom McElwee didn’t return, he died on 8^th August 1981 after 62 days on Hunger Strike. I treasure those battered and worn Rosary beads. I also have what Tom never got to have, a wife and two lovely children.

The Winter of 1978 and the Summer of 1981 had passed the 25^th anniversary mark before I knew it. Life had got better although the memories still lurked in the dark recesses of my mind.

Then Richard O’Rawe wrote a book, Blanketmen, in which he claimed that there was an offer made by the Brits on July 5^th 1981 which could have saved the lives of six men. This couldn’t be true I thought; surely the IRA leadership wouldn’t do this to our comrades for political gain?

Surely not. But why would Ricky say this unless there was some truth in it? I knew Big Ricky, I shared a cell close to him for a while in H3. He was the shoulder that Bik leaned on, the person to whom he relied upon for advice. He knew what Bik knew.

I had a distant memory of a rumour. A rumour only; that the Brits were moving and Joe wouldn’t have to die. Gerry Adams must have over played his hand I thought and as a result Joe McDonnell died, followed by the other lads including Big Tom.

I observed closely as Ricky defiantly stood his ground against abuse. As his name was spread like shit across the media. I heard the lies but they never passed Ricky’s lips. Documents hidden since those dark days not only backed him up but a man who went by the code-name of The Mountain Climber came forward as well as former Blanket comrades.

With each new revelation those calling Ricky a liar lied or remained silent in the face of awkward questions.

I eventually knew that I had to stand behind Big Ricky and face what was coming just as I had to stand behind Big Tom that Christmas week in 1978.

I owed it to six brave men who had the courage that I lacked; the courage to die for what they believed in.

Dixie Elliott

Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the US Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses.

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000Z

So now it's snapshots of US Marines pissing on the Afghan dead. Better, I suppose, than the US soldiers pictured beside the innocent Afghan teenager they fragged back in March of last year. Or the female guard posing with the dead Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Not to mention Haditha or the murder videos taken by US troops in the field – the grenading of an old shepherd by an Iraqi highway comes to mind – or My Lai or the massacre of refugees by US forces in Korea or the murder of Malayan villagers by British troops. Or the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 Catholics by British troops in Derry in 1972. And please note, I have not even mentioned the name of Baha Mousa.

The US Marines' response to the pissing pictures was oh so typical. These men were not abiding by the "core values" of the Marines, we were informed. Same old story. A "rogue" unit, a few "bad apples", rotten eggs. Maybe.

But if there is one game of pissing on the dead, how many others happened without pictures? How many other shepherds got fragged in Iraq? How many other Hadithas have there been? There were plenty of other My Lais.

As laptop filmography gets better, so it all comes slopping out, the rapes and slaughter – and yes, by the Taliban the stoning of young women for supposed sexual misconduct in Afghanistan; by al-Qa'ida, executions and throat-cuttings in Iraq.

And no – the Americans are not the Nazis, the Brits are not the French Paras of 1960 Algeria (but surely we're not comparing the French paras to the Nazis). The Canadians handed prisoners over to Afghan thugs for brutal questioning but the Canadians are not like Saddam's secret police – and, I suppose, the Taliban are not Stalin's NKVD or Putin's KGB (before he became a statesman). And you can't compare – surely – the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in 1979 with Genghis Khan.

So let's take a little guessing game. A British Sunday paper reveals shocking revelations of torture and cigarette burning, of physical brutality where prisoners must be hospitalised for a week, of possible electric torture. The French in Algeria? Saddam's mukhabarat? Nope. It's The Sunday Times Insight Team's report of 7 May 1972; the victims, of course, IRA suspects in Belfast. A "rogue" unit? A "few bad apples"? I doubt it.

When the Gloucestershire Regiment went on a rampage near Divis flats, smashing every window in the street the day before they were due to leave Belfast, the line was changed. They had been under "enormous strain" – but weren't these the "Glorious Gloucesters" of Imjin River fame? And the killer Paras of Derry – weren't these the same Paras of Arnhem Bridge?

And so we go on. Yes, British troops murdered SS prisoners after Normandy – just as the Red Army did in the Second World War and the Americans. And all this gets a bit dull, doesn't it?

Dresden was worse than the Blitz – but who started it? Hiroshima was worse than Pearl Harbour (ditto). The Canadians bayoneted German prisoners in the First World War – but the Germans really did committed atrocities in Belgium in 1914. And what about Waterloo? What did we do with the heaps of French dead? Why, we honoured them by shipping their corpses off to Lincolnshire and using them as manure on the fields of East Anglia.

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.

And how should armies react? With one word: guilty.

Robert Fisk.

First published here.

------------------------------------------------

Desecrating the bodies of the dead in war time is a war crime under international law, yet that is what happened to Gaddafi's body. (Close allies of the West were responsible) One only has to watch the video of the US marine's Bob Fisk writes about, to understand such behaviour by NATO troops has become all to common in Afghanistan. It is pitiful to see that these young men do not even understand they are doing anything wrong, let alone participating in a criminal act. That can only be because their chain of command have never sent orders down the line the dead must be treated with respect. Once politicians and the command structure dehumanises the enemy, atrocities such as urinating on the bodies of dead Afghanis in almost inevitable.

The behaviour of the military command in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been cowardly, failing to accept responsibility when things go wrong, preferring to throw squadies and grunts to the wolf, claiming they are just a small number of rotten apples. Heroes one minute, barbarians the next. Class prejudice is clearly at work here.

MH.

I have not posted the video here for obvious reasons.

If the Thatcher government were serious about the July 5th offer to end the hunger strikes, why did they not then just publish their proposals about clothes, remission, etc.

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000Z

After British government documents were recently released under the thirty year rule, the controversy has re-erupted over the ‘offer’ Margaret Thatcher’s government made in July 1981, in an attempt to end the IRA/INLA hunger strikes, then taking place in the north of Ireland's notorious Maze Prison. This issue first entered the public arena in 2005, when former blanketman Richard O’Rawe published his book Blanket-men, an untold story of the H-block hunger strike. In which he detailed the choreography of the British offer and the response to it by the PIRA's outside leadership.

To put it bluntly, in the book and subsequent newspaper articles, O’Rawe claims the outside leadership by not immediately grabbing the offer with both hands, sacrificed six more hunger strikers to die a dreadful death. Understandably this caused fury within the camp of Gerry Adams, who had dominated the sub committee the PIRA Army Council had set up to oversee the hunger strike.

Despite what we know, I have never believed this is a tragedy which came about by a treacherous act on the part of the republican outside leadership. In the fog of war, due to a host of differing reasons, people make mistakes and take bad or unpalatable decisions. If not directly involved, most of us in the clear light of day recognise this is the price paid for engaging in military conflict. It is the nature of the beast, but that in no way makes such decisions any less traumatic for those who were at there sharp end.

However, amongst all Irish republicans the blanket protest and hunger strikes still have a totemic importance, the more so amongst those who were responsible for overseeing them from the outside, or at the time were political prisoners in the Maze serving time on the blanket.

One of the more interesting pieces of research to come out of the Afghan and Iraq wars, was the reason British squadies gave when asked who they were fighting for when they were engaged in those theatres of war, more often than not they replied;

“Not for Queen and Country that’s for sure, but for my mates who served alongside me.”

I think this could be said about most military conflicts, big or small, loyalty to the group becomes all, and the David and Goliath struggle for political status which took place in the Maze prison was no exception. In many ways this explains the strong feelings ex blanket men have on this issue, we get a taste of this from the article former Blanket-man Dixie Elliot wrote for Organized Rage, and which we will publish here tomorrow. Dixie is clearly very angry about the outside leaderships failure to accept Thatchers offer of 5th July.

Supporters of Gerry Adams and the sub committee have claimed, on being told of the offer through a back channel which was established by British intelligence, Adams had no alternative but to ask for more clarification.

Whilst its true since O’Rawes book was first published, the Adams leadership have handled the blow back which has arisen in a thoughtless and self justifying manner. For example, with or without their knowledge, attempts were made to intimidate O’Rawe into silence, along with any other republicans who put their head above the parapet and spoke up in his defence. It has also not helped that Danny Morrison, whom the Thatcher's government granted special access to go into the Maze on the 5th July 1981, and Bik McFarlane, the prisoners OC at the time, have made statements since O'Rawe's book was published which they later contradicted in subsequent interviews and articles.

Having said this, some on the other side of the argument have hardly helped their cause, especially on the Internet, where they have openly accused Gerry Adams of deliberately allowing six hunger strikers to go to their deaths on a will of a wisp hope the National H-Block/Armagh Committee would generate enough popular support to enable SF to build a solid electoral base in the north and 26 Counties.

Whatever the fine detail of this issue, and I should say I consider Richard O’Rawe’s book to be a fine piece of work, and by publishing it he acted not out of self interest as he has been accused by some, but in defence of his former comrades, who are no longer alive to speak up for themselves. There may also have been an element of survivors guilt at work, but I stress that is only supposition on my part.

Nevertheless despite his honourable intentions, I do feel Richard overlooks the fact the Adams sub-committee had a major hurdle to cross were they to recommend the acceptance of the proposed ‘offer,’ without first receiving from the British government public confirmation of what it contained.

The misinformation the Provo's put out in 1980 about the British government renegading on an offer they made to Brendan Hughes, which resulted in him calling off the first hunger strike. The reality being there was no offer, Hughes called the first hunger strike off for humanitarian reasons, there was no offer for the British government to renegade on. (Sadly it seems the British government acted astutely by keeping quiet about this, presumably because they thought it might come in handy one day)

That this 'misinformation' was believed by both a majority of their members and supporters and still is by many today. Must have made the Provisional's and the hunger strikers supporters in 1981, doubly sensitive about Thatchers true intentions. I doubt it is an exaggeration to suggest at this time paranoia would have been the group think of the Provo leadership and its core support base.

Having said this, it does seem to me if the Thatcher government were serious about the July 5th 'offer,' why did they not then just publish their proposals about clothes, remission, etc and be done with it. After all it was the regime they eventually introduced in the Maze after the hunger strikes were eventually called off.

If they had done this, it would have given confidence to those within the Republican leadership who supported calling off the H/S, plus a peg on which to hang their argument. Instead when the Adams leadership failed to come through immediately by calling the H/S off, asking for more clarification, Thatcher withdrew the offer and reverted to a policy of victory at any cost. A decision which by the time the hunger strikes finally ended, led in total to 61 people being killed, 34 of them civilians, and six more Hunger Strikers.

I have heard some people who were not directly involved at the time, ask why does all this matter, why not leave it to the historians. I would just add this, the 5th of July offer, no matter how fleeting it turned out to be, proved Thatcher was for turning, and could be forced to respond positively to mass protest and brave men acting individually and as a group.

If things had turned out differently and the Hunger Strikes had ended with only four dead hunger strikers; and a partial victory for the Blanket-men. Thatcher may have been less emboldened and determined to defeat the British Miners and the trade union movement as a whole. Whose defeat proved disastrous for progressive politics within the UK, and I would add the 26 counties in its wake. Both nations became neo-liberal, low waged, non manufacturing, casino based economies in which organised labour was regarded as an anathema, as was collective bargaining and political, media and business elites were allowed to plunder at will at the expense of the majority of citizens.

Proving the lady was for turning; would have placed a powerful weapon into the hands of those who opposed such wretchedness. Sadly it was not to be.

The Haitian Earthquake Gold Rush: Where did the money go?

2012-01-16T06:00:00.000Z

Cartoons of the week.

2012-01-13T08:00:00.000Z

"The Secret To How Our Society's Owners Get Away With Everything

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000Z

How about a wealth tax on those who’ve made massive financial gains at the expense of the rest of us?

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000Z

It is astonishing that sado-masochism, so beloved of the English upper classes in their sexual antics, is so infectious in the Labour Party, albeit in a very different context. There seems to be an obsession in some sections of the party that once the Tories go down the route of self-destructive austerity, we must at least match them or even preferably out-austerity them – self-flagellation in true Lutheran style – in order to prove our ‘credibility’ or to display ‘realism’.

The Guardian, or at least the Blairite wing of its political journalists, is intent on pursuing this line for all they’re worth, whilst giving no coverage whatever to the alternative view which makes much more sense. Now we’re told that Gavin Kelly, chief exec of the reputable Resolution Foundation, is saying Labour must face the facts on future spending. To that I say, bring it on. Let’s start by looking at the true picture.

The whole debate is conducted, unquestioningly, on the basis that there’s no money available – it’s all just a matter of how much spending is cut and where. Now nobody is suggesting that all public spending should be automatically protected and no cuts be made at all: of course it’s sensible continually to review public expenditure regularly to make sure it’s all providing the best value for money, and if not, either cut it or spend it differently. But that’s completely different from making slashing cuts when there are far better economic alternatives available.

It’s really bizarre that such a consensus about huge blanket cuts has been rigged up as though three crucial facts didn’t exist. One is that the government is spending £8-10bn keeping every million persons on the dole – that’s about £23.75bn a year keeping the present 2.64 million persons unemployed. That is not a sensible way of spending public money. The same amount of money, no borrowing, should be used to fund their employment building houses which are desperately needed, improving transport and energy infrastructure, and starting to build the green economy.

Second, the government is about to print another £75bn in so-called credit easing and giving it to the banks or big corporations. That is also not a good way of spending money when much of it, or even most of it, will end up in offshore speculation or tax havens. Far better for the government itself directly to use £20bn of that (or more) creating a million jobs in the priority sectors above.

Third, the 1,000 wealthiest super-rich (just 1,000 persons, only 0.003% of the population!) according to the Rich List have increased their wealth since 1997 by £296bn, enough to pay off the entire budget deficit twice over. How about a wealth tax on these lucky persons who’ve made such colossal gains at the expense of the rest of us, which could well raise £50bn over the next 5 years? A rather better way of conducting the public accounts than slashing the budgets for the NHS, schools and universities, housing, social welfare, and benefits for the disabled.

Michael Meacher.

First published here.

Obituary: Mary McLennan; Community and political activists, member of CPGB, life time partner of Gordon McLennan.

2012-01-12T05:30:00.000Z

Growing up amid poverty during the 1930s in the Gorbals area of Glasgow led Mary McLennan, who has died aged 84, to develop a strong sense of injustice and political awareness which fuelled her desire to change the world. She shared this passion with Gordon McLennan, the former head of the Communist party of Great Britain, whom she married in 1950.

She was born Mary Reid into a loving family and relished the freedom of her childhood, playing in the street without the constant supervision of adults. In later life, she appreciated the work of the painter Joan Eardley, partly because it brought back to her those early days of children's street songs and games.

After she had moved to Brixton, south London, in the 1960s, Mary became recognised as a community and political activist with a singing voice that could melt the coldest of hearts. Her duets of Robert Burns's songs at the annual Hogmanay events and at Burns suppers in Lambeth town hall were legendary. Her sense of herself as a Scot never waned; she never lost her Scottish accent and was known as "Mrs Scot" by the local Rastas on the corner.

Largely self-taught, Mary displayed a keen love of learning until the end of her life. She was open-minded and did not seem to be constrained by social mores. Her influence continues down the generations. As her granddaughter, Nancy, said: "We looked to her as our compass."

Gordon died in May last year. Mary is survived by her three sons, Gregor, Tom and John, a daughter Frances, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Written by Francis McLennan.

Did 300 Workers at Foxconn, China, Xbox 360 factory threaten Mass Suicide?

2012-01-11T16:39:00.000Z

Three hundred Chinese factory workers who manufacture Microsoft Xbox 360s threatened mass suicide last week, according to unconfirmed reports.

The Foxconn employees threatened to throw themselves off of a factory roof due to a payment dispute, according to Record China and Want China Times. According to these reports, the incident began when employees asked for raises on Jan. 2 and were asked to either quit with compensation or keep their jobs without a raise.

Most of them chose to quit, but did not receive the promised compensation.

Microsoft could not confirm whether the mass suicide incident took place at Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan, China. A spokesperson declined to confirm whether the factory is even a manufacturer of Xbox 360s, saying that the company does not disclose which specific products are manufactured by which suppliers.

“Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously, and we are currently investigating this issue,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Mashable. “We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge.

“Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors, and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy.”

Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, counts Apple, Dell and HP among its clients — most famously producing the iPhone. But despite the employee talent shows, sports tournaments and training programs in its promotional material [PDF], the company has a lousy track record when it comes to employee suicide. Wired calculated in its March 2011 issue that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past five years.

Some of Foxconn’s factories are surrounded by anti-suicide nets, and employees have reportedly been asked to sign a “no suicide” pact. After interviewing 120 Foxconn workers, authors of a May 2011 report [PDF] by Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour found significant instances of labor abuse at the factories.

“Workers always have excessive and forced overtime in order to gain a higher wage,” says the report. “Workers are exposed to dust from construction site and shop floor without adequate protection. Even worse, they are threatened by potential harm of occupational diseases in various departments. Additionally, military-styled management is still in practice, characterized by ‘military training’ for new workers.”

In June 2011, Apple sent its then-COO Tim Cook and a team of independent suicide prevention experts to review Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen. According to an Apple report released in February 2011: “The investigation found that Foxconn’s response [to the suicides] had definitely saved lives.”

If the current reports are true, however, the response may not have been enough.

Graphic courtesy M.I.C. Gadget

First published here.

Occupy Wall St to occupy vacant houses across USA.

2012-01-11T13:24:00.000Z