Socialist Review June 08



Frontlines



South Africa - reclaim our streets

Activists in Johannesburg are organising their local communities to oppose the recent violent attacks on foreigners there, Silumko Radebe from the Anti Privatisation Forum in Alexandra reports.

Tensions in South Africa have led to xenophobic attacks on our brothers and sisters from other countries, particularly against Zimbabweans and Somalis who live with us in our townships and communities.

We feel that as South Africans it is important to bring together a broad coalition of every civil society organisation, political organisation, faith-based organisation and the labour movement to reclaim our streets. We want to say that we condemn the attacks on the poor, especially the working class from other countries. 

We are planning a march on 24 May in Johannesburg to reclaim our streets and ease the tensions against the immigrant communities so that they can be part of society in South Africa. We want them to join us on the march to show the small reactionary forces that they cannot instil fear into our people or push our brothers and sisters into concentration camps. We cannot afford a setback to our 14 years of democracy or to let them roll back the gains we have made to unite everyone.

We are also creating awareness within our communities about the issue of xenophobia and condemning the violence that has been happening. Over 6,000 people have been displaced in the country, particularly in Gauteng. Many are staying in police stations to seek refuge, so the community is coming out to say they should be integrated back into our community and live freely among us.

 The issue we are trying to bring out with the march is that we are together and not divided by borders or issues of ethnicity, and to reach out to other South Africans who also condemn the attacks so we can show the world that not all South Africans are xenophobic.

The other events that are taking place in the communities are visits to the police stations to the people sheltering there to say there are South Africans who care and that it's important that all of them feel free to be in our country. On Saturday we plan to march to the Department of Housing, the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Safety and security to say to these institutions of government that the neoliberal policies of the African National Congress have created the conditions we face in the country. 

We will be making it clear that there has to be a policy shift in favour of the poor and to create employment and improve service delivery. People need houses and access to basic services. The attacks, especially by local South Africans, come from panic that brothers and sisters from other countries are here to take their jobs and houses.

After 14 years in power the government needs to roll out policies to meet the social needs of our people so we don't have poor working class people fighting against each other for resources. The majority of the population in the country live under poor conditions: more than 40 percent of people are unemployed and more than 50 percent live below the poverty line of less than £1 per day. 

These are the issues facing our current economic policies, and these are the issues that have created these conditions.

END

Christian Aid's report Death and taxes

Christian Aid's recent report, Death and Taxes, exposes the role of multinationals in conning poor countries out of vital tax revenue. It calculated that the poorest men and women in the poorest countries lose at least $160 billion a year in this way. This is substantially more than the $100 billion at present given in aid and would be enough to prevent almost 1,000 unnecessary child deaths each day.

The subprime crisis is driving policymakers to look again at regulatory measures. As before with the collapse of Northern Rock, the crisis drew attention to the "offshore engineering" that had effectively made it impossible for investors to accurately evaluate the assets and liabilities of the parent company.  

The report highlights how this lack of transparency has resulted in secret deals between governments and mining companies in low-income countries. A particularly blatant example is that of Zambia, which agreed a royalty rate with mining companies of only 0.6 percent. This meant that in 2006, for example, Zambia received revenues of just £12 million while the companies produced £2 billion of copper. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) claims that 5 to 10 percent is the normal range for royalties.

The simple act of Christian Aid's partner organisations obtaining the secret documents and bringing them to public notice was enough to create massive political pressure for a renegotiation of the deals to benefit the people of Zambia. At present the mining companies are resisting. But it should not be necessary for civil society to undertake cloak and dagger operations to force politicians and multinationals to give some benefit of a country's finite natural resources to its own citizens. 

The good news is that the situation is not hopeless. Britain's Department for International Development should continue to work to assist developing countries in strengthening their tax revenue authorities. 

The British government should stop being an obstacle to multilateral measures that could ensure automatic information exchange between jurisdictions. Given that nearby half of the recognised tax havens are crown dependencies, overseas territories or Commonwealth countries, Britain is uniquely well placed to become a leader. 

The other key international measure is to demand an accounting standard that mandates country by country reporting of economic activity, profits and tax paid, rather than simply a global consolidated account. Ultimately, a lack of transparency in financial markets facilitates abuse - of investors and individual taxpayers in the wealthy countries, and of the poorest people in the poorest countries. It's time to come clean.

Alex Cobham

Policy Manager, Christian Aid

Death and Taxes is available at www.christian-aid.org.uk

END

Teenage Sex - fearfulparents.com

Each week we face sensationalist media headlines about the danger of online predators and paedophiles who stalk the internet to prey on children. These fuel the culture of fear that gathers pace with each new story - frightening parents who feel powerless as many are nowhere near as net savvy as their offspring.

The British government-commissioned Byron Review, published recently, is in part a response to this fear. Dr Tanya Byron has adopted a sensible approach to helping protect minors in a digital age, but the report will no doubt be taken out of context, inadvertently helping to drive the call for censorship and curbs on the freedom to disseminate information.

Headlines such as "Millions of girls using Facebook, Bebo and Myspace 'at risk' from paedophiles and bullies" (Daily Mail, April 2008) help little in finding a level of regulation and child protection that will benefit online communities. This climate has led in the US to a raft of bills that offer little protection to the millions of minors in virtual worlds. For example, it is now illegal for someone under the age of 18 in the state of Georgia to register for a social networking site without parental permission. This neither offers protection to minors nor educates parents in offering children guidance. 

The British government is now proposing a bill to force registered sex offenders to hand over their email addresses. Anyone can open an email account using any name and remain anonymous, so monitoring a database of addresses to block registered offenders is pointless. 

In reality abductions by strangers are minimal. Most minors are at more risk from the people they know. In the US less than 0.1 percent of all youth abductions are by strangers according to MIT university. Stories covering the US Crimes Against Children report picked up on the statistic showing one in five children are sexually solicited online, but they failed to report that the same study shows more than 76 percent of these were from fellow teens. 

Children have the technical know-how without the emotional maturity to deal with some of the content they are presented with. As safety fears put real-life playgrounds out of bounds, children are transferring their role playing to the virtual playground.

Corporate bodies exploiting user-generated content for generating revenue need to take responsibility by signing up to codes of conduct. This will help to expose the facts behind the media fuelled fears and create an environment where sensible and workable measures to protect minors can be implemented.

Claire Foot

END

Heathrow  - third runway flies in face of good sense

As Socialist Review went to press protesters were due to converge on Heathrow in a demonstration to oppose the airport's expansion. The groundswell against a third runway demands attention. But other voices have the ears of Gordon Brown's government - the lobbyists for British Airways (BA), airport operator BAA and the bosses' CBI. BA's future profits require expansion if they are to follow the record £875 million operating profit in the year to March.

The Department for Transport signalled the expected go-ahead for expansion a fortnight before the demo, telling MPs it recognised "the immense value of Heathrow as an international hub airport". The campaign to stop it has brought together local people who are angry at the increasing noise and congestion, and those concerned at the wider threat of global warming. 

Aviation leaders repeat endlessly that flying accounts for 2 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions and maintain they are victims of an environmental lobby that targets air travel while other industries are more polluting. 

Some of this is true. Shipping accounts for 8 percent of world carbon dioxide emissions and road traffic for more than 20 percent in Britain, and there is huge pressure on airlines to cut their use of fuel with oil priced above $120 a barrel. However, aviation is responsible for up to 6 percent of Britain's carbon dioxide emissions so there is reason enough to rein in Heathrow. 

Significantly, carbon dioxide is just one of a cocktail of global warming gases produced by flying. At an altitude these magnify atmospheric warming, perhaps by a factor of 2.5. This figure is disputed, but a multiplier effect seems certain.

Just as important, air travel is growing at a rate outstripping every attempt to reduce its emissions. The latest aircraft are increasingly fuel efficient - the Boeing 787 due for launch this year should use 25 percent less fuel than the aircraft it replaces. But airlines are expanding faster than reductions in emissions and have been doing so for decades.

Partly that is because individual aircraft fly for 20 years or more, so the efficiency of the latest model makes little impact on the overall contribution of an ageing worldwide fleet. But crucially air travel expands by an average 5 percent a year, when the annual improvement in fuel efficiency is 1 to 2 percent.

Industry and government gloss over this and stress the economic case for expansion. They argue there is demand for travel - most flights do not take off empty - and if people do not fly from Heathrow they will do so from Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt. These airports handle fewer passengers than Heathrow, but are growing fast. They have more runways, less congestion and more routes than Heathrow - so business, profits and jobs will be lost if Heathrow does not grow. The aviation unions broadly agree.

Airlines also add that congestion increases emissions. Aircraft can spend 40 minutes above Heathrow waiting to land. A third runway would cut that. Of course, airline bosses do not expect that to be the outcome - they intend to add flights.

Building the runway might take ten years. In the meantime moving to mixed use of the two existing runways - alternating takeoffs and landings on each throughout the day - could increase traffic by 15 percent.

That would not just increase emissions and pollution from road traffic; it would remove a respite for people under the flight paths. At present the runways are used either for takeoff or landing and switch use in mid-afternoon to give people a break from takeoffs, when aircraft are most noisy.

The government made up its mind long ago, although it has yet to sign off expansion formally. However, the forces ranged against it are growing, as new London mayor Boris Johnson and the Tory London Evening Standard have realised, leading them to question the plans.

In a rational world a majority of us might decide some air travel was desirable and ration it, while scrapping business jets, cutting back on flights and cargo, flying only the least damaging aircraft and investigating alternatives. We might decide we could retain carbon fuel for this reduced air travel until we found something else, or we might conclude the consequences were too grave. Either way the decision would reflect the interests of the majority. Fat chance - for now.

Ed Warburton

END

George Bush - golf wars

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal" - George Bush, 15 May 2008.

"Thousands of Americans have given up a lot more than golf for this war. For President Bush to imply that he somehow stands in solidarity with families of American soldiers by giving up golf is disgraceful. It's an insult to all Americans and a slap in the face to our troops' families" - Brandon Friedman, US veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush claims he gave up golf on 19 August, 2003, after the attacks on UN personnel in Baghdad, despite news outlets pointing out that they reported on the president golfing well into October. 

Either way it's the sacrifice that counts. PW

Tory pick and choose

In 1989 Westminster Council voted to expel homeless families from the borough's hostels. They were transferred to asbestos-ridden tower blocks in a safe Labour ward, often without heating or sanitation systems. 

This was part of Westminster's "building stable communities" plan, which pumped investment into marginal wards in order to secure Tory votes while removing groups traditionally thought to vote Labour (such as the homeless, nurses and students). 

It became known as the "homes for votes" scandal, described by a previous council leader as "simply criminal".

One pioneer of all this was council leader Sir Simon Milton. With such experience, his newly appointed position seems obvious: Boris Johnson's lead adviser for planning and housing. PW

END

Frontlines end



Union-made 

Mark Serwotka

United we stay

The PCS civil service workers' union conference last month may turn out to have been the most significant in the union's ten year history. 

It was characterised by unity and consideration of the extremely difficult industrial and political circumstances we, and the rest of the public sector, face. Our activists have been engaged in an extended period of struggle over the past few years. We have upheld our principles of solidarity, unity and, crucially, independence from the political establishment. And we have shown that they work.

In the face of a government committed to further cuts, in a hostile political and industrial climate, PCS won, for the first time, national agreements covering the threat of redundancies and the consequences of privatisation. We have not won everything we wanted. But we kept our right (and intention) to take action should those agreements fail to protect any members. But the challenges to come, particularly over pay, will be harder. 

Everywhere I speak at union and public meetings members and reps of all unions agree that joint action must be the answer to a government which attacks us across the board. On 24 April the first such joint action took place. We have been working towards that for some time. 100,000 PCS members were on strike alongside members of the NUT teachers' union and the UCU lecturers' union, as well as council workers in Birmingham and staff from Shelter. 

No one who attended the rallies and demonstrations up and down the country could fail to be excited by the enthusiasm this generated. It was a taste of what joint resistance over pay would be like. 

 The PCS conference agreed that we must confront the pay policy which is preventing our members from keeping up with inflation with further national industrial action. We will now ballot our public sector membership on this. But we need more action of the sort seen on 24 April.

NUT acting general secretary Christine Blower and president Bill Greenshields addressed conference, committing themselves to continued collaboration. This will not be built solely at the top. Members and activists from all unions must continue to build links and campaigns in their own localities.

We are facing a prime minister who said he wants to reduce the size of the civil service to 1945 levels - a time of rationing and hardship, in a country that still had only a minimal welfare state. 

What a miserable statement from a miserable prime minister - a prime minister who, in his desperation to avoid the humiliation of defeat at the hands of a bunch of lacklustre Tories, apes their policies in a pathetic attempt to sound tough.

Saying this openly is not very popular with some in the trade union movement. They say that if we criticise the government we are letting in the Tories. But our loyalty, first, second and third, is to our members. We have the right to defend ourselves from Tory policies - whoever is implementing them. We know from our Make Your Vote Count (MYVC) campaign (and common sense) that the Tories and Lib Dems would do the same, but unions can only defend ourselves by being robust (to coin a New Labour phrase).

Brown's government is in disarray after the May elections and the 10p tax outrage. This is no time to let them get up off the floor only to renew their attacks against us. It is the best time for us to press for change - the pay policy can be broken.

PCS has no political affiliations, but we are political. We need to change the political environment to deliver our aims.  

MYVC mobilised hundreds of our members to counter the poisonous growth of the British National Party. It is not popular with management, and certainly not with the fascists.  And disgracefully, PCS activist Eddie Fleming has been sacked for his union activities, while at the same time, in the same office, a member of staff was able to stand as a BNP candidate - with official approval. What a terrible example of distorted values under a Labour government. We will not tolerate Nazis in our membership, and we don't want them working in our public services either. 

Hundreds of local councillors and candidates (including eight out of ten Labour candidates) told us they do not support the government's agenda of job cuts, pay cuts and privatisation, during our MYVC campaigns. 

While little of such opposition manifests itself in Westminster, John McDonnell has continued to do a fantastic job for us. We are talking to him and a number of other non-affiliated unions about how we can coordinate our political work in parliament. 

For PCS, the decision is made - industrial and political struggle will be stepped up in 2008. We must now win others to our side. MS

Mark Serwotka is general secretary of the PCS, the civil service workers' trade union

END

Feedback

The year before

Grosvenor Square 1968 has become a common piece of historical shorthand (Feature, Socialist Review, May 2008). There was a demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968 in London. It did not go to the US embassy. The battle of Grosvenor Square, when the police mounted full scale cavalry charges, was in October 1967.

The March 1968 effort was much larger but much more passive. Tariq Ali led it off to Hyde Park, and only the ultra-lefts (yes, I was one) went to Grosvenor Square, where we were totally outnumbered by the police (who didn't lose it this time). Apparently, at the end, they all sang Auld Lang Syne together (no, I didn't). There was none of that in 1967.

This is not only important for my personal history, but because it illustrates that May 1968 was the highest point of what was a much longer, multi-faceted, interacting international process. 

The insistence on the importance of the total international process from the US civil rights movement of the early 1960s to the industrial struggles of the early 1970s, is the strength of Chris Harman's book on 1968, The Fire Last Time. The only weakness is that our heroic, near insurrectionary, struggles in the then new University of Essex barely get a mention.

John Shemeld

Nottingham

 The 17 March 1968 demonstration certainly was not a peaceful affair, as the classic Granada TV documentary showed. The October 1967 one (of which I was one of the organisers) was the first to show the militancy building up. But the March one was three or four times larger. There was no doubt in anyone's minds that we intended to try to battle our way to the embassy. The demonstration that went to Hyde Park was the October 1968 one. We had learnt the hard way that the police could make the US embassy impregnable and so instead took over a vast swathe of London's streets. 

Chris Harman

Riposte

Congratulations to Hassan Mahamdallie on a beautifully argued riposte to the vile Martin Amis (Feature, Socialist Review, April 2008). 

As the Financial Times - not normally known for its liberal views - pointed out in response to the 2006 Hamas landslide victory in Palestine:

"It has long been clear that Islamic revivalism has a broad, well rooted following. More recently it has been equally obvious that Western policy - on Iraq and Israel or in support of despotic and corrupt rulers who deny their peoples' rights - has helped the Islamists perform politically well above trend. It is the scorched earth tactics of the autocrats [fostered by the West], who have left their opponents nothing but the mosque to rally around, that have furnished the Islamists with their following."

It concludes - unlike our bigot Martin Amis - that the West can only contribute to undermining Islamism by genuinely supporting democratic principles. 

Annie Hawes

By email

The end of the line

Call centres (Union-Made, Socialist Review, May 2008). Just those two words together are enough to provoke a groan and a yawn from most people. They are indeed the modern day equivalent of the old factory production lines. It is repetitive, monotonous work that has not, in most cases, been chosen as a career and yet these office edifices have become an essential ingredient of modern life without which countless services and businesses could not function. 

The staff in our call centre are amazing; there is a vast array of talent, creativity and experience from people of all ages and backgrounds, each of whom struggle daily to do this difficult job as well as they can. Being "on the phones" can often, in my experience, feel as though the wheel is still spinning but the hamster is long dead. This raises, at the very least, serious job satisfaction issues. 

Consequentially, if employers are unwilling to appreciate or recognise how much effort has gone into achieving their results, under difficult circumstances and for what is frankly meagre pay, then they risk losing not only the loyalty of their staff, but the staff themselves.

Leni Koupis

London

Pro-choice victory

The Abortion Rights demonstration outside parliament on 20 May was a great success. Some 1,000 protesters turned out, all chanting pro-choice slogans. MPs inside parliament voted against all the amendments that would have cut the time limit on abortion.

This is a decisive win. It shows that, in the face of highly funded anti-choice propaganda targeted at the press and parliament, our views can still win because they are supported by more people up and down the country. However, the votes against the amendments to reduce the time limit to 12 and 16 weeks came up against far greater opposition in parliament. More MPs voted for the amendments that could have cut the limit to 22 weeks. 

This means that we've got to stay vigilant and involved in the Abortion Rights campaign to fight for a woman's right to choose now and in the future.

Farah Reza

London

END

Letter from Lebanon

Recent events exposed the weakness of the US backed government and both the strength and limitations of the Hezbollah led opposition, argues Bassem Chit

Lebanon's 14 March coalition government has been an ally of US and European imperialism since it took power in 2005. The coalition capitalised on popular resentment against Syria's 29-year occupation to push for a neoliberal, pro-imperialist agenda. The government increased the role of "domestic intelligence" agencies in coordination with the US, and formed an armed militia under the guise of private security companies. They hoped that these security companies would become powerful enough to match Hezbollah. So the government could wage Israel and the US's war on the resistance.

In early May the government discovered that Hezbollah was monitoring military aircraft landing at Beirut International Airport and operating a secret military communication system. The government fired the head of security at the airport - a man close to the resistance - and closed the communications network.

This was a declaration of war. Hezbollah and its allies reacted swiftly. In a few days of fighting they swept away these militias destroying the "US project". The rapid defeat of the government revealed the hollowness of their popular support. It represents a massive victory for the resistance. The government capitualted at peace talks held in Doha, Qatar.

But despite this success, Hezbollah and its allies face difficult questions. The opposition has been pushing for a national unity government, using popular resentment against 14 March to get more seats in the cabinet, ministries and so on.

Yet any challenge to neoliberalism is missing. The 14 March government has implemented "economic reforms" such as the removal of protection on local produce, and massive cuts in social benefits and state services. By showing little concern over the growing anger against neoliberal policies, the opposition has stated that there will be no change of direction with the new government.

The most important evidence for this was the general strike called by the opposition in January 2007. The strike was organised to put "street pressure" on the government, but it turned out to be, as one Hezbollah official said, "a popular Intifada". 

While the opposition leadership demanded a bigger role in the cabinet, the movement called for the government to fall, higher wages, less taxes, cheaper bread and policies to tackle the shortage of water and electricity. 

As this movement was threatening the opposition's control over the "street" the general strike was called off, just as it was beginning to bite. Despite the opposition's powerful resistance to imperialism, it does not represent the interests of the working class. 

There is a second weakness in the opposition strategy. The Doha peace deal does not present any real solution to the sectarian political system. The opposition only wanted the electoral system reformed. 

By accepting a rearrangement of the sectarian allocation of power, the opposition has made its peace with the system. This means they will only succeed in delaying a new crisis. The signal they are sending is that they are willing to form a "bourgeois united front" against the interests of the working class.

As socialists we oppose such a move, and are pushing harder for class politics. We support the right of the resistance to bear arms, but we also support the people who hold these weapons, the people who help the resistance fighters and gave shelter to those displaced during Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon. The resistance's victory in July 2006 came from the masses, not, as Hezbollah claim, "from heaven".

The economic problems are those of everyday life. Today over a third of the population live under the official poverty line. The minimum wage has remained at $200 per month - the official poverty line - since 1996. 

The victory for the resistance over imperialism provides a golden opportunity for the left. The ruling class will try to build illusions that Lebanon's sectarianism is "embedded within society", but recent struggle has seen a slow withering away of sectarianism, to be replaced by growing class antagonism. Hope, more than ever, lies within the grasp of the working class.

Bassem Chit is a member of the Leftist Assembly for Change (www.tymat.org)

END

Feature

Is Britain moving to the right?

Labour's crushing election defeats and the increase in the vote for the Nazi BNP has led some to believe the country is drifting rightwards. Lindsey German opens our analysis of the situation by challenging that assumption and argues that election results don't tell the whole story

I

t's hard to remember that only nine months ago 1 May was projected as a likely general election day. Then, the theory went, Gordon Brown would be able to take Labour to a fourth election victory, strengthen his position as elected prime minister and continue for another four or five years. Brown was at that time - again hard to remember - 

enjoying a honeymoon following the unlamented departure of Tony Blair. 

Instead the local elections in parts of England, Wales and London on 1 May, alongside the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, were terrible defeats for Labour. On the basis of these results, the Tories would have a 116 majority in parliament if there were a general election now. We can therefore be pretty certain that there will be no election, if Labour has anything to do with it, until late in this parliament. 

These elections mark a watershed in a number of ways. Most importantly, they presage the return of a Tory government for the first time in more than a decade. May also saw the election of a Tory mayor, after eight years in office for Ken Livingstone, who won first as an independent against Labour in 2000, and then as the Labour candidate four years later. Alongside the election of Boris Johnson, the fascist BNP won a seat on the London Assembly. 

None of this is good news for the left. While some right wing candidates made advances in the London elections (the notable exceptions being UKIP and the English Democrats) candidates from the Lib Dems leftwards either lost votes or only just maintained their previous ground (as in the case of the Greens).  

It would, however, be a mistake to see the result as simply a shift to the right. Much more it represented a collapse of support for Labour with the Tories being the main beneficiaries. Why did that happen? Firstly, the election as a whole was fought on the basis of right wing politics. Crime and immigration dominated the issues being discussed, and this was a deliberate decision on the part of the main parties. When that happens it is much harder for a space to the left to open up, especially when Labour goes along with the consensus of more police on the streets and being tougher on crime. 

More fundamentally, traditional Labour voters were punishing Labour for the 10p tax, the rise of food and utility prices, the housing crisis and much more besides. In the circumstances of a right wing and unpopular Labour government, staggering on after 11 wasted years, it is unsurprising that some voters saw little difference between Labour and the Tories. 

It is instructive to consider two feature articles which both appeared on the same day a week after the election results. One, by Ken Livingstone in the Guardian, heralded his support for and in the City of London. The second, by David Cameron in the Independent, appealed to all those who were progressive on green or equality issues to join the Tories. No wonder voters were confused. 

At the same time as these electoral gains for the right, there was another story during the election period. Teachers, lecturers and civil servants struck and demonstrated on 24 April. The demonstrations on that day were some of the youngest and most militant workers' demonstrations for at least a generation. 

The carnival held in London's Victoria Park the weekend before the elections attracted 100,000 in opposition to the BNP. 

Immigration 

In addition, there is no evidence that attitudes on a range of issues - from privatisation to war - have changed in the course of the election or that the results are likely to lead to such a change of views. In many instances the general public remains to the left of politicians on these questions and on many more. There is one major exception to this - immigration. 

The consensus here is much more right wing, with even those who claim to be anti-racist and pro-diversity (which even Tories like Johnson now boast) saying that there have to be limits on immigration. Or, as it's sometimes put, "the country's full up". This, plus the growing wave of Islamophobia, has given a base for the BNP to grow. Even liberal opinion has played its part in this. The BBC's White Season showed a concern for the "white working class" not evident when reporting strikes, or the class bias in education, or the housing crisis. 

Even in the case of the BNP vote, however, it is clear that for many it represented a protest against the Labour government by people who felt they had been ignored or left behind by Labour. That does not mean we should dismiss the vote. While the proportion of the vote was not much higher than four years ago, the absolute number of votes was higher, and the election of an assembly member for the BNP gives them a profile and a level of confidence which they have not had in London for many years. 

The BNP vote also highlights the contradictory nature of the politics in the recent elections. There is a sense of frustration and disgust with the policies of the mainstream parties and politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and only in it for themselves, and this sentiment can be channelled in different directions. In these last elections the main beneficiaries were right wing parties, particularly over the question of immigration. But this was at least partly because the main parties have taken up and promoted anti-immigrant policies.

Most shamefully, New Labour continued to do so in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, held just weeks after the local elections. Literature for the Labour candidate highlighted "concerns" over immigration and invited voters to consider, "What do you think is the biggest problem facing the area?" offering "immigration" as a tick box reply.

The left failed to meet the challenge presented by this election. In London it became a Boris and Ken show, with little substantive differences on most policies, and some of those not to Labour's advantage (for example on ID cards or conductors on buses). The other parties were squeezed, especially UKIP whose vote fell most dramatically from over 100,000 to just over 20,000 and who lost two seats previously held on the assembly; and the vote I received in 2004 for Respect at around 61,000 first preferences fell to under 17,000 this time. It's clear that many voters did not want to risk voting for a smaller party for mayor in case it led to the defeat of their favoured candidate. 

While this squeeze affected the votes for mayor, the split in Respect and the divisions on the left did no one any favours in the list elections when they were in direct competition. The left vote was therefore split in London, with neither the Left List nor George Galloway's Respect getting close to winning. There was clearly great confusion over the name. In addition, any division leads to political confusion with some people taking the view that they will vote for neither. The Left List vote was disappointing. It is clear that the weeks which we had to publicise a new name were not sufficient and that some people voted for Respect thinking they were voting for us. 

It was, however, right to stand in the elections. When we took part in hustings we made a real impact, helped to pull the campaign to the left and put distinctive policies on housing, crime and immigration onto the agenda. We were also able to intervene around the teachers' strikes and against the BNP putting a political alternative. It would have been wrong to take part in an election campaign where no one challenged the dominant consensus. 

At the same time, it was also right not to put all our emphasis on elections. Elections are a very useful snapshot of consciousness among working class people at any one time, but they don't tell the whole story. Of necessity, they reflect the past more than the present in the sense that people still vote mostly on past loyalties or on issues which particular parties have or have not taken up in the past. The different groups of workers going on strike over pay, or the 100,000 who attended the carnival, or those becoming radicalised over the banking and economic crisis and the high cost of food and commodities, or the students who have campaigned for fighting unions, have a specific weight regardless of if or how they vote. 

Any socialist or left organisation has to relate to them, as well as to ethnic minorities suffering immigration raids, or the Muslim community suffering racism and attacks on civil liberties. Opposition to the war continues, as does defence of women's rights, especially over abortion and the reactionary attempt to reduce the time limit. The outcome of the various struggles that take place in the coming months can have a greater impact on the balance of class forces, on people's lives and their willingness to engage in further struggle than where they put their cross on a ballot paper. 

Where does the left go from here? Firstly, this is a time when many on the left want to discuss why Livingstone lost, whether a Tory government is inevitable and how the left can organise to defend ourselves. We have had nearly a decade when the movement has seemed on the rise, since Seattle in 1999, and this is a reverse which requires explanation and serious analysis if it is not to lead some to despair. 

Secondly, we have to engage in activity which can counter despair and point a way forward for the left: whether against fascism, for higher pay or over housing needs. But that activity on its own is not enough. We also need political solutions to the major ideological and political questions that face us. Socialists are well placed to do this: we have a set of ideas which attempt to understand the world in order to change it, also because we take a wider view of the working class movement.

The crucial questions facing the movement today are how do we develop successful struggles and how do we build an alternative to Labour which has so badly failed generations of working people? The election results were bad for the left overall in London - although even here there were some very good votes in north and east London which show the left can present an alternative - but in parts of the country the results were extremely good, for example in Sheffield and Preston. Other results, for example the anti-academies councillors in Barrow, who won four seats, show there is space to the left of Labour that needs to be filled. 

That is why it would be a mistake to abandon the electoral field, and why the Left List should continue to organise locally, through meetings, networks and activities which can allow us to build a base in the localities. In London we began to establish very good networks among different ethnic minorities and trade unionists, but in this election they did not translate into votes. We have to build on our areas of success to find a way of winning more votes in future. 

The left also needs to build links and organisation on every issue which confronts us - war, fascism, a growing housing crisis, attacks on living standards - which at present will fall short of total electoral or programmatic unity, but which should aim to go beyond single-issue campaigns. Labour MP John McDonnell has put forward a list of demands that Labour should adopt to win the next election and these sorts of issues are ones which can unite the left.

Finally, socialists are too few in number to bring about the changes and policies we need. That has to change, both by winning more people directly to socialist ideas, and by deepening our influence where we can make a difference and where we have already shown the importance of socialist organisation. That also means spreading our influence geographically, especially to areas such as outer London where the fascists have gained support in recent years. 

The world is changing very fast. We do not know the full extent of the economic crisis -  - only that it is already affecting jobs, wages and housing. We can see the terrible impact of neoliberal policies as people riot in different parts of the world to gain enough to eat. We know that there is great disillusion with existing politics and a sometimes inchoate desire for change. Socialists can give a lead  and make a real difference by fighting on the economic, political and ideological fronts.

END

Pay, the fightback…and how much do you spend on your horse?

Many workers are gaining confidence to join the resistance to pay cuts and privatisation. Charlie Kimber assesses the pressure 

on Gordon Brown from below

The fallout from the tremendous strikes and rallies on 24 April is continuing. Those who struck then are debating doing it again. Some of those who did not strike are discussing getting involved. And many others look on, wishing their own union leaders could be won to such action.

Gordon Brown's oft repeated determination to hold pay rises for 6 million public sector workers at half the rate of inflation must have lost Labour piles of votes on 1 May. But Brown shows no signs of backing off. This confrontation is a central economic and political issue. It poses the fundamental question of 2008: will workers agree to let their living standards be cut in order to bail out the bosses, the bankers and capitalism?

Over 400,000 strikers on 24 April gave a resounding message that they won't see their pay cut without a fight. The strikes reflected feeling over lack of staff, the penetration of private interests into the public sector and the oppressive power of management. But the main unifying issue was pay.

Now the chance exists to recreate that day on a higher level. Around 800,000 local government workers in Unison rejected their 2.45 percent offer and are now voting in a strike ballot. The initial indications are that the first strikes could be in early July. Teachers are discussing a further strike ballot in the autumn.

The 100,000 civil service workers who struck on 24 April could also strike again. July will see the 80,000 workers in the Department for Work and Pensions face the second year of an imposed deal which means 0 percent for 40 percent of the workforce. 

At its conference the whole PCS civil service union backed a motion calling for a national strike ballot of 280,000 members over pay and other issues. Further education lecturers have agreed further strikes - in London on 9 June to coincide with the TUC lobby of parliament, and two days nationally in September. And at the CWU conference postal workers are to debate calling a national strike ballot over pensions. And there's also a fight in the private sector - over pensions at Grangemouth and with Unite promising a real challenge over pay on the London buses.

But for the revolt to come to fruition it will require a political battle at every level. Unfortunately the left lost its move for another ballot for a strike this summer at the NUT executive. After the May elections one section of the trade union leaders will demand that there are no strikes in case the government is weakened and the Tories benefit.

In some unions, especially those affiliated to Labour, there is heavy pressure from the top to damp down any fight. But even here the feeling from below has forced strike ballots.

Those who continue to argue for surrender ignore the fact that workers should only be loyal to a government that is loyal to them, not one that cuts their wages and privatises services. If the left does not give a focus to the anger against Labour then it is precisely the right that gains. This is the lesson from the 1970s.

A union movement that is hobbled and demobilised will be one that is demoralised enough to let the Tories in. Over the next few weeks there needs to be intense rank and file pressure to compel union leaders to call ballots, to win those ballots and, as far as possible, to secure coordinated action between unions. 

And inside the unions' national and section executives the left needs to insist that the members' interests come first, not the interests of Labour ministers or the career prospects of Gordon Brown. 

Fixing the figures 

Galloping inflation is the major factor driving the pressure for a fightback over pay. Britain's rate of inflation rose to 3 percent in April, well above the pay increases offered to millions of workers in both the public and the private sectors. And the real rate of inflation for ordinary people is rising at least twice as fast as the official figures show.

The more accurate Retail Price Index (RPI) rate of inflation rose to 4.2 percent in April, up from 3.8 percent in March. But official figures released on 13 May showed food up 7.2 percent, household energy up 8.3 percent and transport fuel up 18.7 percent. 

More detailed analysis shows spaghetti up 59 percent and baguettes up 23 percent. A basket of typical food essentials was up 19.1 percent on a year earlier. 

Worse is to come. Wholesale price inflation, which is an indicator of future price rises, was up 6.2 percent in April. Gas and electricity prices are set to go up a further 15 percent this year, another harsh blow for those who are already struggling with the average bill of more than £1,000. No wonder that on 14 May Bank of England governor Mervyn King said, "There will be a squeeze on living standards over the next couple of years."

One traditional response when the figures look bad is to leave reality untouched, but to try to fix the figures. This is certainly happening. In the spring the Office for National Statistics added fees for stabling horses to the goods whose prices it measures to work out inflation. 

Maybe there are millions of workers out there for whom this is a crucial component of their monthly budget. But I reckon it won't be much consolation as your food bill goes through the roof to know that some chief executive's dappled grey is still getting its board and lodging at a bargain price. 

And while inflation rises, unemployment is also going up. One study in mid-May estimated that 1,200 people will lose their jobs every day over the next 18 months. Unemployment has been rising for the last three months and reached 1.6 million in March.

Meanwhile around 2.5 million credit card customers have had restrictions put on their accounts as part of the fallout from the "credit crunch". While most banks continue to make record profits, they have cut customers' spending limits, brought in annual fees and even closed accounts.

Those targeted are not those who use their cards indiscriminately. They are those who don't bring enough profit. Many use their cards rarely and pay off the balance in full every month.

A uSwitch survey found that 51 percent of the targeted customers were using their cards regularly and making at least minimum repayments. A further 20 percent were using their card regularly and paying their bill in full. Just 16 percent had exceeded their credit limit in the last year or missed more than one 

monthly repayment.

END

The resistible rise of the BNP

The recent local elections saw the BNP gain ten councillors and a London Assembly member. Judith Orr puts these results in context, and argues that the fascists can, and must, be stopped once more

One of the most shocking results last month was the election of Nazi British National Party (BNP) member Richard Barnbrook to London's assembly. This was on top of 13 seats the fascist organisation won in councils in England. It also lost three seats, so its net gain was ten, bringing a total of 57 seats. 

The BNP often quotes a figure of over 100 seats, but this includes parish councils where it often stands unopposed or without its candidates identifying themselves as BNP members. In ten of its 13 seats the BNP replaced a Labour councillor, showing it can capture seats outside the inner cities where Labour's base has collapsed. 

The BNP has also been given a massive boost with programmes like those featured in the BBC's White Season and the endless flow of media attacks on immigrants. In many cases, far from challenging such ideas, Labour has been seen to go along with them, most recently in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

The BNP won its first seats in South Yorkshire - two in Rotherham; two in Amber Valley and two in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both in the East Midlands; and one in the Three Rivers borough in the Eastern Region. It also came very near to winning a number of seats, including Amber Valley where it lost winning a third seat by just one vote. Nine of the top 20 wards it just missed were in South Yorkshire. The North East also saw some worrying results, when the BNP came within 60 votes of winning in Hartlepool, and polled over 25 percent in Newcastle.

In the 2004 European elections the BNP won 4.91 percent of the vote with 808,200 votes. On the basis of the votes gained this May, it has the potential to win seats in Yorkshire and Humberside, the North West and the Midlands in next year's Euro election.

But the disturbing headlines about the BNP's victories are just one part of the story. It's important to put these votes in perspective. The percentage of the BNP vote rose by only 0.6 percent from 2004 in the London Assembly election. Yet this was enough to push it over the critical 5 percent barrier and win a seat. 

However, because of the high turnout of 45.3 percent (up by 8.3 percent from 2004) it meant it won 130,714 votes. It's worth noting that the total Conservative, BNP and UK Independence Party (UKIP) vote is almost the same as it was in 2004 - around 42 percent. UKIP's vote collapsed from 8.2 percent to 1.9 percent, with their votes being distributed to the Tories and the BNP. 

But the BNP also faces problems. Nationally it is still finding it hard to break into inner city areas - but it is trying. Also its Eurofascist strategy - putting itself across as a respectable political party - is succeeding in winning it seats but also has limitations. 

As is the case with all fascist parties, the BNP is pulled in two different directions. One is towards elections, and another to taking to the streets in order to break up and terrorise progressive movements and immigrant areas. This creates tensions in its own ranks. We have seen several cases of this inside the BNP, most recently in Colwyn Bay, Wales. In May three BNP town councillors resigned before even attending a council meeting. One said he did not realise the BNP was a fascist party and didn't like the fact that he was attacked by the party for helping an Asian family.

On the other hand, we have also seen a section of the party frustrated by the restraints imposed in the quest for respectability, wanting to break out of the straitjacket of elections. That is why we have seen convictions of a number of BNP members for violence. For the BNP to carry out its aim of creating a fascist state, elections will not be enough and it will have to take to the streets. 

This is what all classic fascist movements have done in the past. The BNP has made several forays in recent years but has been pushed back by the anti-fascist movement. With its electoral success the pressure will grow for the BNP to capitalise on its gains and take to the streets in the near future.

All this shows the urgency of building against the fascists on many fronts in the coming months. The success of the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) carnival was proof that there is a real mood to build opposition. The next step is building the biggest possible turnout on 21 June for the demonstration called in London by LMHR and Unite Against Fascism (UAF).  

UAF will be calling a series of rallies all over the country, targeting particular places where the BNP has done well. The rallies alone will not be enough to challenge the growth of the BNP. In every city and region it will need local UAF groups involving trade unionists, students and other activists who can build roots to undercut the BNP at a local level. 

Next year there will be a Northern carnival, on the same scale as this year's carnival in London. At the same time LMHR will be trying to reach out to young people and will be holding a series of concerts in Hull, Rotherham, Stoke, Barking and Dagenham. LMHR will also be creating, alongside teachers' unions, an educational pack for schools to use in developing anti-racist education. 

This year's election results shows there can be no complacency surrounding the BNP. Those who say we can just ignore the BNP and it will go away are playing a dangerous game. This strategy failed in France, as the growth of the fascist National Front shows. 

What is needed is a broad based movement that can undermine the BNP at both a national and local level. But that leaves open one important question: how can we build a socialist current that offers people an alternative?

END

Feature ends

Feature

Housing benefits

The abandonment of council housing building has worsened dramatically the housing crisis, both socially and financially. Glyn Robbins argues the case for publicly owned, democratically run and high quality social housing

The current world economic crisis is unusual. Previous recessions have been triggered by commodity prices, runs on the banks, stock market crashes, wars, natural disasters and hyperinflation. The roots of this one lie in the absurdity of the housing market. 

The catastrophic collapse of subprime mortgages in the US revealed much wider weaknesses in international capitalism, but the origins are very simple. Housing, which most of us regard as an essential of human existence, is so overpriced that millions of people around the world can't afford it without risking financial ruin. Subprime aftershocks are now working their way through the global financial system, but amid all the hand wringing and analysis it's important to hold on to the fundamentals: treating housing as a speculative commodity doesn't work and, while it may make fortunes for a few, it creates misery for many.

In the US, a country that has never had an equivalent of council housing, millions of low and middle income families have been compelled to buy a home at the limit of what they can afford. The unscrupulous selling of subprime mortgages has resulted in mass repossessions, homelessness and social decay. 

It would be a great mistake to think that "it couldn't happen here". The many "low cost" home ownership products that are subprime mortgages by another name - and have dominated the business plans of housing associations - are now exposed.

Britain is firmly in the grip of a housing crisis and it's likely to get worse. Already there are 1.5 million people on council waiting lists and the queue is going to get longer as the number of repossessions inevitably increases. Decades of under-investment in genuinely affordable rented housing are not only failing to generate the new homes we need, but are also leaving millions of council tenants 

living in deplorable conditions, often leading to poor health, impaired education and a raft of other social consequences that are not only bad for individuals, but for their communities and our society as a whole. 

The failure of current policy results from the slavish obsession with home ownership and the assumption, against all evidence, that the market has the power to provide the homes we need. A snapshot from the figures for new homes built shows the roots of the problem (see graph below).

There are some important - if obvious - conclusions to draw from these figures. First is the collapse of council house building. It is almost impossible to believe that only a generation ago half of all new homes built were genuinely public. Second is the overall, if sporadic, decline in the number of new homes built. The current government target is for 3 million new homes by 2020. Some critics, including the charity Shelter, say this isn't enough. A glance back in time shows that the capacity of the construction industry - when linked to adequate public investment - can deliver far more than our current expectations. Thirdly, despite enjoying a unique place at the right hand of government policy, housing associations have singularly failed to fill the gap left by council house building. Even taking the loosest definition of "affordable", we are still in a situation where only one in ten new homes in Britain are built for people who can't afford to buy. 

It could be argued that housing policy has more impact on people's everyday lives than any other plank of government, with the possible exception of wars. In his studies of the Ocean Estate in Stepney, Professor Peter Ambrose has extensively recorded the way that bad housing has knock-on effects for a multitude of public services - and thereby public expenditure. For example, Ambrose shows that poorly housed families are far more likely to call upon health services, and their children to need extra help at school. It's less easy to calculate other social costs, but the problems of petty crime, drugs and the alienation of young people are often associated with poor housing. Government refusal to adequately invest in housing is a false economy.  

One consequence of the deification of home ownership is the way it explicitly encourages an individualistic outlook on life. Many words have been poured out describing our atomised, fractured society, but it is often with an underlying sense that this is the natural order of things. The house building industry is wedded to this concept of individualism, of which having a mortgage is the ultimate expression. The neurosis associated with the mortgage fixation is depicted in one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. Writing about Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller recalls, "I hoped it was a time bomb under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that sought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last!" 

As Miller succinctly observes, after buying a home comes buying things to put in it. The housing academic Professor Peter Malpass once referred to government elevating shopping to a "civic duty" and there is no question that our patterns of consumerism are strongly linked to the culture of home ownership.

We should also recall what Frederick Engels said about mortgages "…chaining the workers by this property to the factory in which they work." 

The British economy, like that of the US, is now intrinsically linked to the fate of the housing market. Over the past 17 years house price inflation has represented one of the key drivers of economic growth, even though this growth is largely illusory. What has become clear in the US - and will soon reach Britain - is just how fragile this reliance on house prices is.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with buying your own home, but we need to think about what impact it has on our society and environment. To do this, we need to look beyond some of the historic and ideological prejudices that have built up against renting in general and council housing in particular. 

Just as the costs of bad housing are sometimes indirect, so too are the benefits of good housing. When we consider post-war housing policy, we should try to calculate the real value to the nation of two generations of council housing. My dad was born in rented, private sector slum housing in the East End, but when he was seven, along with 25,000 others, his family was offered a new council house in Dagenham. Without this move to a new home with a garden, inside toilet, affordable rent and security of tenure, it is impossible to believe that my dad's family would have had the stability, good health and relative material comfort that they enjoyed. And if my dad had not had these things, it's unlikely I would have had them. If we multiply this experience by the millions of people who have lived in and benefited from council housing, we arrive at a more accurate assessment of the value of direct state investment in building affordable homes. 

The deterioration of council housing has been well chronicled, often by people who never liked it in the first place, but there's no point pretending that council housing is a panacea or that it hasn't had serious problems. There have been systemic failures in the way that council housing has been run, but it is impossible to disconnect this from nearly three decades of progressive cuts in funding, linked to increasing stigmatisation of council tenants. This has contributed to an atmosphere of despair and cynicism that extends from the town hall to the local housing office. An ex colleague of mine once said that he had gone to work for a housing association because he was "sick of saying no to people". 

On her first day in office the new housing minister, Caroline Flint, decided not to talk about the chronic undersupply of affordable housing, but to launch an attack on the character of council tenants. Leaving aside the details of what were, to put it kindly, badly thought-through proposals, what they indicate is that council tenants are now fair game. 

To abuse council tenants in the mid-1970s was to abuse one third of the population and almost certainly a friend or member of your family. With the progressive erosion of council housing in the following years, council tenants have become a smaller, but easier, target. The "chav" character is one example, but it was best captured by the television programme Little Britain. In one sketch, over the image of a tower block, the narrator says, "In Britain, poor people live in council housing." I recently heard a more vulgar example at a football match between West Ham and Liverpool, when a supporter of the London team shouted, "You council cunts!"at the Liverpool supporters, as if an association with the first of the C words - "council" - captured everything he despised. 

But such prejudices now have official sanction, as illustrated by Ms Flint's first day outburst. Her predecessor was forced to shelve plans in the current Housing Bill that sought to introduce means testing for access to council housing. This would be a fundamental rejection of the principles of the welfare state and of the government's own comprehensive policy review in the Hills Report. It would again run the risk of repeating the disastrous mistakes of the US, where access to decent, public, low cost housing has always been means tested. The result has been the creation of ghettos of poverty, overwhelmingly inhabited by non-whites, single parents, the elderly and the disabled. As the Hills Report shows, this social and ethnic stratification is already occurring in Britain. Sadly, I fear that another attempt will be made to introduce means testing for council housing, unless there is a fundamental rethink of policy.

The first generation of council housing took place in response to the appalling housing conditions of the Victorian slums, the second as the result of the Blitz. It's time for the third generation.

The core principles of council housing will remain the same: affordable rents, secure tenancies, public ownership and democratic control. With 3 million existing tenants, many of whom have said no to privatisation, and 1.4 million on the waiting list, the demand for council housing is indisputable. Here are just some of the things that third generation council housing can deliver.

1) Public housing on public land. 

The government persists with the absurdity of encouraging local councils and other public authorities to sell off their land. Every day millions of pounds worth of public assets are being lost, often with negligible returns to the public purse. 

The huge long term benefits of retaining the value of public land have been recognised by a range of authorities. Taking the volatile cost of land out of the housing development equation will release massive resources. Local authorities not only own much of the land, but also have the knowledge and expertise to deal with the necessary legal and planning transactions. This would substantially speed up the development process and make it cheaper. In this way, building council housing could make a substantial impact on the government's target for new homes.

2) Low energy, zero carbon council homes.

New Labour wants all new homes to be "zero carbon" by 2016 and expects the private sector to build them. Very few developers intend to meet this target. As the market falls, they will put profit before reducing damage to our environment. 

Using public resources presents the best - perhaps the only - opportunity to build sustainable homes. The demands of providing zero carbon homes are substantial, but it can only be done as part of a national strategy, overseen by government, but devolved to local authorities and elected councillors. 

How we live in our homes is as important as how we build them. Because of its public ownership, ethos and direct links to the local democratic process, council housing is far better placed to promote energy efficient homes than are private, unaccountable housing developers. According to the 2005 English House Condition Survey council homes are already among the most energy efficient in the country. Technologies like combined heat and power are far more viable based on the communal heating principle that has long been a feature of council housing. Britain's recycling rates still lag way behind those of other countries, but it is impossible to disconnect this from people's housing conditions. Investing in council housing would give people a real incentive to care for their local environment. 

3) Council housing and community cohesion.

We hear a great deal about our fractured, atomised society, but very little about how we combat the culture of individualism that alienates many of our communities and particularly young people. Council housing can offer an alternative. When people are poorly, expensively and insecurely housed, it's no wonder they find little energy or motivation for wider community activities or participation. 

Well built, well maintained, well managed council housing has the potential to dissolve the social boundaries in our society. Despite the attacks of the last 25 years, council housing is still far more socially and ethnically mixed and integrated than suburban monocultures. The many community projects that flourish on council estates, not least the dynamic history of tenant campaigns, are a testismony to this

4) Modern local services and local jobs.

Investing in a third generation of council housing offers huge potential for devolving local services and creating local jobs. To do this it will be necessary to brush off some old ideas. 

There is a stack of evidence to show that housing services are best provided at local, estate-based level, by people who are properly trained and have permanent contracts of employment. The ever-increasing sub-contracting and casualisation of housing work, together with the growth of remote call centres, have contributed to poorer, less accountable, less accessible services, as well as substantial increases in disrepair, crime and "anti-social behaviour". The return of the resident caretaker, estate handyperson and local housing office should be a vital part of a new era for council housing. 

It's important to see the current state of housing in an international context. I have already referred to the important policy parallels with the US, but the common threads extend much further. In his book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis graphically illustrates the way the "Washington Consensus" has influenced housing policy around the globe. One example Davis describes is the way that governments have promoted urban regeneration schemes that promote private luxury housing over affordable rented housing. In the name of producing mixed communities traditional working class areas have seen a process of gentrification that is thinly veiled social and ethnic engineering. 

New Labour wants to put the final nail in the coffin of mainstream British council 

housing - a unique service that has served the needs of millions for generations. If unchallenged, the consequences could be disastrous. Council tenants won't let this happen. Gordon Brown needs to climb off his blinkered, ideological horse and admit that the majority of people want to see a future for council housing - now more than ever - but one that is based on taking the best of the past and combining it with a new vision for the council housing of the future.

END

Interview: Benjamin Zephaniah

Rythms of radical culture

Poet, novelist and musician Benjamin Zephaniah talks to Weyman Bennett and Judith Orr about politics, culture and why Boris Johnson's appointement of a black deputy should fool no one

Your most recent album, Naked, blends spoken word with music. Is there more space for that? 

For me they've never been really separate. When I start thinking about poetry I think of the sound of poetry and the effect it has on people when they hear it, rather than how they see it on the page. 

There was a very strong oral tradition in England when most people were illiterate. There was no access to books until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Books were not just printed and then given to the masses. Books were printed for the elite, and then poetry became an elite thing. Even when I perform a poem without music I can hear the music between the gaps, and it's really nice when I see members of the audience get it as well. 

Are you going to do more music? 

At the moment I'm going through a novel writing stage, but I'm beginning to feel itchy feet. Maybe next year I'll start doing some more poetry gigs and after a couple of months I'll probably want to say something through music. It's coming. It's as if I'm pregnant and soon I'll have to give birth to another album. 

I really appreciate the fact that I'm able to do it when I want to, because so many artists do things they don't want to do because of their contract. I knew I was going to enjoy this interview because I'm not just sitting down and plugging a product, where if I go off and start talking about the Iraq war the record company are there saying, "Bring it back to the album."

Boris Johnson was elected mayor in the recent London elections. What do you think of his appointment of a black deputy, Ray Lewis? 

I think Boris Johnson was, and probably still is, a very dangerous right wing Tory. These people are bigots, they're racist, but they've got to be electable. So it's in his interest to tone down his rhetoric and to be seen to be inclusive. After all the things he said against multiculturalism, to go into that office and appoint a black deputy - no one should be fooled by it. It's just clever politicking. 

I remember Colin Powell talking about how loyal he is to the US. It's like in the old days when an invader went into a country with an army and then set up a puppet regime; physically and militarily controlling it. Now the US makes sure there's a McDonald's and Starbucks, and all their economic and political interests taken care of, and they don't have to be there physically. There are exceptions with Iraq of course.

I think the same thing happens with racists. The best person to work on behalf of a racist is a black person so they can say, "I can't be a racist because I've got this person working for me". George Bush is one of the most sexist, racist politicians on the planet, yet he had a black man and a black woman as two of his closest aides, but those people do not care about the black community. 

If you were driving down the road in the 1980s, at a time when the police were so racist, the worst thing was to get stopped by a black policeman, because he wanted to impress the white policeman. My poem "Dis policeman keeps kicking me to death" is from a true experience. I was actually in a police station, the police were kicking the shit out of me, and I went, "You racist bastard!" and said, "You calling me a racist? We'll see to that." He walked out and a black policeman walked in and just carried on beating me! So people like Boris Johnson have all these people around them, as if they're supposed to represent people, but they're just there to oppress you as much as he would. 

The other election shock was BNP member Richard Barnbrook being elected to the London Assembly. Why do you think this has happened?

Britain is getting more nationalistic, more inward looking, more militaristic. When I'm not in London I'm in China, and there are people around the world saying, "People talk about boycotting China. Well maybe we should boycott Britain as well." 

We'll be hosting the Olympics soon in a place where you can be a Muslim and write a poem and you get imprisoned. In gym not long ago I was training three boys and one girl. We were doing some boxing and kung fu. One of the guys went out and I said, "Where's he gone? Has he got lost looking for the toilet?" And they said, "No, he's gone to pray," and I thought, "Gosh, you're all Muslims! This could be classed as a training camp!" We laughed, but it's serious. 

None of this stuff surprises me, and I think a lot of it is about the failure of the Labour Party; the failure of all major politicians in a sense. I'm not sure if Boris Johnson won the position or if Ken Livingstone lost it.

There have also been constant attacks on multiculturalism.

I'm an unashamed multiculturalist because I think that Britain, by its very nature, is multicultural. Britain does multiculturalism better than almost anywhere else in the world. There are more white and black people in the US, but there is less intermarriage, for example. 

The problem is that when it's working no one complains. It doesn't make good news to say, "Today in Brixton the Chinese community lives alongside the Indian community which lives alongside the black community, and nothing happened. Everyone had a good time." But the moment something happens it's, "Multiculturalism must be questioned. Is one culture swamping another culture?" The opposite of multiculturalism is monoculturalism, and the last person to take that to its logical conclusion in a place where there were lots of cultures was Hitler. 

When people talk about defending British culture, they have to talk about setting up a think tank to decide what British culture is, because nobody knows. A lot of the talk about multiculturalism is simply racism mixed with the idea of the "war on terror".

For example, some people put bombs on themselves. They went into London and blew the trains and the buses up. Then we watched videos of them saying, "We did this because of what you are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and what you are allowing to happen to Palestinians." Yet people turn the television off and go, "Why did they do this?" It's like there's a massive elephant in the room called Iraq and it is ignored. 

Do you think the government's talk about finding a British culture and the rise of Islamophobia have legitimised the ideas of the BNP? 

Yes. One of the most disturbing trends is hearing even black people talking about the immigrants coming into this country and taking our jobs. I'm thinking, "They were saying that about you just a decade ago." 

You feel so comfortable, you've got your house - OK, you've got a bit of debt, but that makes you feel British - and if I turn away you sound English or cockney or Brummie. You feel you've arrived, and now you want to deny what you have to newcomers. Black people who have not even completely got over the trauma of racism now feel confident to say things which are racist but coat them by saying they care about the English language 

or care about what's happening in our schools.

What do you think about the resistance to that, through the anti-war movement or the Love Music Hate Racism carnival? Is there room for optimism?

I get a lot of young people saying, "Yeah, I want to resist. I want to do something. But I don't know where to go." What fascinates me is that we can have a demonstration like 15 February 2003 and it happens all over the world: there was one going on in Chile, in Japan, another in Jamaica, and that gives me hope. But there's nobody on the international stage galvanising all this energy, it needs someone to harness and really direct it. We should have an international workers' party.

I spoke to a 14 year old girl who went to the Love Music Hate Racism carnival. I felt in her voice the excitement of my first Rock Against Racism concert. It's really good because she's not particularly political, but it made her think and got her talking. She rang me to say, "I went to this thing, I got this leaflet and what you were saying makes sense now." So, yes, we can do something through culture and music. I think one of the things you've got to realise about political struggle is that sometimes something happens that's really profound but we don't see it straight away. 

You work with young people a lot. What's your take on what's happening in young people's lives and what we've seen in London in recent months?

Let me tell you about what they call gun crime and knife culture. When we were kids we used to fight. We were martial artists and we used to get black eyes and we used to do slashing rather than stabbing. It was about territory, about macho stances, and even about sound systems. "What are you fighting over?" "Oh, our tunes are better than their tunes." Crazy when you think about it. 

Now I think it's a lot more serious. I was talking to a kid the other day and he said, "Why do you want to do all that kung fu? I just want to be a hundred yards away and shoot them." His attitude was like going shopping: I want quick food. I don't want to waste any energy. 

I've got a theory about this, and some people say it may be over the top but I still stand by it. Who do these kids look to? There is negative music around, talking about my posse, my postcode and all that. But forget that. The kids are doing what the politicians and the police are telling them to do, looking towards our leaders and do you remember what they said in the lead up to war? They said we need a pre-emptive strike. They said that if it looks like someone may strike us in the future we're going to strike them now. So if I'm a young kid living in Hackney and I'm walking down the street and see a white guy with a skinhead, and I think he might attack me some time in the future, I'm going to attack him now. 

I'd say it was the law of the jungle, but I think that's quite insulting to the jungle.  

The government's response is just criminalising young people.

We need a less militaristic, more caring society. When four kids are in the dock in front of a judge, it may well be the case that one of those needs to go to prison for a long time, it may be that one needs some help, it may be that one just needs some parents or that one has dyslexia. I think when a judge - and I think most judges are wankers anyway - looks at a group of people they should look at them as individuals. 

A lot of the public are educated by the mainstream media to think that the system is working well if someone's got a long sentence. We know that's not true. If you get a long sentence you just come out angrier. I did a couple of years in the nick, and when I came out I was so angry for being imprisoned for something I didn't do that four weeks later I found a policeman and kicked the shit out of him because I just felt I had to get my revenge. In prison nobody asked me how I felt. Nobody talked to me. It was just punishment. 

In your books for young people you capture the dilemma of kids who get excluded, who have no sense of hope and there's a sense of them finding themselves.

I remember Margaret Thatcher saying, "If you reach the age of 30 and you have to use a bus you're a failure." I was talking not long ago with Carol Ann Duffy, the poet, and I made a reference back to the Thatcher age and she said, "But Benjamin, we're still in the Thatcher age." She was right. That's the mentality. Some kids leave school and maybe they're very good with apprenticeships or something else but if they don't do well in university they're a failure. I'm not sure I'd have done well in university actually. It's a real irony that I've got these 14 honorary doctorates from universities from doing stuff outside of academia.

A lot of the bestselling children's novelists are well educated, middle class, white people. Many are ex-teachers. They have studied children and talk about doing research, and then sitting down to write a book. I simply say, "Remember, Benjamin, when you were 14, you hated books. If a teacher gave you a book you thought, 'What the fuck's that?'" So I ask myself what would I have liked to have read when I was 14? I don't sit there with a dictionary. If it's not in my vocabulary then I don't use it. I don't need to do any research. 

My second novel was about boys and refugees. I know what it was like to go into school where I was the only black person. My mum thought she'd be really smart and send me to an all white school and I remember walking round thinking, "My god!" - and I spoke the same language. What would it be like if I came from war-torn Ethiopia and had to just walk into a school? These are things that really matter to young people. 

One of the best reviews I ever read was from an Ethiopian newspaper. It said, "How does he understand the mind of a 14 year old Ethiopian boy?" That was a 

great compliment.

END

A to Z of Socialism

M is for Mass strike

"…for the first time [it] awoke feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock…the proletarian mass…quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains."

This is Rosa Luxemburg's description in The Mass Strike of the impact of the strike wave that swept the Russian Empire in January and February 1905. 

More mass strikes followed in October and December, leaving the Tsar's autocratic regime battered if not yet overthrown. In all there were 23 million strike days in Russia during 1905, far outnumbering anything seen previously in Russia or the more advanced industrialised countries.

For the first time the strike weapon was the central driving force of a revolution. The experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 had been full of lessons for Karl Marx, not least that workers could not simply lay hold of the existing state machine, but had to smash it. But strikes were marginal, reflecting the predominance of small scale artisanal workshops in the city. Now the mass strike revealed itself, in Luxemburg's words, as "the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution".

The experience of revolution throughout the course of the 20th century vindicated this insight time and again. There were revolutionary mass strikes in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918-23, Italy in 1920, Hungary in 1956, France in 1936 and again in 1968, Iran in 1978-79 and Poland in 1980.

Luxemburg was concerned above all to draw out the lessons of 1905 for the German working class, the most powerful of her day. 

In "normal" periods, outside of revolution, a division between politics as the realm of parliamentary representation and economics as the sphere of trade union bargaining is deeply entrenched. In both, workers are often passive by-standers, only occasionally asked to participate in elections or in limited strike action to strengthen the hand of the union negotiators. The mass strike sweeps all this aside, as workers enter the struggle on their own behalf, and barriers between economics and politics are dissolved.

It is not just that militant economic struggles can lead to clashes with the state, its laws and police, but mass political strikes provide a huge stimulus to economic strikes, especially among sections of workers who previously had little or no tradition of militancy or even union organisation. The "ceaseless reciprocal action" between economic and political  issues in mass strikes acts to constantly recruit new forces to the battle, as new groups of workers stir, and raise their own demands, perhaps for the first time.

This leads to a point Luxemburg makes in response to the arguments put forth by the trade union leaders of her day, and ours. "How can a mass strike be attempted without the overwhelming majority of workers being already unionised and with full trade union treasuries to ensure hardship doesn't drive workers back to work?" cried the leaders of Germany's well organised unions. Luxemburg responds that it is the mass strike itself that draws new groups of workers into union organisation, in a way the normal course of trade union affairs could never do. 

In Russia a "feverish" work of unionisation set in after the first mass strikes of 1905. The strikes and factory occupations in 1936 in France saw the membership of the main trade union federation, the CGT, rise from 1 to 5 million. Luxemburg gives one condition for this: the strikes must be "fighting strikes" that really threaten to settle accounts with the exploiters. When they are top-down strikes, controlled in scope and duration, they will tend at best to be limited to those already encompassed by trade union organisation.

Mass strikes, Luxemburg observes, above all change workers themselves and on a scale and with a speed years of socialist propaganda alone could never achieve. In January 1905 workers petitioned the Tsar and called him "little Father"; by December a significant minority were determined to overthrow him. Through the mass strike workers cease to be the passive victims of capitalism and become an active revolutionary force.

The Mass Strike took fire above all at the powerful layer of trade union officials in Germany who reacted in horror to any hint that the "Russian" methods might be contemplated at home. In "backward" Russia, where workers lacked legal rights, such militant methods might be suitable, but they were wholly inappropriate, dangerous even, in "advanced" Germany. Luxemburg's book was a devastating attack on this complacent outlook. 

But Luxemburg underestimated the danger the trade union bureaucracy - and its allies inside the Social Democratic Party - represented. She argued they would be "swept aside" if they resisted the mass strike once it was in motion. But the roots of reformism go much deeper than this suggests, and the capacity of the trade union bureaucracy to derail even the most powerful strike movement has been proved repeatedly. 

But, finally, we should also note that more than once a strike begun as a bureaucratic manoeuvre, initiated and controlled from above, has turned into something much more militant. In May 1968 a one-day general strike called by reluctant trade union leaders in solidarity with students facing de Gaulle's riot police turned, in the following days, into an enormous wave of factory occupations that challenged an advanced Western capitalism.

Mark Thomas

Further reading:

The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Fröhlich are both available from Bookmarks. The Patterns of Mass Strike by Tony Cliff is available at tinyurl.com/4yx2yw

END

Fortress Europe

Samos island: a Greek tragedy

When British academic Chris Jones, acclaimed for his writing on radical social work, went to live on a small Greek island he discovered that he was living on a frontline. He reports on the plight of desperate refugees who risk their lives to escape to Europe, and the reaction of the community

T

here are now two significant groups of people traveling to the Greek island of Samos, which lies close to the coast of Turkey. One group is known as tourists or travellers. They come here conventionally from many parts of the world either on the summer charter planes or the ferry boats. They spend most of their time on the beach and rarely have any contact with the authorities. The second group also spends time on the beaches and in the sea. 

Unlike the tourists and travellers they are refugees and arrive through the year and land on the beaches during the hours of darkness. Unlike the tourists their travel to the island has been much more costly, at around £450 for a place in an inflatable dinghy which brings them across the two to three kilometres of sea which separates Samos from Turkey. Unlike the tourists they do get entangled with the authorities, and an alarming number die or are injured getting to the beach. The figures are never accurate, as so many bodies are not recovered, but the Samos police chief claims that 24 bodies were found on the beaches or in fishing nets last year. Local activists think that is a gross under-counting.

Samos is on the borderlands between "fortress Europe" and Turkey. It is the closest of all the Greek islands to the Turkish mainland. The narrowest gap, also the most hazardous in terms of sea conditions, is just 1.2 kilometres. The smugglers can cross with their human cargoes in less than an hour. And over the past 12 months there has been a marked increase in their numbers. In 2007, 4,469 people were detained on Samos compared with less than 1,500 the previous year. 

The authorities on the island are overwhelmed. Until six months ago all the undocumented arrivals were detained in an old building in Samos Town that had formerly been a police station and before that a tobacco warehouse. It was said to accommodate 200 but numbers up to 500 were regularly held. The conditions were horrendous - an offence to human dignity according to the United Nations representative in Athens. There was massive overcrowding, and the building was wholly incapable of dealing with the summer heat or the damp and cold of winter. Toilet and bathing facilities were completely inadequate, and plaster was falling from the walls and ceilings. There was one pay phone in the yard. 

Refugees

The Samos authorities feel they have been let down by the Greek state and by the European Union (EU). This is a longstanding complaint which in part has roots stretching back to the bloody civil war in the late 1940s and the subsequent succession of right wing governments through to the 1970s. Samos and its neighbour Ikaria (both in the same local authority) have long been associated with communism and as such have been deliberately neglected by the central state. This is especially the case for Ikaria. Both islands are very much on the periphery of Greece in many senses.

But it is geography and world politics that have thrown the spotlight on Samos. An island that would wish to be known for its nature and rich flora, for its beaches, and for its association with the mathematician Pythagoras, is now becoming infamous for the way it treats the refugees. In the past 18 months there have been at least two highly critical visits and reports on the situation. One was from a German charity, which was alarmed by the hopeless manner in which the Greek authorities were processing refugees. The second was from an EU commission that had similar concerns arising from the extremely low approval rate (0.61 percent) for asylum seekers. This is the lowest approval rate in the EU. We now await a third report from a Norwegian human rights group.

Samos is a gateway into the EU. With a population of less than 35,000 and high levels of poverty, dependent on tourism and to a lesser extent farming, it is not a place where refugees seek to settle. The population itself is not diverse and non-Greeks stand out. Once they have made it to the beaches the refugees are easily picked up and processed. There is no multicultural urban environment in which to disappear, although local people are sympathetic to their plight. The tabloid press in Greece, no less than their counterparts in Britain, peddle stories about the country being overwhelmed by refugees and undocumented people who are out to steal jobs and livelihoods. On Samos these stories have little purchase. 

For older people like our neighbour Katerinio who is in her mid-80s, the plight of the refugees reminds her of the time when she escaped the Nazi occupation of Samos. Like the refugees of today, she and her parents left during the night and with eight others rowed over to Turkey with nothing and depended entirely on the kindness and humanity of strangers until they arrived in the Greek refugee camps in Gaza and Egypt. Many hundreds from Samos did likewise, so the people now arriving from wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and Eritrea - who make up the majority of the refugees here, are retelling a familiar story. This was well reflected in our small farming village when three young Eritrean men walked the four kilometres up the hill from the sea in December. They were immediately taken into the coffee shop, fed and provided with dry clothes while they waited for the police. All over the island local people are responding to the needs of the refugees and insist on direct contact as they have no trust in the police or the coastguards. 

But Samos is not a good place to land. First there is the sea crossing which, while not long, is perilous in terms of sea conditions and currents. Then there are the Greek coastguards who police the waters. The local commander responsible for Samos sees himself at the frontline of Greece's (and Europe's) defence and talks of the refugees as being an underground Islamic infiltration of the country. 

The coastguards are especially harsh in dealing with the young men who make up the majority of the refugees. All the reports on Samos contain accounts from young men who have been assaulted and in some cases tortured by coastguards. These allegations compelled the government to instigate an inquiry but nobody expects much from that. It was also revealed that the high-speed coastguard patrol boats try to prevent the refugees from landing either swamping their dinghies or by driving them onto tiny uninhabited islands that dot the passage between Turkey and Samos. In both cases, it is left to fishermen either from Turkey or Greece to carry out a rescue.

Those who make it to the beach are picked up and taken to the detention centre where they are detained for 30 days in the first instance. Since December there has been some improvement with the opening of a new purpose-built centre. But welcome as that might be, there is just one part-time lawyer and one part-time social worker on hand to offer any assistance in the centre. Language is a massive problem and an ad hoc system which depends on a local shopkeeper who speaks some English is wholly inadequate. These factors feed into the Greek state's refusal to process claims for asylum. 

It would seem that Samos is typical for Greece as a whole. Firstly the refugees are hassled and messed about - to treat them as humans would only encourage more to come, according to one coastguard - and after at least 30 days are let out to make their way to Athens or Patras (for the boats to Italy) and on into northern Europe. Because the refugees prioritise getting out of detention they fail to realise that without asylum 

status they have no legal future in the EU and are made exceptionally vulnerable. The Greek authorities do virtually nothing to correct this situation, which explains why so few of the over 60,000 refugees each year they "handle" are approved.

Under the governing protocols, the EU insists that claims for asylum have to be handled at the points of entry into the EU. So if refugees leave Greece without their asylum being processed they will simply be returned to Greece for processing and deportation. This is why the Norwegian and German refugee charities are concerned that they find themselves dealing with people for whom they can do little because they have passed through Greece. 

The Greek state is hollowed out by privatisation, neoliberalism and extraordinary levels of corruption. We can expect few new resources to go to the proper and humane treatment of refugees. There is also resentment in Greece that the wealthier northern European countries such as Britain, Germany and France, which don't have borderlands, press the poorer Mediterranean EU states to police fortress Europe with little or no financial support. From the standpoint of the local authorities on Samos it is inconceivable that they have the capacity to manage the human consequences of US and European imperialism and militarism.

For many in the north of Europe, the Greek islands evoke charm, tranquility and beauty. But for some at least, including Samos, Chios and Lesbos, they are sites where the rhetoric of fortress Europe is played out with brutal consequences for those seeking to escape wars not of their making and who find not safety but new horrors and inhumanity.

END

Books

Beijing Coma

Ma Jian

The Olympic flame supposedly signifies democracy and freedom. Ironic, then, that the Chinese Olympic flame had to be "protected" by a bunch of thugs against demonstrators demanding those very things.

Irony is at the centre of Ma Jian's novel, which is simultaneously beautiful and full of brutality: a blistering critique of a repressive society, in which the hardliners now want "a more open economy, but not the demands for political freedoms that it inspired".

Ma Jian has said that he was driven to write Beijing Coma in an attempt to reclaim history from a totalitarian government whose role is to erase it. The book - focusing on the 1989 mass demonstrations for political and cultural freedoms - is a scathing attack on the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party surrounds its history with a wall of silence where any mention of the massacre of unarmed civilians in Tiananmen Square is forbidden and where censorship is all-pervasive (including blocking such words as "freedom" on the internet). In China, Ma Jian's books are banned. The media cannot interview him or even mention his name.

In 1989 Ma Jian was living in semi-exile in Hong Kong. He saw the democracy movement as "some great spark of hope" and returned to Beijing to take part in it. He described a mood where people's "masks" fell away, where people were so excited by the atmosphere that even the pickpockets joined in the strikes.It is clear that writing this book has been very important for Ma Jian. In his words, "This book is very thick. It took me ten years to write."

The narrator and main protagonist is Dai Wei, a student activist who spends ten years in a coma after he was shot in the head during the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

He becomes a prisoner of his body - his experience mirrors the tyranny and the decadence of the system, as his physical state degenerates. But while his body rots, his mind races with energy, with emotions, longings, and, above all, memories. His body echoes Tiananmen, "a trap, a square, with no escape routes", but his mind remains "a warm space with a beating heart, trapped in the middle of a cold city".

His very existence is seen as a threat to the ruling class. He can't speak or move, but the government still keeps him under constant surveillance. On anniversaries of the pro-democracy demonstrations he and his mother are shunted out of their flat and hidden away, in case he becomes a focus for dissent.

As Dai Wei wanders through the interior landscape of his blood vessels and organs, he paints a picture of China from the Cultural Revolution until the present. His father, labelled a "rightist" and imprisoned in a labour camp, is rehabilitated - a broken man with horrific memories of his experiences. His mother, initially obsessed with becoming a loyal party member, looks for salvation to the Falun Gong movement (seen as "another form of madness" by Ma Jian). She becomes another victim of the system, but is also transformed into an outspoken critic: "China is one huge prison. Whether we're in a jail or in our homes, every one of us is a prisoner."

Having crippled Dai Wei, the government won't allow the hospitals to treat him. His mother resorts to any means necessary to fund his medication - from selling his urine to selling one of his kidneys. But Dai Wei remains a "knowing presence" with vivid and articulate memories. In fact his coma has given him more freedom of thought than anyone else around him. He reflects, "I'm probably the only citizen still alive who hasn't signed a statement supporting the government crackdown."

Through Dai Wei's memories we see the frenetic, clumsy attempts to organise the early pro-democracy demonstrations. They make the banners, but forget the poles. They are frightened, brave and have no past experience to shape their ideas. 

It is Ma Jian's belief that on 4 June 1989 the tanks "crushed the soul of a generation" and destroyed any sort of "ethical judgment" among people who are forced to develop schizophrenic personalities in order to survive. This novel denounces the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, but is equally hostile to the corruptibility of the new materialism and "breakneck economic development" which "warps people's personalities and their morality".

Ma Jian actually welcomes China's hosting of the Olympics, hoping that China will be more subject to international scrutiny and that "the army of refugees" (people displaced from their homes to make way for the development of Olympic sites) may themselves become drawn into opposing the system.

Above all, this novel radiates a compassion for ordinary human beings and their striving for justice and freedom. As one of Dai Wei's friends despairs at the existence of corrupt, evil people, Dai Wei retorts, "They aren't evil, they're just the products of an evil system - corruption breeds corruption." His characters change and grow - during a demonstration he observes that "when people become part of a group they find a courage they never knew they possessed before."

We have to hope, with Ma Jian, that a real flame, and not just the bogus, gas-fired flame of the Olympic torch, can be rekindled in China. If so, this book will have played its part.

Beth Stone

Beijing Coma is published by Chatto and Windus, £17.99

END



¡Hugo!

Bart Jones

The Bodley Head

£12.99

Bart Jones's biography of Hugo Chavez is a welcome addition to the literature on the Venezuelan Revolution. It goes beyond a mere study of Chavez the man and delves into the political history of Venezuela and the conditions that shaped the tumultuous rise of the left in the region. 

A well researched piece, it provides an excellent history of modern Venezuelan politics and also contains a number of new interviews with Chavez and many of the people close to him - from army officers who participated in the 1992 coup attempt to members of the present government.

Jones also charts the historical events that shaped Venezuelan society and Chavez's own political development. Accounts of the actions of early Venezuelan radicals such as Simon Bolivar, Zamora and Maisanta are included alongside events such as the bloody Caracazo uprising of the poor in 1989, adding a depth of understanding not present in many texts on the subject.

The book is well written and often reads like a thriller. Particularly impressive are the sections on the 1992 and 2002 coup attempts which are well researched and provide a highly detailed blow by blow account of events as they unfolded.

While this book is a good introduction to Venezuelan politics and provides many new interesting pieces of information it also has some serious flaws. Jones puts no real emphasis on the role played by ordinary people in the revolutionary process and sees them more as passive spectators who depend on Chavez to deliver them needed reforms. He describes them as having been "waiting for someone to come to their rescue". This represents a complete misunderstanding of the balance of class forces within Venezuelan society, and the book suffers a great deal from this. Ultimately Jones sees Chavez as the saviour of the people who, while making mistakes, has single-handedly transformed Venezuela.

Jones also argues that the reason for the defeat of the constitutional amendments in last year's referendum (which would have allowed Chavez to stand indefinitely) was due to a general dislike of socialism by the Venezuelan people. Without providing any evidence for this position he declares that Venezuelans want "social justice without socialism" and were scared by Chavez's increasingly radical rhetoric. As well as being inaccurate, this is completely out of line with the thrust of the rest of the book.

Jones wrote this biography with the aim of challenging the portrayal of Chavez as a tyrant and a demagogue in the US. While providing a very useful tool for those interested in Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution, the book must be read with this in mind. Jones constantly emphasises Chavez's social democratic credentials, and while supportive of his project for "socialism in the 21st century", he at times appears more interested in portraying him as a "good guy" whose "story belongs in a Hollywood movie".

Pete Ramand

Rivals

Bill Emmott

Allen Lane

£20

Bill Emmott was editor of the Economist for many years. He made his name with a prescient book about Japan, The Sun Also Sets, which appeared at a time when many people - especially in the US - were afraid that Japan was going to take over the world. He realised that Japanese capitalism had some serious weaknesses, and when its asset bubble burst, followed by years of stagnation, he was proven correct (though his analysis was in many ways quite superficial). 

The timing of Rivals leads clearly to parallels with the present attention on China, and whether its own economic "miracle" can last. Emmott widens the focus, speculating about the geopolitical and economic future of Asia in a global context. 

The book contains a great deal that is of interest. After a rather feeble introductory section, Emmott takes the three major subject countries in turn and describes their recent economic and political trajectories. I found the Japanese section particularly interesting in its analysis of the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. 

For example, 70 percent of the factory labour force at the electronics company Canon is on "non-regular" terms, ie temporary or part time, compared with just 10 percent in 1995. 

The latter part of the book is devoted to assessing the danger points for conflict within the region and between the emerging Asian great powers and the West. Emmott declares his aim (laudably) as being to connect economics and politics. Though he does, for example, link the Tiananmen Square protests with economic problems (emphasising that workers were involved in the protests) and correctly dismisses the notion that a growing middle class equals democracy, he lacks a real theory of how to make this connection. 

The weakness of his analysis is especially marked when it comes to understanding the relationship between economic and military competition. He sees no necessity for capitalist states to engage in armed conflict. The latter, in his view, is most likely to arise either from historical enmities or by accident. 

In terms of the current situation, the US comes over in the book as a kind of benign onlooker to potential conflicts in Asia. It will face dilemmas over intervention if, for example, China takes over Taiwan, but it is not seen as having its own imperialist interests in the region. 

For Emmott, Asia and the rest of the world can achieve peace and prosperity - and overcome global warming - if we only follow the recipe of ever more deregulation and ever more competition. 

Though there is a great deal in this book which is useful, anyone who reads the Economist will also recognise some infuriating features: a self-satisfied, smug tone and a completely uncritical approach to capitalism as a system. The causes of any problems suffered by countries and their populations always seem to boil down to their being insufficiently committed to the free market.

Sue Sparks

Dreams from the Endz

Faiza Guene

Chatto and Windus

£11.99

Dreams from the Endz is about the impact of politics on everyday life and how the French state stamps on the dreams of the young, immigrants and poor. Set on Uprising Estate in the Parisian suburb of Ivry, the novel's main character, Ahleme, is a sharpwitted and determined 24 year old Algerian woman.

With an astute eye for detail and a wonderfully humorous acerbic tongue, Ahleme recounts her struggles to survive the daily humiliations of the job centre, the immigration office, the police station and the education system, as she tries to get a permanent job, stay in France and keep her 16 year old brother, Foued, in school and out of prison. Add to this caring for "the Boss" (her father, incapacitated by a workplace accident) and it's easy to see why she feels "24, going on 40". 

The second novel by French-Algerian author Faiza Guene develops several of the themes present in her highly successful debut work, Just Like Tomorrow. Both portray the harsh reality of life in Nicolas Sarkozy's France, where racism, discrimination and poverty vie for supremacy with anger and resistance in the outlying suburbs of the capital. 

Guene interweaves political commentary skilfully with daily routine through the voice of Ahleme, writing how "the Boss is having an afternoon nap, I'm dreaming about a better life and there are students demonstrating in the streets of Paris". A brief romance with a Serbian asylum seeker called Tonislav, who is subsequently deported, is summed up with, "There won't be any regrets, between Tonislav and me - just like the Danone factory and those two hundred employees who got made redundant."

Guene does not shy away from discussing difficult issues. The inequities of the French immigration system are explored during a family trip to Algeria. She describes groups of young men huddled around international telephone booths, desperately trying to prolong conversations with family and friends in France. These are the victims of the "double peine" (double punishment) system where non-nationals convicted of a crime also lose their residency. Despite this punitive system, she is all too aware why the majority of young Algerians still want to move to France, eager to leave behind "their experiences of civil war, hunger and terror".

Perhaps the most compelling part of the novel is a sharp argument between Ahleme and her brother about whether an alternative exists to the grinding poverty and racism of life in the suburbs. Ahleme is adamant that drifting into petty crime, as Foued is doing, is a "cop out", choosing instead to focus on the "people who struggle, because society hasn't given them a choice, but they try to dig themselves out and taste happiness anyway". This is a novel well worth reading.

Jacqui Freeman



Rogue Economics

Loretta Napoleoni

Seven Stories Press

£13.99

What links the growth in sex trade in Eastern Europe, fishing piracy in the North Sea and professional players of the online computer game World of Warcraft? According to Loretta Napoleoni they are all examples of the rise to dominance of a terrifying form of economic activity which she calls rogue economics. 

In this ambitious work she attempts to show, through a wide ranging account of contemporary organised crime, that the period since the fall of the Berlin Wall is defined by the dominance of economics over politics. According to Napoleoni, "Rogue economics is not exceptional but endemic, a dark force encrypted in our social DNA, constantly lurking in the background of the societies in which we live."

Napoleoni sees a constant fight in history between politics and the tendency of rogue economics. At various times political institutions have reined in rogue economics, and given people some control over it. However, the fall of the "communist regimes", she argues, unleashed rogue economics on an unprecedented scale. 

The fall of these regimes is combined with the spread of globalisation and the weakening of the nation state, which erodes politics even further in its fight against rogue economics. Despite Napoleoni's dramatic and innovative language, these are not new ideas. The argument that globalisation has weakened the nation-state and its control over the economy has been repeated consistently in recent years, but this has not made it true.  

Her separation of politics and economics also misrepresents dramatically the nature of the economy. The spread of neoliberalism did not involve a retreat of politics and the nation-state. Rather the policies that drove back gains in wages and working conditions and spread privatisation both within the West and in the developing world were driven through politically. 

They required conscious political interventions by states and governments on behalf of major corporations. By concentrating explicitly on the criminal aspects of global economics, Napoleoni detracts from this bigger picture. 

For Napoleoni the nation-state is clearly the most important safeguard against the damaging rise of rogue economics. This makes her political analysis very shallow. The actions of nation-states are consistently seen as innocent attempts to challenge rogue economics that lead to unfortunate consequences. Her fondness for state control seems to generate nostalgia for the Soviet Union and its satellites, which doesn't help her case. The book builds towards a preposterous conclusion, in which she predicts that Islamic finance will gradually come to dominate the economy, and drive out rogue economics, and the Third World will come to dominate the globe. This will carve out a new world order which "will be ruled by an invisible axis stretching from Beijing to Cape Town. Europe and America will lose out".

Sadly, despite the wealth of research and information about sectors of the world economy that are relatively unknown, this book is badly let down by its poor analysis and overambitious claims. 

Dan Swain



The Dirty South

Alex Wheatle

Serpent's Tail

£9.99

Rare is the novel that can take known statistics - for example, 70 percent of African Caribbean boys are likely to leave school with less than five GCSEs - and show how these numbers are really played out in the lives of young black teenagers. Rarer still is the novel that can capture the lives of three generations by crystallising them through the life, thoughts, and feelings of their youngest generation.

In The Dirty South, Alex Wheatle manages to do all of this in a comparatively short 224 pages. The book starts with Dennis Huggins in prison and then takes us step by step through the processes that put him there.

We see Dennis at school, with his friend Noel, sailing from a life of petty theft to selling drugs in school to the fraught life of a "shotta" or drugs dealer. We follow Dennis and his friends as they realise that in spite of all the changes in the last 20 years the "Dirty South", as Brixton is affectionately called, still offers little in the way of opportunity for black working class boys. As Wheatle himself comments, the school system assumes "'cos I am black…I didn't think I had an academic brain".

We watch Dennis as he navigates his relationships between his legal secretary mother and disabled librarian father and his first faltering steps towards love. However, we do more than watch - we see all of this through Dennis's eyes, feel through his feelings and, most importantly, we learn to analyse the world through his thought processes, his language.

However, the novel clearly shows that there is no inevitability about what happens to Dennis. When Dennis comes close to sleeping with a former schoolmate's girlfriend a chain of events unleashes terrifying violence, as his former schoolmate seeks revenge with the backing of his newly minted so-called Muslim gang. It is here we learn the dark truth his father has hidden from Dennis.

The real power of this novel is that we get to see British society through the eyes of a black teenager and the experience of the deterioration of everyday life for many working class people since the mid-1970s. We also see the rise of a new generation of teenagers who have, in the words of the poet Milton, "the courage never to submit or yield".

This book gives the reader a head start. It introduces you to the fighters of the future: characters, not caricatures, who like most of us, try to make sense, and where possible, resist a world that is both hostile and bewildering in turn.

Gaverne Bennett

Bad Samaritans

Ha-Joon Chang

Random House Business Books

£8.99

The credit crisis has brought neoliberalism to the verge of intellectual and practical exhaustion. Following the US Federal Reserve's $30 billion bailout of the Bear Stearns investment bank, even Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, conceded that the current crisis "is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War".

Ha-Joon Chang, a Cambridge economist and adviser to the World Bank, has written a trenchant, historically informed contribution to the emerging establishment debates about neoliberalism. Chang contends that the governments of the rich nations are imposing development policies on poor nations that are not only misguided, but betray a complete misunderstanding of the history of capitalist development. In effect, they are "kicking away the ladder" that they climbed by misrepresenting their own history.

Chang finds that today's wealthy countries climbed the ladder to prosperity by systematically ignoring their own recommendations. For instance, Henry VII built England's woollen manufacturing industry, the backbone of its later industrial revolution, by hiking taxation massively on the export of raw wool to the Low Countries and using state planning to spur investment in technology. At the height of its power, England retained tariffs of 45 to 55 percent on manufacturing imports, far exceeding its nearest competitors.

Free trade, Chang argues, is a policy preached by rich nations who have no intention of adopting these policies for themselves. As England achieved spectacular growth rates by protecting its "infant industries" from foreign competition, colonial rule forced Indian, Chinese, and African markets open to English capital. "Despite their key role in promoting 'free trade' in the late 19th and early 20th century," says Chang, "colonialism and unequal treaties hardly get any mentions in the hordes of pro-globalisation books."

The unsuitability of these policies for the poor is reflected in their growth rates. During the period of Britain's "free trade" hegemony (1870-1913), per capita income in Asia (excluding Japan) increased by only 0.4 percent per year; Africa achieved similar results (0.6 percent). Likewise, since the ascendency of US-led neoliberalism, global growth rates have fallen sharply. While Bad Samaritans is an interesting and readable polemic on global development, there is something insubstantial about the book as a whole. Some have portrayed neoliberalism less as a tactic of the ruling class and more as an objective reality that governments must submit to, as in Margaret Thatcher's dictum, "There is no alternative." 

Chang goes to the other extreme and writes as if Western policymakers implemented neoliberalism out of misguided altruism and can be transformed by appealing to their enlightened self-interest. A more measured analysis of power would consider how the systemic constraints of capitalism drive policymakers and are reflected in their tendency to privilege the short-term profitability of Western firms over long-term development elsewhere.

James Foley



Squandered

David Craig

Constable

£8.99

Anyone listening to New Labour politicians justifying their performance on public services will have heard them claim to have increased spending to record levels. Yet anyone who works in or uses them feels that they are in crisis.

A rigorous analysis of where the money is really going would help undermine Labour's pretence to be the defenders of the welfare state. Squandered includes much useful detail. For example, it quotes the rapid decrease in the ratio of beds to managers in the NHS, dropping from 12 beds per manager to less than five in ten years, or the large pay rises of  the top public sector bosses, such as chief execs of national museums and galleries who have seen pay increases averaging 7 to 10 percent per year (to salaries of over £190,000 at the Tate). 

Most of us would contrast that with the low wages and pay cap endured by the other staff in the public sector. David Craig misses this point. In fact he frequently fails to distinguish between those battling to provide services and those at the top of the pile. 

So he attacks public sector pensions by quoting what a long serving civil service permanent secretary could hope to get on retirement. The reality for most civil servants is very different. Because of low wages and careers shortened by job cuts, the average civil service pension is only about £5,000 per annum - even after including the big pensions paid to the Sir Humphreys.

Craig, together with Private Eye's Richard Brook, had earlier produced a devastating critique of the parasitical behaviour of the management consultants who are milking public services (Plundering the Public Sector). 

Unfortunately, it seems that Craig cannot repeat this quality on his own. He is highly critical of the justifications for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and calls for an end to the ID cards programme and a return to a public service ethos. But, while he attacks PFI and private hospital cleaning, he seems not to direct his ire at big business (with even more inflated top salaries) in general. And at times he veers into the positively unpleasant. He attributes far too much blame to the European Union - his chapter on it would not be out of place in a UKIP publication. And his frequent comments about migrants and endorsement of US style workfare often make this an unpleasant read. A better critique is possible - and necessary.

Nick Clark 

On the Global Waterfront

Suzan Erem and E Paul Durrenberger

Monthly Review Press

£12.99

On the Global Waterfront is a gripping account of the intersection of race and class in the US, in the tradition of the classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. Set on the docks of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2000, it is written as a detective story about racism, vicious state repression, and the power of the global working class. 

The book demonstrates the critical importance of unions in organising against racism and institutional oppression. In 1875, only ten years after the abolition of slavery, the union representing longshoremen in Charleston had recruited 800 members, including many former slaves. The union had already been on strike several times, and was acknowledged as the most powerful organisation of the black working class of South Carolina. To this day, the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) Local 1422 is the "wealthiest and blackest union" in a state with vicious anti-union laws, where the Confederate flag still flies in front of the Capitol building. 

Longshoremen in Charleston are in a powerful position in the global economy. In 1999 Charleston was the second largest port on the east coast of the US, handling $63 million in cargo each day. In 1999 one shipping company decided to employ non-union longshoremen, which led to pickets by Local 1422 members. The pickets were attacked by 600 armed police as the campaign continued into 2000. Many workers were hospitalised and five were arrested facing serious charges. 

The ILA national president responded by issuing a statement that Local 1422 members had broken the law. In contrast, the west coast based International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) immediately invited the president of Local 1422 to speak to ILWU members and donated $50,000 to Local 1422. The police attack took place only six weeks after the famous World Trade Organisation demonstrations of November 1999. The ILWU shut down all US west coast ports on the day of the WTO meeting, and participated in the "Battle of Seattle" demonstration. They knew the power of solidarity. As Local 1422 president Ken Riley expressed it, "Thank god there were people like you who knew what struggle was."

The book brings to life a vibrant example of the global labour movement at work, but I wish the authors had included more details of the debates and grassroots organising within Local 1422. Nonetheless, I couldn't put this book down. It is an inspiring and accessible piece of labour history which should be read and discussed throughout the labour and anti-racist movements and beyond.

Penny Howard



A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Mohammed Hanif

Jonathan Cape

£12.99

Mohammed Hanif thoroughly enjoys himself in his first novel where he explores some fairly outrageous scenarios to explain the death of Pakistan's military dictator General Zia in an aircrash in 1988. But it's a pretty black comedy describing when Zia, backed by Reagan, built up Islamist radicalism against the USSR in Afghanistan. 

The plot centres round Ali Shigri, a trainee pilot who has found his father hanging from a ceiling fan in an apparent suicide and then discovers his friend and fellow officer Obaid is missing. Ali's quest for revenge and love for his lost friend take him on a whirlwind ride which finds him in a Mughal dungeon. Will he ever emerge and what do the authorities have on him?

General Zia lives in a world of paranoia, marooned in a sea of commando bodyguards and food tasters. One gloriously funny chapter must throw a light on dictators everywhere. Zia attends a National Day military parade, which, for "security reasons", is recorded long before the day itself. Not trusting the loyalty of real musicians and workers, soldiers are dressed as fishermen or singers, and sweepers from army HQ as heroic peasants. Hanif has created a highly enjoyable account of a mysterious incident in Pakistan's history. His mixture of historical fiction and fact exposes wonderfully the brutal power and, more optimistically, the precarious fragility of puppet dictators.

Mary Brodbin



Politics Noir

Edited by Gary Phillips

Verso

£8.99

Presidential candidates organising the elimination of their opponents via the barrel of a gun; holier than thou politicians burying sexual indiscretions through threat and counter-threat; and plenty of photograph-stuffed brown envelopes - beneath the thin veneer of what the US political elite have themselves termed morally acceptable, lie the selfish, corrupt and entrenched who force their values upon the poor, both at home and abroad.

Politics Noir, a collection of 13 short stories from the likes of Mike Davis and Gary Phillips, exposes not what has happened, but totally believable stories about what might be happening.  

The authors' brief was to each write a story exposing the seedy semi-obscured underbelly of US politics. As with any collection of shorts, it can be a bit hit and miss. Some stories keep you turning the pages at a pace, but others are relatively forgettable. 

My other criticism would be that there are perhaps too many paint by numbers noir stories here. There are only so many times you can read a story about bribery, hit men, affairs with campaign staff, friends in high places and crooked police officers before it seems a bit repetitive. But, none the less, there are some interesting aspects to the book, not least that uncomfortable feeling that this may be fiction, but it would be far from out of place among the annals of political history.

Patrick Ward

New in paperback & children's books

The Threat to Reason 

by Dan Hind 

(Verso £7.99)

A powerful counterblast to the vulgar reductionism and mock radicalism of the tomes that currently clutter bookshops from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. 

The Darker Nations

by Vijay Prashad 

(The New Press £11.99)

With the now ubiquitous subtitle, "A People's History", Prashad offers a comprehensive look at the history and political trajectory of the Third World. 

Charlie has Asthma 

by Jenny Leigh  

(Red Kite £5.99)

Charlie the cheetah gets out of breath and uses an inhaler so he can still run around and play. Part of a colourful series for four to seven year olds where jungle animals suffer from everything from dyslexia to nits.

Abela  

by Berlie Doherty  

(Andersen Press £5.99)

Abela has been orphaned by Aids. When she travels from Tanzania to seek asylum in Sheffield her life will cross with Rosa, a young girl who is learning to ice skate.

Books end

Culture

Martin Smith

New challenges for anti-fascism

Along with every great success come new challenges. That will be the case for Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR). By any measure, the 2008 LMHR carnival was a great success.