Three arrested in Cardiff as Prosor creeps in through the back entrance

There was a distinct whiff of occupied Palestine in Cardiff Bay today as police declared an exclusion zone around the back entrance to the Senedd – then dealt violently with activists who entered it. The occasion was the visit of Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, fervent apologist for Zionism and scourge of any normal sentient human being who takes exception to the racist state which employs him.

The arrested activists included Val Swain, whose brutal treatment by the South Wales Police after May’s pro-choice demo was followed by a prosecution which was thrown out of court due to the police ‘losing’ witness statements and CCTV footage of what happened at Fairwater police station.

As usual protesters were also subjected to rigorous surveillance with everybody active around the back entrance to the Senedd photographed – in contrast to the low-key policing of the main demo at the front of the Senedd where the media cameras were stationed. However, we also captured some of the action and the results can be seen here.

Prosor’s visit, and the political feeding frenzy brought about by Dafydd Elis-Thomas’ refusal to meet him, once again shattered any illusions that the assembly represents a progressive force in UK politics. Labour and Lib Dem politicians fell over themselves to berate their presiding officer, while Elis-Thomas’s own colleagues were distinctly reluctant to support him – not surprising perhaps when it was a Plaid AM, Mohammed Asghar, who invited Prosor in the first place.

Asghar’s defence for his action was that he needed to hear both sides of the story regarding Palestine. But he will hear no story from Prosor other than a robust defence of the apartheid wall, illegal settlements, the murder of US and UK volunteers, and the destruction of each and every attempt of the Palestinians to create a feasible homeland.

More likely the invitation was Asghar’s response to the climate of Islamophobia unleashed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What better way for Plaid’s first Muslim AM to distance himself from radical Islam than to offer the olive branch to a confirmed Zionist?

Yet again the huge underlying divisions behind the ‘party of Wales’ have been exposed by this ill-judged manoeuvre. It is to the credit of Bethan Jenkins, Leanne Wood and Helen Mary Jones that they joined the protest at the front of the Senedd – but might they not ask themselves what exactly it is that unites them with colleagues who supposedly stand for the rights of small nations but cannot bring themselves to defend a people as ruthlessly oppressed as the Palestinians?

The truth, as we have already seen with the ailing St Athan project, is that Plaid are a fully paid-up part of the UK establishment, dedicated to preserving the institutions of UK imperialism and looking after imperialism’s most important ally in the Middle East, no matter how racist its policies. We call on all socialists in Plaid to join us in building a radical socialist forum in Cardiff which will provide a springboard for the creation of a genuinely socialist force in South Wales and beyond.

For a series of Permanent Revolution articles on the Palestine conflict, and online copy of our Palestine pamphlet, see our newly refurbished main site here.

Israel’s ambassador not welcome here!

From Cardiff Stop the War Coalition:

The Israeli Ambassador will be guest at the Assembly as part of a visit to Wales to build support for the Israeli State. This is the same ambassador who recently castigated British trade unionists, academics and activists for their support for the Palestinians under siege in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel has got a justifiably bad press for its denial of basic human rights for Palestinians; the Apartheid Wall, the road blocks and checkpoints which strangle the Occupied Territories, the constant bombing of Gaza and the rising death toll from war, malnutrition and Israel’s blockade of medical supplies, fuel and food.

Far from being about peace or dialogue, the ambassador, Ron Prosor has made clear his aim is to be a PR man for the state of Israel to undermine the efforts to build a just solution by muddying the waters on what the real situation in the Middle East is.

Therefore we urge everyone who supports peace, justice and equality to attend this protest to send a message to the Ambassador, the state he represents, and his friends in the National Assembly of Wales:

End the Occupation and Set Palestine Free!

Demonstrate – Tuesday 24th June at 5 pm at the Assembly.

Please note: The PR above refers to public relations! For a series of Permanent Revolution articles on the Palestine conflict, and online copy of our Palestine pamphlet, see our newly refurbished main site here.

Raytheon 9 acquitted – now kick Raytheon out of Wales!

In a landmark judgment for the anti-war movement, a Belfast jury has acquitted the Raytheon 9 of all charges relating to their intrusion into Raytheon’s Derry offices and destruction of computer equipment.

Colm Bryce of the campaign said the following:

“The Raytheon 9 have been aquitted today in Belfast for their action in decommissioning the Raytheon offices in Derry in August 2006. The prosecution could produce not a shred of evidence to counter our case that we had acted to prevent the commission of war crimes during the Lebanon war by the Israeli armed forces using weapons supplied by Raytheon.

We remain proud of the action we took and only wish that we could have done more to disrupt the ‘kill chain’ that Raytheon controls.

This victory is welcome, for ourselves and our families, but we wish to dedicate it to the Shaloub and Hasheem families of Qana in Lebanon, who lost 28 of their closest relatives on the 30 July 2006 due to a Raytheon ‘bunker buster’ bomb.

Their unimaginable loss was foremost in our minds when we took the action we did on 9 August, and the injustice that they and the many thousands of victims of war crimes in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered, will spur us on to continue to campaign against war and the arms trade that profits from it.

We said from the beginning that we came to this court not as the accused but as the accusers of Raytheon. This court case proved that Raytheon in Derry is an integral part of the global Raytheon company and its military production. This is no longer a secret or in doubt. Raytheon have treated the truth, peaceful protest, local democracy and this court with complete contempt. The most senior executive who appeared said that the charge that Raytheon had ‘aided and abetted’ the commission of crimes against humanity was “not an issue” for him. Raytheon should have that contempt repaid in full and be driven out of Derry and every other place they have settled. They are war criminals, plain and simple. They have no place in our society and shame on all those in positions of power or influence who would hand them public funds, turn a blind eye to their crimes, cover their tracks or make excuses for them.”

In Wales, those people include Rhodri Morgan and almost the entire political establishment who have backed the plans of the Metrix Consortium to build a massive private tri-service military training centre at St Athan. Raytheon are fully-paid up members of that consortium; in response to criticisms of their involvement in delivering cluster bombs, Morgan happily accepted Raytheon’s excuse that they’d only made the custom-designed missiles for these weapons, and had no plans to make any more. After the Raytheon 9 trial, however, Raytheon stand exposed both as war criminals and downright liars. The company were allowed to move to Derry on the understanding they did not manufacture weapons there. They broke that promise. Their word is meaningless.

In the light of the Raytheon 9 judgement, the Open University, whose own staff are already in revolt against their involvement in the project, must immediately withdraw from Metrix and break their ties with Raytheon. We must furthermore demand that all trade unions offering support to the project cease doing so immediately. No contract must be signed for the St Athan academy.

The Raytheon 9 faced jail sentences if their case had been lost, and we salute their bravery and dedication, as well as the internationalism shown by the relationship they developed with the bombing victims of Qana. While celebrating their victory, however, we have to beware of the direction in which the campaign is leading. In his remarks after the trial, the SWP’s Eamonn McCann called on the Attorney General and the Crown Prosecution Service to investigate all Raytheon’s activities in the UK to determine whether the company is a criminal enterprise. Rather like calls for the state to ban fascist marches, however, this demand is both utopian and disempowering. The fact that one Belfast courthouse has delivered a sound verdict should not delude us into believing that the entire capitalist justice system can be forced to deliver genuine justice. The judiciary as a whole will always serve the needs of the UK military machine and those of our supposed allies. Furthermore, by making calls on the state rather than the workers’ movement and anti-war campaigners, McCann both lends credibility to the former while discouraging the latter from taking its own action and organising its own enquiries.

The same thinking is evident in Eamonn McCann’s statement that “we believe that one day the world will look back on the arms trade as we look back today on the slave trade, and wonder how it came about that such evil could abound in respectable society. If we have advanced by a mere moment the day when the arms trade is put beyond the law, what we have done will have been worthwhile.”

Here McCann has slipped into the language not of revolutionary socialism, but of liberal pacifism. Again, we cannot separate the capitalist war machine from the economic competition at the heart of capitalism; one is merely an outgrowth of the latter and will always be so.

But there is another serious problem with the statement. Slaves, by definition, could not be employed in a war of liberation. But unless we believe the capitalist class will give up their wealth and power voluntarily, we have to accept that those struggling against them will need weapons. Those weapons will be made by arms companies, even if, as in Hezbollah’s fight against Israel in Lebanon, those companies are based in Iran or China rather than Britain.

The Raytheon 9 were absolutely justified in targetting Raytheon, given Raytheon’s role in supplying imperialist forces in a war going on at that time in the Middle East. But however much we may all crave a world without war, we must avoid draining the energies of the anti-war movement in a misconceived campaign to end the arms trade.

On the positive side, the Derry activists have shown how bold direct action tactics can have a place within the anti-war movement, so long as these act as a focus for building a mass movement, not an alternative to it. Despite our comradely criticisms, we in PR salute their success and hope to strengthen the links we have helped forge between the campaigns in Derry and Cardiff – not just links between anti-war activists, but between committed socialists.

Cardiff gets harried – now let’s harry Bush

It’s been a busy year for Henry Charles Albert David Schleswig- Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. Firmly ensconced as British imperialism’s favourite poster-boy, ‘Prince Harry’ has been shunted around the world in search of photo-opportunities and this week wound up in Cardiff, capital city of the nation whose name he presumes as his own.

Harry has learned to curb his enthusiasm for Nazi uniform – and why not, when the donning of a British army lieutenant’s kit gives him all the leeway he needs to lay waste to semi-colonies such as Afghanistan and Iraq?

None if this apparently bothered Rod Phillips, head teacher of Cathays High School, who saw fit to use his pupils as propaganda tools for the latest act of royal patronage. The premise of this was the school’s links with Lesotho, in which the ex-Eton schoolboy also has an interest via the charity Sentebale. Sentebale has given the slavering media ample opportunities to portray an immensely privileged white man holding hands with grateful black children, the ancestors of which once trounced the British army for trying to disarm them.

If Rod Phillips had been interested in educating his charges rather than having them indoctrinated, he might have pointed out that charity is the flipside of imperialist force, and that the same Prince Harry had allegedly been ‘calling in’ UK warplanes to bomb the hell out of the less grateful inhabitants of Afghanistan, where, as in Iraq, children have been prime casualties of UK aggression.

However, the whole point of the Harry PR offensive is to counteract the massive unpopularity of such wars and the increasing problem of recruitment to the armed forces. The belief that the armed forces are ‘our boys’ , ‘doing a fantastic job in difficult circumstances’ etc etc, is a fundamental tenet of capitalist rule; not surprising, when ultimately that rule depends not on the elected parliament, but that army, the police force, the unelected judiciary and the unelected civil service, all topped off by unelected royal figureheads such as Henry Charles Albert David Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

The prince’s visit also involved meeting doctors and nurses of the University Hospital who have been helping to develop HIV treatments in Lesotho. Cardiff activists will not have missed the irony that
it was from this hospital that the terminally ill Ama Sumani was deported to her death in Ghana. Nor the irony that Harry jokingly sympathised with the 12 and a half hour days worked by student nurses. Perhaps, however, we have got him wrong, and he will not only campaign against the UK’s fascistic immigration policy, but support the 90% of GMB health service workers who recently voted against a pay deal which fails to keep pace with the increase in the costs of food and fuel.

Seriously, however, anti-war activists have to counter this propaganda offensive by continuing to get out onto the streets to oppose the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. George Bush is on his way on Sunday 15th – let’s give him a reception which will force the royal princes off the front pages and hopefully give the pupils of Cathays High, and their teachers, pause for thought.

Check our What’s Happening page for details of the Bush demo.

Socialist forum launched in Cardiff

The Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum got off to a promising start yesterday as a range of activists from Cardiff and Newport discussed the many initiatives to create a left of Labour party over the past fifteen years.

During a difficult period for the left, and in the face of Labour’s rightward trajectory, projects from the Socialist Labour Party to Respect have come to the fore, achieved modest successes, but universally come to grief. The forum discussed the characteristics of the different parties and the thorny problem of how to relate to Labour, which, despite its neo-liberal agenda, remains a party 92% funded by the trade unions. Are the circumstances right for calling for a new workers party, is there still a need for the much-maligned Leninist vanguard party, or is is the idea of the party itself outmoded?

PR have views on all these questions which will be apparent to everyone who reads this website. However, the forum is designed not simply to be PR’s mouthpiece but a genuinely inclusive discussion group aimed at exploring differences and paving the way towards greater left unity. In a modest way the first meeting achieved that aim, and participants were enthusiastic for further discussions. The next meeting will be on July 2nd, looking at how socialists should contribute to mass campaigns involving wider forces. If you are a socialist looking to broaden your understanding of the big issues facing us, in a constructive and non-sectarian atmosphere, come along.

McDonnell’s manifesto – not the call to arms we need

The local elections have left Gordon Brown and the Labour government in a very weak position. Brown himself is deeply unpopular. The Tories, thanks to years of New Labour betrayal, are once again a viable electoral alternative.

Here in the South Wales valleys, where Labour used to rule unchallenged, control of three councils have now slipped from its grip. In a newspaper interview a local Labour activist argued that Brown’s continuation of Blair’s policies, symbolised by his invitation to Number Ten of Margaret Thatcher who is rightly hated for her role in destroying the coal based economy of South Wales, was the number one cause for the recent election losses.

John McDonnell’s own response to the local elections was relatively muted. He said:

“After the serious rejection of New Labour at the polls last week assurances that the Government is listening are simply not going to be enough to restore any sense of belief in the Labour Party. What is needed is a radical change of political direction. We have to demonstrate that change by introducing a new policy programme that specifically and very concretely addresses peoples’ concerns raised on the doorstep. This May manifesto petition is launched so that all our supporters can have a say in pressing for the changes we need. We believe that Labour can win back the support of our people by adopting a new 2008 May Manifesto.”

What is to be done?

Across the labour movement activists in the Labour Party, the unions and the wider left are all asking what should be done in the light of New Labour’s rotten record and the shift to the right, in elections at least, that it has precipitated. The answer is to wage war on the whole New Labour Project. And the war should start with a battle to finish Brown’s leadership off.

We don’t say this because we think Brown lacks charisma and is a poor communicator. Such twaddle is best left to the press pundits who think politics should be about celebrity and image.

But nor is addressing Labour’s crisis merely a matter of convincing Brown to adopt a few better policies to revive Labour’s credibility with its voting base. Cosmetic surgery cannot eradicate the ugliness of New Labour.

Brown and New Labour need to be fought at every level of the labour movement. The pay freeze needs to be smashed. The increasingly regressive tax system needs to become the focus of mass protest action. The steam roller of Labour privatisation across the public services needs to halted in its tracks. And the daily racism meted out by this government – racism that is fuelling the growth of the fascists – needs to be combated.

The Labour Left today

The first port of call for workers up against such a right wing Labour government used to be the Labour Left. But today the Labour Left cannot rally mass support in the unions and really shake things up in the way, for example, that Benn’s deputy leadership challenge did in the early 1980s.

John McDonnell, the nearest person to being a figurehead that the Labour Left has in parliament, could not get enough support from MPs to mount a leadership challenge to Brown last year. With so many MPs looking anxiously at their slender majorities he would probably get even less support for a challenge now.

More importantly he does not have anything approaching a sizeable base amongst the activists – in the party or the unions – to be able to shake things up. The membership of the Labour Party is in sharp decline. So too is that of its left. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) which McDonnell heads has rightly opened itself up to non-party members (though wrongly, as long as they don’t stand against Labour) to try and build up wider support for its renewal project. But there are no signs that this is transforming the LRC into a significant player.

McDonnell’s manifesto

In these circumstances John McDonnell’s new manifesto is a disappointing one. It consists of the following ten points:

“ * Nailing the 10p tax mistake by the introduction of a fair tax system removing the low paid from taxation and ensuring the wealthiest and corporations pay their fair share
* An increase in the basic state pension, immediately restoring the link with earnings, lifting people off means tested benefits and providing free care for the elderly
* An immediate start on a large scale council house building programme and assistance for those facing repossession
* Immediate end to programme of local Post Office closures and liberalisation of postal services
* An end to the privatisation of our public services
* A new pay deal for public sector workers to protect their living standards and tackle low pay
* Abolishing tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants for all students
* Scrapping ID cards and abandoning 42 days detention
* Introduction of a trade union freedom bill and measures to protect temporary and agency workers
* Rejecting the proposals to renew Trident”

This is a pallid manifesto. While Brown hits the poorest sections of society with unfair indirect taxes he tolerates criminally low rates of corporation tax. Calling for fairness doesn’t really amount to much. Why not say openly, let’s tax the rich?

A new pay deal for public sector workers? Why not call for an end to Brown’s pay freeze? Reject Trident – sure, but we aren’t using it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s prioritise getting Britain out of the wars Labour is actually waging and link this to a fight to end Britain’s nuclear missile programme.

A new trade union bill is all well and good – but what about scrapping the existing anti-union laws? And why no mention of renationalising the railways, raising the minimum wage and carrying through a massive investment in the public sector, including bringing privatised services back into state ownership?

By any standards this manifesto seems timid when so much is at stake. And if you believe, as McDonnell does, the answer to the current political crisis and growing economic mess, is a programme of left reforms then those reforms should provide a fundamental alternative to the New Labour programme.

It is questionable whether even a set of more powerful reforms would do the trick. Will issuing a manifesto, even a better one than Mcdonnell’s (better in left reformist terms) really change much? It will be taken up by a handful of supporters. It will give Labour left activists a petition they can take to meetings. And it will provide a counterpoint to the official manifesto when work on it gets underway. But it won’t change a great deal in British politics because it does not constitute a full frontal attack on New Labour.

A manifesto for today should encompass a strategy for taking on and defeating New Labour in every arena of the class struggle – the party itself, the unions, the campaigns against racism and fascism, the campaigns against climate change, the campaigns to defend abortion rights.

A call to arms

McDonnell should have issued a call to arms. He should have said, “Brown is following on from Blair. He is leading us to disaster and I intend to call a national meeting of all activists across the movement (or I call on all activists to come to the Convention of the Left) to discuss waging a fight to the finish with these traitors in our midst. They have single handedly saved the Tories from oblivion and restored their electoral credibility. I will ask every union conference to back my challenge to the leadership of Brown in the next few months. I declare war on New Labour” … or words to that effect!

But he didn’t. He did not outline a course of action that could rally people to a fight now. He poses it all as a “policy” change. This misses the point. Brown will change policies as and when it suits, as the retreats over the 10p tax threshold shows.

What Brown will not do is change New Labour’s fundamental line. And getting into arguments about the finer points of policy plays into Brown’s hands. He can keep the debate going at that level while carrying on a neoliberal programme at a practical level.

None of this is to suggest that McDonnell and the LRC should not be part of the fightback. They should. But the number one priority is not a policy debate within the Labour Party in preparation for the next election. The priority is beginning the fightback – the sooner the better – so that the working class movement is better equipped to resist whatever is thrown at them by either New Labour or the Tories, before, during and after the next general election.