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Global Warning: So what is to be done, then?

2 November, 2020Admin

Climate Strike: the practical politics of the climate crisis
By Derek Wall
Published by Merlin Press, 2020, £10
Reviewed by Clive Heemskerk

Derek Wall was a founder of the Association of Socialist Greens grouping that existed within the Green Party in England and Wales in the 1980s and, later, a leading figure in the Green Left.

In 2006 he became the Greens’ co-Principal Speaker, the closest role to that of leader within the party before it changed its structure to include a formal leader position in 2008 (which was won by the then MEP Caroline Lucas).

Given this background his new book, as would be expected, provides a good summary of the climate crisis, including in an early chapter a sober assessment of challenges to the science of climate change.

The battle for Unite

2 November, 20202 November, 2020Admin

While not formally triggered, an election contest is under way for the leadership of Unite, the pivotal trade union in Britain both industrially and politically. ROB WILLIAMS examines the key issues at stake.

Over the next 18 months, and perhaps sooner, the three biggest unions in Britain – Unite, Unison and GMB – will have elected new general secretaries. Being the largest affiliates to the Labour Party, these elections will have particular significance for Sir Keir Starmer as he looks to consolidate his leadership victory over Corbynism. As it desperately looks to navigate out of the Covid crisis, the capitalist establishment is closely monitoring these events. In particular, it will be assessing whether Len McCluskey’s successor as the general secretary of Unite is capable of maintaining the union’s challenge to the Blairites in Labour. As the BBC’s Iain Watson said, “The result of that contest will determine whether the union works closely with Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, or is willing to be openly critical”. (19 August)

Policing with prejudice

2 November, 2020Admin

Racism and homophobia are intrinsic to the role of the police under capitalism. The experience of an individual officer fighting to challenge discrimination is the subject of a recent book, reviewed by SARAH SACHS-ELDRIDGE.

Forced Out: A detective’s story of prejudice and resilience
By Kevin Maxwell
Published by Granta Books, 2020, £14-99

Forced Out is a personal account of a black gay police officer who experienced systematic and persistent racism and homophobia within the police. Kevin Maxwell recounts the sustained and high-level attempts to silence him when he challenged discrimination. As a child he says he was “obsessed with, seduced by, the police force”. But just over a decade after joining up, his experience made him ill and he was forced to resign.

Maxwell’s is not a wholly unique experience in terms of black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) and LGBT+ police officers in Britain. In 2008, as he points out, the Secret Policeman Returns Panorama documentary found that 72% of Black Police Association (BPA) members had experienced racism at work and 60% felt their career had been hindered by their ethnicity. He says that most officers who are BAME, women and/or LGBT+ and make it to the top of the police do so by not challenging discrimination, to the extent of denying the reality of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and even hiding their sexuality.

Revolution or reaction

2 November, 2020Admin

TONY SAUNIOS, secretary of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), asks, which forces will gain from the Covid crisis?

More than six months of the Covid-19 pandemic and global crisis have exposed everything that is rotten in this era of capitalist decline. Global capitalism is in a putrefying prolonged death agony, which is inflicting misery on millions of people on a scale not seen for an entire historical era.

Humankind’s productive forces stagnate, and the technological leaps forward made in recent years are failing to raise the material conditions of the mass of the global population. The environmental crisis reflected in recent fires and floods is causing additional suffering and dislocation. Internationally, an economic, political and social crisis not witnessed since the 1930s is unfolding at breakneck speed. The horrific consequences have demonstrated the crucial necessity for the working class to build mass socialist parties that offer an alternative to capitalism. “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by an historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”, wrote Leon Trotsky in 1938, words that are apposite to the situation we face today.

Council House Britain

2 November, 20202 November, 2020Admin

Council House Britain
A TV series on Channel Four
Available to watch at channel4.com
Reviewed by Elizabeth Gallagher

As a lifelong resident of Southwark, growing up in a council flat on the eleventh floor, and still living in a council property, you would think that the recent series on Channel Four, Council House Britain, would have been of interest to me.

I received an email from Southwark advertising the show and having a quick look at my local paper, I found an article by councillor Kieran Williams, Southwark council cabinet member for housing, saying that the council was committed to the documentary.

Editorial: Britain’s fragile covid equilibrium is coming to an end

1 October, 20202 November, 2020Admin

It is now over six months since the World Health Organisation declared the Covid-19 outbreak to be a global pandemic, and two weeks later, that Britain went into lockdown.

After retreating from his government’s original ‘let them get herd immunity’ strategy – the existence of which was confirmed in August by Jeremy Corbyn reporting Cabinet Office briefings he attended in the spring on Privy Council confidentiality terms – Boris Johnson initially benefited from a rally round the prime minister mood as the public health crisis escalated.

Lessons from the exams fiasco

1 October, 2020Admin

The enforced government U-turns over the grading of this summer’s school exams has shone a spotlight on the inbuilt class inequality inherent in education under capitalism.

The disputed algorithm at the heart of the grading controversy had inequality programmed into it. With school students unable to sit written examinations because of the Covid crisis, schools were asked to provide estimated grades for their GCSE and A-level students based on their knowledge of the students’ work. But the exam authorities decided that these predictions then had to be processed through an algorithm that prioritised the previous overall exam performance of the school, rather than that of an individual student.

Meeting Covid: no substitute for fighting, workers’ organisation

1 October, 2020Admin

At the beginning of the lockdown, the government’s mantra was ‘we’re all in this together’. The experience of the pandemic has exposed for many that no such unity exists. Instead governments around the world have put the interests of capitalism before people’s health. To varying degrees they have largely failed to protect people in the workplace and the vulnerable in the community.

Global Warning: Arctic tipping point

1 October, 2020Admin

“We are measuring the pulse of the ice sheet”, said the lead author of a recent Ohio University study, Michalea King, referring to the annual changes in Greenland’s three kilometre-thick ice covering. And that pulse is weakening – the patient is bleeding out.

King has demonstrated that Greenland’s vast ice sheets are melting so fast that even if global warming was to end today, not enough snow would fall to replenish the ice sheets. The yearly pulse of snowfall and melting, measured by King and her team over decades, shows a sudden change.

The future of the PCS debate

1 October, 2020Admin

Unlike some other unions that have grown during the Covid crisis, the PCS civil servants’ union has not reversed a pre-pandemic trend of declining membership. The debate now under way on the union’s future structure, assessed here by NEC member DAVE SEMPLE (in a personal capacity), has relevance for all trade unionists in the struggle against the capitalists’ attempts to pass the costs of the crisis onto the working class.

Meetings of the PCS national executive committee (NEC) over the summer have discussed two papers which laid out ‘strategic options’ for the union. The two options were potential merger with an unspecified other union; and restructuring, which expressly included the idea of voluntary redundancies of union staff. Neither paper explained how these options would address the problem of a membership base that is still shrinking while the civil service as a whole has been growing since the EU referendum in 2016. This lack of analysis is a theme that runs through everything the formerly left leadership of the union have said or done on the ‘strategic options’ so far.