Police crack down hard as St Athan demo finally awakens mass media

Protesters were banned from marching through Cardiff city centre today as police invoked the public order act to minimise the visibility of the demonstration against the St Athan military academy.

Clearly acting on orders from high up the political food chain, police also insisted that written applications would be needed for further protests and threatened march organisers with arrest if anything untoward should happen at the event.

The pretext for the clampdown was that police intelligence suggested that disruptive elements were targetting the march. Perhaps we should take heart that police “intelligence” proved to be so resoundingly mistaken. Far more likely however is that the MoD and Welsh political establishment feared a movement which threatened the military-industrial complex they are building and the huge sum of money the stinking war profiteers and their allies are trousering through a scheme which will undoubtedly attract mass opposition once people get wind of what really is happening.

It that sense today’s march was a great success. Finally elements of the mass media, including Red Dragon Radio, the BBC and HTV Wales have allowed anti-military academy arguments to be aired. Although the march, routed round the back streets of Cardiff to the OU building on Custom House Street, was seen by virtually no-one, hundreds of thousands will have heard its message: no public money for war criminals!

The rally at the end of the march, which attracted exactly the kind of enthusiastic young audience PR have argued the campaign needs, was addressed by Davy McAuley of the Raytheon 9 (see previous articles), whose rousing speech was followed by that of Wales’ only openly anti-St Athan full-time politician, Jill Evans. Following our criticisms it was heartwarming to see Leanne Wood AM also on the march, and we confidently expect other councillors, AMs and MPs to break cover in the coming months.

The build-up for the march has been an excellent example of left unity, with South Wales anarchists, Cardiff PR, the SWP and others working together harmoniously. Now we must take that forward. The campaign meets this Tuesday, 29 April, 6.30pm at the Temple of Peace. If you care about the future of Wales, be there.

HTV news report is here.

Raytheon 9 activist to speak at anti-St Athan rally

With reports suggesting this Saturday’s anti-St Athan march will be larger than expected, an activist from the Derry-based Raytheon 9 campaign is due to speak at the closing rally. The Raytheon 9 are currently facing trial following their excursion into Raytheon’s offices in Derry in protest against the arms giant’s involvement in multiple atrocities.

Raytheon, for those still unaware, are part of the Metrix consortium who will build and run the military academy at St Athan through the glorified HP agreement known as PFI, for which we will all eventually pay.

Other speakers include Jill Evans MEP, the only professional politician in Wales to oppose the project, despite being left to hang by her party, Plaid Cymru, who at the first test of office have sacrificed any credibility as a left alternative; even the most left wing of its elected members, Adam Price MP and Leanne Wood AM, have baulked at opposing a scheme which they suppose to be a vote-winner.

Anti-St Athan campaigners on the ground are reporting that this in any case may be an illusion. The groundswell of opposition to the giant academy extends well beyond pacifist, socialist and anarchist groups, particularly in the local areas most affected by the expected influx of squaddies from half the world’s armies.

That opposition will surely grow once the strength of feeling against St Athan makes itself felt this Saturday. The demonstration will be hard to ignore – even by the post-Hutton BBC with its paranoia at being seen as anti-war and its comfortable business relationship with Land Services Trillium, the property outsourcing group who are building its new centres and who also happen to be fully paid-up partners in the Metrix consortium.

Volunteers are still needed for various tasks on the day. If you can help out, email us.

An updated leaflet advertising the next campaign meeting on 29 April can be downloaded from our resources page.

Lecturers’ strike – eye-witness account

Pauline Atienza of Cardiff PR, secretary of Wales UCU FE section, sent the following report from today’s action:

“I have just returned from a very successful lobby at the Senedd. About 250 lecturers from colleges across Wales were at the lobby having left their comrades on the picket lines at the colleges. The strike is solid across the country.

At Rhondda college pickets discovered that there was a police training event happening. Two uniformed police officers agreed not to cross the picket line! Their inspector was not happy!

At another college one of the managers was so infuriated by the picket line that he drove off in a huff and crashed his car into another vehicle. That will be an interesting insurance claim!

This has been a good start to the action. Pressure on fforwm (the principals’ organisation) and the college principals will be maintained through refusal to participate in any work which relates to ‘quality’. This is an area crucial to college managers in their claims for funding. Hopefully college managements across Wales will recognise that they cannot get away with destroying the all-Wales pay agreement and will finally honour the deal.

Even Deputy Minster for Skills John Griffiths addressed the gathering and expressed the WAG’s commitment to the all-Wales pay agreement which principals are trying hard to scupper.

One thing is for sure. We are ready to take further strike action if management continue to renege on the agreement.”

Wales FE lecturers strike over pay betrayal

Lecturers in every Welsh FE college will strike for one day on Wednesday April 16. The dispute has been called by the lecturers’ union UCU following the failure of last ditch talks at which the college employers’ organisation, fforwm, would not guarantee to fully implement a new national pay structure finalised only 12 months ago.

On the strike day, FE lecturers from all over Wales will picket colleges from 8.30am and hold a rally at the Senedd (Welsh Assembly building) in Cardiff at 11.30am.

UCU members in Welsh colleges voted in a recent ballot by 72% in favour of a programme of strike action and 90% in favour of withdrawal from key duties associated with college quality management. Lecturers were balloted following fforwm’s refusal to implement a significant step in the new pay structure, which should have seen experienced lecturers progressing to the top of their new pay scale this month.

UCU representatives and representatives of fforwm met with the Wales Assembly Government (WAG) minister responsible for FE, John Griffiths, in a final attempt to resolve the dispute on April 7th. Some limited progress was made. However the employers refused to implement salary progression from April and would give no assurances that they would adhere to the new national agreement in every college in the future.

UCU Wales official Margaret Phelan said:

“The principle has been accepted in Wales that lecturers should be paid the same as school teachers. UCU signed a national agreement on this with the employers, in good faith, and we expect it to be fully implemented. The funding has been provided by the Welsh Assembly Government and colleges should be paying up. I now urge UCU members to give maximum support to the planned industrial action. The union will do everything it can to bring about a fair and swift solution.”

UCU Wales FE Chair, Guy Stoate said:

“The ballot majorities in favour of action indicate the extent of anger and concern amongst ordinary lecturers. FE lecturers do not take action lightly. This is the first national FE strike in Wales for almost a decade. We will certainly do all we can to minimise the impact on students. However the employers are seeking to undermine a national agreement that not only restores fair pay to FE lecturers but also directly benefits students by promoting excellent professional practice. That is why UCU will take whatever action is necessary to defend the agreement.”

Pauline Atienza, Cardiff PR member and secretary of UCU Wales FE section said the following:  “Management is clearly trying to scupper the all-Wales agreement and go back to college by college pay bargaining.  This strike is a strike to save that agreement”.

For further details contact us at cardiffpr@yahoo.co.uk

As demo day approaches, let’s get the St Athan arguments right!

While the campaign against the privatised military academy at St Athan has been steadily growing, it has yet to register on the radar of the mass media. That will hopefully change after the demo in Cardiff on April 26th, which now features on the Stop The War homepage and looks set to pull in a big crowd. With increased media scrutiny, however, it is vital that campaigners get their facts right and are prepared for the arguments which our enemies will undoubtedly raise.

Cardiff PR were not involved in the statement of opposition originally drawn up by the campaign, but if we had been we would certainly have counselled against building the romantic illusion that Wales is uniquely pacifist as a nation. Wales, whether we like it or not, has been successfully integrated into the British imperialist military machine, not only through the involvement of Welsh regiments in the armed forces and Welsh politicians in sending troops to war, but also in the supply of essential goods to the armed forces: the British navy was once dependent on the high-quality steam coal which was the source of the Rhondda’s prosperity.

That does not mean there has not been opposition to this integration. The campaign against St Athan has a notable precedent in the campaign to prevent the siting of a bombing school on the Llyn peninsular in 1936. And the bravery of Welsh miners fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, while the UK government was covertly supporting him, should never be forgotten.

Our role is to build on this tradition of opposition. However, the campaign against St Athan must not become a NIMBY campaign, but a campaign against privatisation full stop, and beyond that a campaign against public money being spent in the preparation of future invasions that the majority of people in Wales and the rest of the UK do not want. That is why, as we have argued before, we should defend the right of MoD workers to full employment and retraining if necessary, but we should not be arguing in defence of the existing training centres.

Of course we will be attacked for being pacifists (which Cardiff PR and many other activists certainly are not) and risking the defence of Wales and the rest of the UK. We have already dealt with this argument. The wars currently being waged by the UK military have nothing to do with our defence – in fact they have undermined our safety. No-one should accept the huge sums of money being poured into “defence” without a full and open public enquiry into this expense, run not by government with its vested interests, but by workers’ organisations.

It is important for us to also be clear on what a PFI project entails. PFI (now called PPP, or private-public partnership because of PFI’s unpopularity) is a scheme whereby private businesses pay for the building and running costs of an institution which government then rents back through regular payments over 25 or more years. PFIs offer the illusion that governments are spending less money when in fact they are spending more, since they have to subsidise the profits of the privateers, all the more so since businesses pay far higher interest on loans than governments do. Furthermore, if a PFI project gets into difficulties, it is down to government to bail it out.

One reason PFIs are so unpopular is that the supposed superior efficiency of the business model is achieved through cutting labour costs to the bone: every single PFI has involved redundancies and the employment of workers on minimal wages with minimal rights. A recent Guardian/ICM poll showed that two-thirds of people questioned favoured an immediate moratorium on PFI projects. And it should not be forgotten, as the likes of Rhodri Morgan praise the “Team Wales” PPP, that Labour originally came to power on a promise to end all PFIs.

A recent email purporting to be from the Cardiff Stop The War Coalition, besides unilaterally redefining what the 26th demo is about, claims that St Athan will be the UK’s “School of the Americas”. We should avoid such lazy comparisons. The School of the Americas was founded with the explicit intent of brainwashing South American military leaders and producing rabid anti-communists such as Pinochet. While it is certainly true that the products of St Athan will take part in reactionary wars and the repression of left dissent, the purpose of the academy will be to train students in aeronautical engineering, electro-mechanical engineering, and communications and information systems. Senior military officers will oversee the privatised training – they are not the object of it.

Of course, the original plan was for much more training to take place at St Athan. That was before the government backtracked on “Package 2″, claiming that the Metrix bid did not represent sufficient “value for money” – a significant climb-down from the drive to privatisation. The loss of Package 2 means that the project is now calculated at £11 billion – but bear in mind the escalating costs of other privatisations and the potential fallout from the growing economic crisis.

The campaign has rightly focussed attention on the presence of arms manufacturers Raytheon in the Metrix consortium. As we have previously argued, the question of whether Raytheon actually manufacture cluster bombs or depleted uranium warheads is merely splitting hairs. Their own website includes pictures of the “submunitions” (cluster bombs) their “delivery systems” (missiles) are designed to carry. They are without question guilty of some of the most appalling crimes against innocent civilians.

One minor detail we haven’t mentioned yet: in 1997 Raytheon made a donation to the Labour party and took MPs on an expenses-paid holiday. Two years later they were handed an £800 million contract from the MoD.

As for the daylight robbery involved in the privatisation of Qinetiq (major players in Metrix), you know something is seriously amiss when even the Daily Mail takes exception.

And if all this cannot convince punters that they should at least be sceptical of handing huge amounts of public money to Metrix, maybe we should also mention that another Metrix partner, service provider Serco, has a senior independent director, Margaret Ford, who also happens to be a Labour peer.

In the light of the dishonesty, vested interests and shameless profiteering already associated with this project, why should anyone believe the claims about jobs and knock-on effects on the Welsh economy made by its proponents? The PCS, which represents most of those presently involved in MoD training, has rubbished the jobs figures: we and others have already pointed out that many of the training jobs will be relocated from elsewhere. The idea that the academy is the best way to use public money to cut dole queues in the Rhondda and other impoverished areas of South Wales is absolute nonsense.

But the money is only available for this project, we are told. Who says? In this supposed democracy, why should we accept that there is a bottomless fund for warfare and never enough for housing, health, new community centres, better services, etc, etc, etc? Why not ask the unemployed what they need and see if they answer “another war in Iraq”?

Further articles on St Athan:Open University and arms dealers
PR resolution to Stop the War conference.
Check archives for more.

Leaflets and posters in English and Welsh can be downloaded from our resources page. Below: a few of Raytheon’s products – see videos.