Stop the War: Stop St Athan

Permanent Revolution’s resolution on St Athan was overwhelmingly carried at the Stop the War conference on Saturday 27 October. Now we must make sure that this is no paper victory, and that the Stop the War committee start pouring real forces into the campaign to stop the murder academy.

No attack on Iran – lobby the Welsh Assembly!

With Iran under increasing threat of air strikes, Cardiff Stop the War coalition are calling for a commitment from Welsh AMs to oppose any such attack. On Tuesday 6 November there will be an all-day lobby of the Assembly in Cardiff Bay, with a rally at 12.30. Details of this and a meeting the following day featuring Andrew Murray, chair of STWC, are on our ‘What’s happening’ page.

Benn backs St Athan campaign

Tony Benn has given his backing to the campaign against the St Athan school of death. Adding his name to the campaign’s petition, he wrote:

“The privatization of war is part of the neo-liberal commitment to profit and those who make the most money from war are the arms manufacturers. We must take a stand against mercenaries who have no responsibility to any elected governments.”

You can sign the e-petition against St Athan at http://www.cynefinywerin.org.uk/index.php?docid=281

SWP block Stop the War support for St Athans campaign

The campaign to stop the school of death at St Athan received a minor setback last night when SWP members and supporters ensured Cardiff Stop The War Coalition rejected our resolution for the STW conference.

The resolution is already on the conference agenda and is supported by the FE sector of Wales UCU (see below), but support from Cardiff STW would clearly have increased its chances of success.

Last night’s meeting indicated, however, that both the SWP and its partners in the UK leadership of STW, the CPB (Communist Party of Britain), will oppose the coalition taking up the fight against the St Athan super-academy.

This may surprise some people. After all, the proposed school of death, besides being an obscenity in itself, will be one of the world’s prime sites for training armed forces for the “War on Terror” which it is STW’s stated mission to oppose.

However, SWP speakers claimed that backing the St Athan campaign could threaten the wide support the coalition enjoys.

It is an argument which, in different forms, we have heard from the SWP for over thirty years: in their view you cannot build a mass campaign if you threaten the central ideas that legitimate capitalist rule: the need for immigration controls, for example, or the illusion that ‘our boys and girls’ in the armed forces are essentially a benevolent force acting in our interests who are occasionally led into an unwise war.

Consequently, while seven years of STW have eroded confidence in the Labour government and put pressure on them to withdraw forces form Iraq, the coalition has failed to alter perceptions of British imperialism and its military servants.

During that time, at the behest of the SWP, the supposed clear focus of STW has changed several times, from a campaign against war in Afghanistan, to a campaign against war in Iraq, and now a catch-all campaign against the War on Terror. In order to keep its clear focus its leaders refused to carry out a decision of the 2nd People’s Assembly – motivated by a Cardiff PR member- to set up anticapitalist social forums.  At the same time the STW website had a link to the SWP’s anticapitalist front Globalise Resistance.  The need for a clear  focus, moreover, has not prevented the coalition adding the fight for a free Palestine to its aims, nor the fight against a racist backlash from the Iraq war, nor the fight for civil liberties – an issue which covers a multitude of struggles, many of them potentially divisive.

PR are not opposed to STW taking on these issues. But then why not take on the massive issue of St Athan which is inextricably linked both to the prosecution of future invasions, the repression of dissent and the inflammation of racism?

PR are not interested in token protest or building small sectarian campaigns. We want to see a mass Stop The War movement, but not one whose hands are tied by the fear of taking on the hard arguments.

Wales lecturers support St Athan campaign

Last weekend Cardiff PR supporters took our resolution on St Athan (see below) to Wales FESC (Further Education Sector Committee) and won resounding support for it. Wales FESC, part of the new union for lecturers UCU, will now back the resolution at the upcoming Stop The War conference.

The proposed super-academy represents, among other things, an insidious development in the privatisation of education and training. Among the arms merchants and ex-MOD insiders of the Metrix consortium which will run the academy is that great British institution the Open University.

A resolution on St Athan we’re taking to Stop The War conference

Cardiff Stop The War Coalition meets this Thurs, 18 Oct, 7.15, Mackintosh Institute, Roath. PR supporters will be proposing the following motion to go forward to the UK conference on 27 Oct – come and give your support if you oppose the Academy of Death (see article below).

 

Resolution on the St Athan Military Academy

This coalition notes:

The MOD’s decision to both centralise and privatise its training at a new complex at RAF St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan, to open fully in 2013.

The award of a £14bn government contract for this to the Metrix consortium, involving among others Qinetiq, a privatised wing of the MOD led by ex-MOD John Chisholm, and Raytheon, manufacturer of the cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons that have killed and maimed civilians in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.

The lack of public consultation on the project and lack of criticism or even debate in the mass media, or from supposedly anti-war MPs Welsh AMs, or the Welsh TUC.

 

This coalition believes:

That the new complex, on a scale hitherto unseen in the UK, will be the site of training of all branches of the armed forces for the “War on Terror”; in other words, for further war on the nations of the Global South and for the suppression of protest and civil liberties in the UK and throughout the world.

That the complex will represent a significant militarisation of the Welsh economy with a major impact on the lives of South Wales residents.

That the Welsh Assembly government has sold this package on the promise of jobs for South Wales, but (a) most jobs at St Athan will involve the redeployment of skilled workers and teachers from elsewhere, leaving low-paid unskilled work for the local labour force, and (b) the closure of training centres throughout the UK will actually lead to greater unemployment overall.

That it is contradictory to oppose imperialist wars, or the assault on civil liberties, if we do not equally oppose the training for these under the pretext of our ‘defence’.

 

This coalition resolves:

To oppose the creation of the St Athan academy.

To organise a mass protest at the site of the academy and to facilitate events throughout the UK educating people about the reality of the academy.

To win the support of trade unions, student unions and activist groups in building an international campaign; to call on MPs, MEPs and AMs to support this.

To call on the UK government to solve the problem of unemployment in South Wales and areas affected by MOD closures by instead investing in socially useful jobs in health, education, construction etc, and the development of peaceful and environmentally friendly technology.

Proposed by Permanent Revolution

 

 

Wales Does Not Need The St Athan Death Academy!

 

In an appearance on Question Time earlier this year, Wales’ First Minister Rhodri Morgan endured public humiliation as he refused to utter a word on the subject of Iraq. Now, with the award of a potential £14bn government contract to RAF St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan, perhaps we know the reason for his silence. The contract, for a defence training academy, is the largest single award ever made by a government to Wales – or more precisely, to the public-private partnership between the Metrix consortium and the Welsh Assembly, which owns the land on which the academy will be built.

The new complex, effectively a university of the armed forces, results from an MOD decision to centralise its training. St Athan had been in competition with RAF Cosford in the West Midlands for the right to deliver ‘Package 1′: courses in Aeronautical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Communications and Information Systems. There is a strong possibility Metrix will also win the contract to deliver ‘Package 2′: Logistics and Personnel Administration, MOD Police and Guarding and Security, Languages, Intelligence and Photography. According to government propaganda, 4000 jobs have already been guaranteed at St Athan as a result of the contract award; with Package 2 this will rise to 5,500.

It is not hard to see why the government favoured the St Athan bid. Leaving aside the role of Qinetiq (see below), Labour’s popularity in Wales has plummeted. When the deal was announced Morgan led a minority administration at the Welsh Assembly, with the prospect of more seats falling to the Tories in the May elections – one key marginal being the Vale of Glamorgan. Local resentment had been intense since the collapse of a promised 6000-job LG electronics factory and the failure of the MoD’s last project at St Athan – the Red Dragon ’super-hangar’, which turned into an embarrassing white elephant.

Indeed, many of the new jobs at St Athan will merely involve the reemployment of aerospace engineers and other skilled workers made redundant by the withdrawal of work on Harriers and Tornados. Aerospace workers are in any case in short supply worldwide; most of these highly-paid labour aristocrats will merely be moving back to Wales from contracts elsewhere. It is also inevitable that companies involved in the bid will seek to bring in their own staff. The ‘new jobs for Wales’ are likely to involve a host of poorly paid cleaners, catering workers and other support staff. And as for the idea that the spin-offs will solve the problems of the South Wales valleys (as Rhondda MP Chris Bryant has claimed), it should be pointed out that St Athan had 15000 students back in the 80s – did this prevent the decimation of the valleys following the defeat of the Miners Strike?

In any case, amid all the media-led euphoria about new jobs for Wales, one small matter seems to have been forgotten: the purpose of this new institution. As Metrix puts it: “Over the next 30 years the UK will deploy new capabilities and must possess the ability to deliver the appropriate effects to defeat rapidly evolving and asymmetrical threats.”

Those puzzled by this arcane terminology may be helped by the Unspeak’s definition of “asymmetric warfare”: “the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at” (www.unspeak.net). In other words, the St Athans academy will prepare its students for the ‘war on terror’. They will graduate to maim or help maim the children of the Middle East and other areas impoverished by globalisation and vital to the interests of the multinationals. They will increasingly be involved in battling the ‘enemy within’ – people who disagree with the merciless project of modern capitalism.

The Metrix consortium involves some choice players in the ‘War on Terror’: Raytheon, for example, the US arms giant, who have developed amongst their murderous arsenal the Silent Guardian, a “directed energy application that employs millimeter wave technology to repel individuals or crowds”. Then there is Qinetiq, privatised arm of the MOD, led by ex-MOD man Sir John Chisholm, which has developed a device for detecting asylum seekers, and enjoys a close working relationship with the department which hands out huge sums of public money to the private sector. Due to its guaranteed income from MOD test ranges it has taken over, Qinetiq is already a licence to print money. Now its fat cats will be able to afford even more luxuries at our expense.

It was a Labour government which privatised part of the MOD, and it is strange how Labour opponents of the unpopular war in Iraq fail to make the connection with the proposed University of Death at St Athan. Julie Morgan, Rhodri’s wife and Cardiff North MP, for example, was one of the rebels who voted against the war. Yet she has been outspoken in her support for the retention of aerospace jobs at St Athan. Indeed, not one rebel MP has spoken against the academy project or the vast budget it will entail. Nor, needless to say, have any of the local media. Despite the overwhelming opposition of people in the UK to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, BBC Wales acted as it always does when discussing the UK armed forces: no more critically than a government broadcaster in a totalitarian state.

Whereas the Cosford bid could only appeal to local interests, the Welsh media and politicians have been able to employ a more powerful propaganda tool: the appeal to nationalism. The competition between the two bases for the academy has been turned into a battle for Welsh pride every bit as intense as a Wales-England rugby match. The public-private partnership promoted by that well-known opponent of PFIs, Rhodri Morgan, was known as ‘Team Wales’. The successful bid, according to Morgan, shows that “Wales delivers”. Morgan, an avowed socialist, now crows from the rooftops about how the rest of the world will be ‘green with envy’ at Wales’s success.

Leaving aside the fact that the vast majority of Welsh workers will gain nothing from the St Athan development, Morgan’s trajectory is an object lesson in how moves to devolution in the UK, far from promoting socialism, are erecting barriers between workers and diluting class consciousness. To celebrate the success of one group of workers at the expense of another is an obscenity. Would Morgan have crowed so loudly if Welsh pits had been spared in 1985 at the expense of all the mines in Scotland and England? Welsh workers have a proud history of internationalism, involving countless acts of selfless solidarity, including the defence of the Spanish republic against Franco. Now they are being encouraged to cheer the success of multi-millionaire defence contractors dedicated to bombing third-world countries back to the Stone Age – all in the name of Welsh pride.

The majority of the Welsh people have never voted for devolution. Barely a quarter voted for the Welsh Assembly, and in the cities of the south east, where workers are concentrated, they voted against. Welsh members of Permanent Revolution voted with them – against the entire left who were happy to climb onto the nationalist bandwagon. While we recognise any nation’s right to self-determination (provided this does not involve the oppression of another national minority), we do not advocate separatism when it will only serve to derail the class struggle. We predicted at the time of the Assembly referendum that the drive to nationalism in the UK would only benefit the bosses. Increasingly we are being proved right.

Our opposition to devolution does not mean we do not wholeheartedly support the defence of the Welsh language, or that we are opposed to the fight for greater democracy – far from it. But this struggle needs to be taken up at every level of society, from workplaces, to housing estates, to local and national government. It is a fight not against other nations, but against the profiteers who control our lives – profiteers epitomised by the Metrix consortium.

A fundamental aspect of that fight is the struggle against privatisation and for control of how our taxes are spent. If £14 billion is available for a Death Academy from the bottomless pot of defence spending, why are schools throughout Wales and the UK under threat of closure? Why are students subject to an ever-increasing mountain of loan debt? Why is there a desperate shortage of decent public housing? If the workers of Wales need jobs, there is no shortage of vital work to be done in building the communities, publicly-owned industries and public services we need. If Rhodri Morgan was any kind of socialist he would be fighting for jobs which serve our needs, not the gravy train of murder.