Socialist forum: onwards and upwards

The Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum met for the second time last night to discuss the united front tactic, specifically as it relates to the fight against fascism. Numbers were up from the first meeting, with activists coming from Swansea and Newport to join a variety of Cardiff socialists and anarchists in a constructive and informative discussion entirely free of wooden sectarian posturing.

Part of the remit of the forum, in a period of increasing disorientation of the left, is to revisit the ABC of Marxist theory and practice as developed by the Third and Fourth internationals in their healthy earlier periods.

A second aim is to facilitate unity in action around those issues where agreement can be reached as to what action is necessary. Clearly, in the current period, the fight against fascism is a priority, and yesterday’s discussion made real progress in establishing what is needed in that area.

Closely related to this is the fight against deportations and the elimination of border controls. This is an area where revolutionary socialists and class struggle anarchists can unite to draw in wider forces; despite the overwhelming demonisation of refugees and asylum seekers, victorious campaigns such as that around the Sukula family in Bolton show how the labour movement and local community can be moblised against the inhumane policies of the British state.

It is a sad reflection on the state of the socialist left today that the basic concept of the united front has by and large been abandoned. The idea of the united front was that revolutionaries could work alongside much wider forces around specific issues without compromising their own ability to put forward socialist arguments. By working with trade union leaders, reformist politicians etc, revolutionaries could show themselves as willing to go further than those misleaders to forward the interests of the working class. For example, in a trade union dispute we would not hesitate to call for the militant defence of picket lines where necessary, something even the most left Labour MP would baulk at.

Such a demand is but one example of how a revolutionary socialist programme should not be something to be stowed away for a great day in the future, but is relevant to the immediate struggle. Today, however, there is a widespread perception on the left that workers can only be addressed with arguments which do not challenge the fundamental tenets of the capitalist system - reformism.

The workers united front, meanwhile, has been replaced by the simplistic concept that we build as big a campaign as possible, allow left liberal ideas to dominate it, then content ourselves with selling papers on the sidelines to the few who will listen. Instead of challenging trade union barons, exposing Labour MPs and proving in practice the superiority of revolutionary socialism, the aim has become to keep everyone on board by avoiding anything which threatens the reformists, and even to big them up in front of workers and hope to grow by clinging to their coattails.

In the case of Unite Against Fascism, even Tories have been pulled on board for public meetings. How can workers be convinced that socialists, not fascists, represent their interests when they see us in league with the class enemy, whose attacks on the working class and promotion of racism have sown the seeds for fascist success in the first place?

PR will continue to fight via socialist forums in Cardiff and elsewhere for the maximum possible unity - but unity which promotes, not cripples, our ability to fight.

Our aim with the Cardiff Radical Socialist Forum is that, once established, it will become the property of all its participants, and as such a step towards wider socialist unity, both within united front campaigns and, if sufficient agreement on organisation and programme can be reached, a revolutionary socialist party. Meetings will be on the first Wednesday of each month - the next (proposed by comrades of the CPGB and agreed at the forum), will be on Iran (details to follow).

There is also a CRSF e-group which all open-minded leftists are welcome to join.

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.

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.

Labour poll collapse in Wales: Morgan can’t pass off blame

Rhodri Morgan blamed Labour’s collapse in the recent council elections on the leadership of Gordon Brown. But the simple fact is that the party founded by and still primarily funded by workers has been betraying those workers for eleven years - and Labour in Wales has played a full part in that betrayal.

The scale of Labour’s humiliation is staggering. With only a third of the electorate bothering to vote, and Labour winning just 24% of those votes, no more than one in twelve voters put their cross next to a Labour candidate. In Wales Labour fared no better than in England - and in the Vale of Glamorgan, proposed site of Morgan’s beloved military academy, the Labour-Plaid coalition lost power to the Tories.

The Morgan administration has enacted reforms at the Senedd which have counteracted some of the effects of the neo-liberal Westminster government. But the depressed state of so many Welsh communities demands urgent and radical action, paid for by public funds, which in turn requires outright opposition to free-market ideology and privatisation in all its forms. So why are Labour trumpeting the biggest PFI in history at St Athan, costing £11 billion of taxpayers money to create at best 2000 jobs at an incredible £5.5 million a job!?

Iraq is often cited as a major reason for voters’ disillusionment in Labour. So why did Rhodri Morgan fail to utter one word of condemnation of the invasion? If this was, as has been mooted, part of a deal whereby Blair would not interfere in Morgan’s running of Wales, then Labour’s collapse here is due reward.

Time and again, from the axing of the Llanwern steelworks to the closure of the LG factory in Newport, Labour politicians in Wales have no answer except they are sorry, but we are all helpless in the face of the all-powerful market.

However, Morgan and co are quite happy to embrace capitalism when it promises ‘jobs for Wales’, even when this is based on a complete lie, as at St Athan. Devolution in Wales, as in Scotland, has spawned a narrow nationalism which has played straight into Plaid’s hands by declaring there is such a thing as a “Welsh interest”, when in reality the interests of the working-class and those of their exploiters remain as incompatible as ever.

As PR have constantly argued, there is no short-cut to a revival of class-consciousness amongst workers without the rebuilding of labour organisation and the defiance of anti-union laws in order to succesfully prosecute struggles. For this reason we welcome wholeheartedly the upsurge in working-class militancy which the government’s loss of credibility is fostering. And for this reason also we have criticised the wholesale capitulation to electoral politics into which much of the left has fallen. It is a sad fact that, however derisory Labour’s results have been in this election, the results of groups further to the left have been correspondingly awful.

This phenomenon was not limited to Cardiff, where the Socialist Party and the SWP/Respect/Left Party shared a few dozen votes between them. There is no dressing up the scale of the left’s defeat throughout the UK: in the London mayoral election the fascists got 53,000 more votes than the only left of Labour candidate. Respect Renewal did little better, winning no more than a single additional councillor in Birmingham. Its combined vote in London was lower than that of the BNP, who now boast a seat on the GLA – a presence every socialist in London must actively campaign against and challenge.

So what way forward now? The idea that the left can mount a united electoral challenge is comprehensively refuted by the experience of the last decade. The various attempts at left unity – the SLP, SSP, SA, Solidarity, CNWP, Respect and Respect Renewal – have all failed.

This was certainly in part because of the conflicting interests of the various groups involved. However, more importantly it was because, rather than addressing what the working class objectively needed to take it forward, these groups were all premised on something the working class certainly did not need – the abandonment or watering down of huge chunks of the socialist programme in order to make their electoral message more palatable.

The left has to rebuild itself first and foremost in the struggles outside Parliament. When it engages in electoral activity in future it must present an uncompromising revolutionary anti-capitalist programme – it could hardly fare worse than it did this time around! If we do not raise revolutionary socialist arguments, how will we ever build a revolutionary vanguard within the workers movement?

Instead of another false unity initiative the left needs to honestly and openly reassess its mistakes over the last decade. No single party however nominally broad can at present encompass a spectrum of activists both inside and outside the Labour Party and on the left of the Greens as well as non-aligned socialists and members of the various left groups.

But socialists from all these strands of the left must begin to organise and work alongside each other now. The demand that before we can unite in action we must join a single party or quasi-party organisation is a sectarian barrier to the real regroupment that urgently needs to take place.

Rather, activists need to agree to fight together around the key priorities of the working class now. That means starting right now to build the base organisations of the unions ready for a renewed offensive by Labour and the Tories. It means fighting any upsurge in repossessions or evictions with the oncoming housing crisis. And it means standing firm against the continued attacks on women’s rights and immigrants, campaigning resolutely against the war and using opportunities like the Convention of the Left in Manchester this September to agree on joint campaigning priorities and to begin a real debate about the way forward.

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.

The Sukulas - a great anti-deportation victory

Cardiff PR salute the work of Cardiff activists in raising funds for the children of Ama Sumani, the Ghanaian woman deported to her death while receiving vital medical care in the UK. Her death was a tragedy rightly described as state murder. It has been followed, however, by excellent news for another important anti-deportation campaign. Jason Travis of PR, chair of the Sukula family campaign, gives his account of their victory:

On 27th March, almost three years after the start of the campaign the Sukulas, a Bolton family of asylum seekers who fled the civil war in the Congo, finally received the news that they’d been given indefinite leave to remain.

Over 3000 people have supported the campaign that has also had the support of Unison, the NUT, the NUJ and other unions.

The Sukulas were one of the first families to have all benefits withdrawn under the notorious Section 9 that the government had hoped would drive families out of Britain by taking away their homes, their benefits and even their children who would be placed into the care of social services with the adults made destitute and homeless.

The campaign declared that if any attempts were made to evict the Sukulas we would form a physical blockade around the house to prevent either eviction or deportation. We gained support of local unions and Bolton Unison backed social workers who refused to initiate care proceedings purely because of government imposed destitution. This stance was backed by the British Association of Social Workers and later Unison nationally.

As a result of this defiance by workers and the massive community support, taken up by the local paper the Bolton News, the council refused to evict the Sukulas. Following this another ten Greater Manchester councils and then councils in Yorkshire made a similar commitment to refuse to evict families of failed asylum seekers. The Sukulas themselves lived 17 months without benefits living only on community support and proceeds from the campaign (which is therefore several hundred pounds in debt). Hundreds demonstrated against the Act and led by the Sukula campaign Section 9 was smashed!

In addition we successfully campaigned against Flores Sukula being expelled from Bolton Soxth Form College- purely on grounds of being a failed asylum seeker- with Bolton NUT and the NUS threatening a campaign of massive publicity and protest of the college authorities didn’t back down. We also, through trade union support, demonstration and threatened pickets prevented the forced dispersal of the Sukulas to Liverpool.

We feel that as a consequence of the Sukula campaign, together with a growing number of similar campaigns around the country, the government had to back down and settle thousands of asylum cases, the so-called legacy cases. If we had not assembled a range of trade union and community activists prepared to take militant action up to and including physical blockades then the government would not have its policy on families left in tatters.

There is however still a lot to do. We have always from day one campaigned against all deportations- of men, women, children of anyone. This is why we have supported the No One is Illegal trade union conferences, the second of which met 29th March 2008 with some hundred trade unionists planning action to oppose immigration controls and organise migrant workers.

We demand the right to work and have continually pushed for a national network of trade unionists and community campaigns prepared to take physical action and strike action to defend migrants and refuse to implement immigration controls. We need a network of parents, teachers, other education workers and students to declare schools are no deportation zones. But we also need community campaigns with the ability to mount emergency defence pickets and we need trade unions to recruit all workers- documented or otherwise- to demand the right to work and organise at trade union agreed rates and to turn the success of exemplary campaigns like the Sukulas into a national movement of defiance to smash all immigration controls.

The family and campaign thanks everyone who has supported us and will continue to fight against all deportations.

For details of CardiffPR’s work supporting Congolese and other refugees in South Wales, email cardiffpr@yahoo.co.uk.