Dundee SSP

Make the rich pay – bail out all public services, not bankers’ and billionaires’ profits

By Richie Venton – SSP national workplace organiser

Two major trade union events in the space of 48 hours demonstrate the seething anger at public sector cuts, the potential for a united resistance across the trade unions, and the potency, increasing popularity and urgent necessity of the Scottish Socialist Party’s alternatives to this assault on jobs, services and conditions.

EIS 10,000 march

On Saturday 6th March, 10,000 teachers, lecturers, nursery staff, parents, pupils and other trade unionists poured out of Glasgow ’s Kelvingrove Park , snaking their way round a mammoth route to the EIS union’s rally in the SECC.

This was the first national demo called by the EIS in decades. The overwhelming majority of the marchers had never been on a demo before. The age profile was a whole cross-section, from toddlers in buggies and primary kids, through trainee and newly qualified teachers, to bearded veterans of the profession – united in their fury at education budget cuts, whilst bankers’ bailouts, renewal of Trident weapons and bloody war cost the public a fortune.

Anger at that obscene contrast was reflected in speeches by the EIS president and others at the rally. They denounced the governments of Westminster and Holyrood for regarding these expenditures as more important than the education of our children, who represent the future, and lambasted the SNP government for now confronting children with the choice of either free school meals or smaller classes, when they had promised both and children deserve both.

SSP on the march

The EIS march is part of a campaign they have entitled “Why must our children pay?”

The SSP was the only party with a leaflet that directly dealt with the issues of the march, demanding “make the rich pay – not our kids; bail out education and all services – not bankers’ profits; 20’s plenty in any class – give our kids a chance.”

People snapped up the leaflets, smiled and murmured their agreement with the headlines, turned and quoted it to their friends as they assembled to march off.

The lively SSP contingent was joined by parents and children who fought the heroic Save Our Schools Campaign in Glasgow last year. As we marched we led the chant “Twenty’s plenty in any class – give our kids a chance”, which caught on with the crowd marching and bystanders on the pavements.

As the 10,000 trod towards the end of their marathon march to the SECC rally, we improvised an SSP “street meeting” on the pavement as they passed us! We belted out our message on a very loud PA system: “The SSP demands that the government tax the rich, to bail out education, not bankers’ profits and bankers’ bonuses.” Several sections of the march shouted back their agreement with us as they marched past, and even more contingents applauded us as they marched past. A sign of how profoundly the bankers’ bailout has changed people’s consciousness, including their open-ness to the SSP’s unashamed socialist demands.

The EIS leadership promised in speeches that this mass demo is just the start of the campaign, which is to be welcomed, and which EIS union activists and members will make sure is the case.

It is absolutely right that as the union representing 60,000 members in education they should take up the cudgels in defence of that service. But what would be tragic, and totally divisive and counter-productive, is if the EIS leadership argued for cuts in other services to save education; unity of opposition to all service cuts, combining the power and scale of members of all public sector unions and the communities they service is what is urgently needed to stop the slaughter.

Biggest civil service strike since 1987

It was therefore encouraging that an EIS representative (as well as speakers from the FBU, UNISON and STUC) addressed the 8th March strike rally in Glasgow, called during the 48-hour stoppage by all civil service workers, members of PCS.

This was the biggest civil service strike since 1987. Across the UK, over 250,000 workers brought services to a halt in tax and customs offices; Job Centres; driving centres; the Courts; the MoD; passport offices; the Scottish parliament (for the first time ever); Westminster … to name but some. 30,000 of these strikers were in Scotland .

They are overwhelmingly low-paid workers, whose partial compensation for low pay has been a modest average pension of £6,500 and a reasonable redundancy scheme – which is now under assault. The government has set in motion the legislation to slash the Civil Service Compensation Scheme, cutting the package that most workers would get on being made redundant by up to one-third, tens of thousands of pounds each. A sure sign that the Labour government (backed up quite openly by the Tories on this) want to slaughter tens of thousands of jobs on the cheap – in addition to the 100,000 already shed in the past 5 years – and usher in privatisation by making the prospect more attractive to the privateers.

The response to the 48-hour strike was absolutely overwhelming – forcing management to stoop to tricks like jetting in a handful of scab managers from Newcastle to open the Glasgow DVLA office.

Socialism in the civil service

Again, not only did SSP members in PCS play an instrumental part in building the strike, but our policies were more widely and eagerly embraced than for a long time: on the picket lines, at the PCS strike rallies in Glasgow and Dundee, and at the SSP public meeting in Glasgow after the union rally. This was a really large meeting, with over half those present attending their first ever SSP meeting. And strikers were enthusiastic in their support for our socialist aims – many commenting wryly that if only we could get a fair hearing in the media, imagine how popular our case would be – as well as our proposals on how to build public sector unity against all cuts in the immediate future.

Unity against the carnage – build 10th April Demo

Alongside a rolling programme of further industrial action by the PCS, railway workers are striking (Scotrail) and balloting for pre-General Election strikes (Network Rail). Numerous anti-cuts campaigns, involving council workers’ unions and communities, are campaigning against the brutal council cuts that loom. Already 5,000 council jobs face the chop, with hair-raising predictions of 32,000 jobs (one in every eight!) being butchered by 2014. And community centres face closure up and down Scotland .

So an immediate opportunity to tie all these strands of struggle into a rope to restrain the axe-wielders presents itself on Saturday 10th April. Scottish UNISON is calling a mass, national demonstration in Glasgow that day, in defence of public services.

SSP members in all the various trade unions – alongside other union members – need to move heaven and earth to make this an almighty display of the power of a united working class on the march, by calling on their unions to mobilise members into an event that dwarfs even the brilliant 10,000 on the EIS march.

As Labour, Tory, Lib Dem and SNP politicians sharpen their knives in a grisly pre-election competition for whose cuts are the deepest, the SSP in contrast will stand up for public sector workers and the communities that depend on public services.

We will build for a united march for public services – not private profit, demanding the governments tax the rich and bail out all public services – not bankers’ and billionaires’ profits.

We will campaign inside the unions for measures that would fund these services, protect and create jobs, and begin to re-distribute wealth from the millionaires to the millions.

Measures such as a 10% tax on every millionaire (to fund 80,000 new jobs in Scotland alone, on £25,000 a year for 3 years!); restoration of income tax on the rich to pre-Thatcher levels (83%) and likewise Corporation Tax on big companies, from the current paltry 28% to the 52% it was at before Thatcher and then New Labour made this country a tax haven for the tax-dodging rich.

A sea-change has begun in the outlook of workers in the frontline of public sector carnage by the parties that back big business and the profit system. Socialist measures – including full-blown public ownership of the entire banking sector, natural wealth, services and big industries, but with democratic control – are increasingly convincing to people whose future is under threat.

The time is ripe for the potential power of a united trade union movement to be mobilised – starting with 10th April – and for socialist demands to be boldly advanced amongst an increasingly receptive crowd of angry workers. The SSP will do its part, emboldened by the events of the past 48 hours.

The Guardian ran an amusing story through the week about the book which caused the bullying storm.

When Brown heard about a Blairite article which was pro-Tony Blair he is reported to have ranted

This is factionalism! This is Trotskyism! It’s fucking Trotskyism!

So there you have it lefty train-spotters, the definition of Trotskyism is writing an article in a popular newspaper praising the most right wing Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher.

Another 27 innocent civilians killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan. There is one marked difference between this and previous attacks, there appears to be no immediate denial, claim it was the Taliban the hit, claim it was the Taliban who hit them etc etc.

The SSP are holding a public meeting on the war on Wednesday.

Wednesday at 7pm in the DVA Constitution Road Dundee.

A Canadian Anti-War group have pointed out a cruel repeat of history.

The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were boycotted in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Then–U.S. president Jimmy Carter announced the boycott in February 1980, and Canada and dozens of other countries soon followed suit. In his state of the union address that year, Carter made the case against the Soviet war:

“The vast majority of nations on Earth have condemned this latest Soviet attempt to extend its colonial domination of others and have demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Muslim world is especially and justifiably outraged by this aggression against an Islamic people. No action of a world power has ever been so quickly and so overwhelmingly condemned. But verbal condemnation is not enough. The Soviet Union must pay a concrete price for their aggression.”

Now Canada is part of a coalition occupying Afghanistan whilst hosting the Olympics.

Read the rest of the article at the link for more information.

Dundee SSP are holding a public meeting about the continued war and occupation in Afghanistan on the 24th of February at the DVA.

Today’s Courier reported that a plaque for the Basque refugees from the Spanish Civil War in Montrose now has a permanent home.

Don’t forget to commemorate the Dundee volunteers to the International Brigade at Macmanus Galleries this Saturday.

There will be a short ceremony by Burns’ Statue in Albert Square next Saturday, 13th Feb, at 12noon to mark the permanent return of the Dundee Spanish Civil War memorial, and the new supplementary memorial, to their proper home.

We previously covered the re-dedication of the new plaque

We are holding a public meeting Axe war, not services on Wednesday 24th February at the DVA, Constitution Road, starting at 7pm.

The main speakers will be

• Colin Fox, SSP co-national spokesperson
• John McAllion, former MP and MSP for Dundee East
• Joan Humphreys, Military Families Against War

followed by Q&A and discussion time.

If you have discussed politics in the last 12 years and you will have undoubtably heard a comparison to Labour and the Tories that resulted in someone saying they are just the same.

You may have even heard it go one step further and a description of Labour as Blue Labour instead of New Labour.

Well the Lib Dems have went one further and re-branded themselves in blue.

If you’ve been saying for years that Labour, Tories and Lib Dems are all the same – it’s good to see one of those parties agree with you.

The SSP of course are a bit different. We don’t get donations from millionaire businessmen – so aren’t in their pocket. Our elected representatives take a reduced wage and as far as we know none ever had the public purse pay for building work on their castle.

In Dundee West we are of course aware of the cost of a DVD player and that computer desks shouldn’t cost you £800.

The next meeting is Wednesday 3 February 2010 – with the main topic being Politics of Protest.

At the DVA, Constitution Road, Dundee.

The Indian town of McLeod Ganj takes its very Scottish sounding name from a British military officer, having been a garrison town during British rule in India. Though it is now over six decades since the British state gave up its imperial ambitions in the sub-continent and ended its occupation there, a thread of occupation still runs through the fabric of Mcleod Ganj.

Today, though, the occupation is not one enforced by a conquering imperial army, but consists of refugees fleeing from the occupation of Tibet by the army of the People’s Republic of China.

Mcleod Ganj is a suburb Dharasalam, home of the Tibetan government in exile and of the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, since he fled there from his native Tibet in 1959. Many of the Tibetans in exile there have terrible tales to tell of human rights breaches and atrocities committed by the army of the People’s Republic of China.

There is a DVD called Ce Qu’il Reste De Nous (What Remains Of Us). It is the story of a young Tibetan refugee who was born in India but grew up in Montreal, Canada. She returns to Tibet (using her Canadian passport) with a portable DVD player and a message from the Dalai Lama. She also films the reaction of the Tibetans to the video, all, of course, in secret.

As an additional feature on the DVD there are interviews with three Tibetans in exile. Each interview is a personal horror story of torture, exile and human rights abuses committed by the Chinese against the Tibetans.

Dawa Khyzom is now a refugee in India after escaping through the mountains. She spent three years in prison for the horrendous crime of bearing a flag during a peaceful demonstration in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

They took us to the prison, legs and hands tied up. I was with two other nuns. The soldiers wouldn’t stop hitting us all night. They would hit us all over. It’s the same in every prison. They kept us starving while in jail. The only food we had was sandy and rotten.

Tenzin Choedak was sent into exile by his mother, who sacrificed all that she had with the hope that her son could freely go to a Tibetan school. He left Tibet, guided by a Sherpa, by way of Nangpa La’s pass, which lies between Mount Everest and Cho Oyu at a height of 5800 metres.

He describes his perilous journey to India through the vicious cold and heavy snow of the high Himalayas, relating how he arrived there with frostbite and having counted five dead bodies frozen in the snow on his journey. Tenzin Choedak was eight years old at the time of his escape from Tibet.

Palden Gyatso is a monk who enraged the Chinese authorities and was imprisoned for 33 years, his “crime” in their eyes being resisting patriotic re-education. After spending all that time in jail he made his escape to India through the mountains. He took with him some of the instruments of torture which he had managed to take from the prison.

On the wall there was all these torture tools. When I asked for my rights a soldier picked up the biggest one and showed me how it worked.. I could see the electricity come out. And then he said, ’Here are your rights.’ He would put it in and out (of his mouth), breaking my teeth. Then he let it in my mouth. The electric shock went through my body and I fainted.

These three people are at least now out of Tibet and the reach of the occupying Chinese forces. But thousands are still imprisoned under this brutal regime for simply demanding their basic human rights and wishing only to be left alone in their own country.. The source of all this misery has its roots sixty years ago.

The People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1950, and though life in much of Tibet continued as normal, an uprising in 1959 was brutally put down and the Dalai Lama was spirited away to begin a lifetime of exile from his native land.

Though the accepted mythology has it that there was no resistance to the Chinese invasion, there was, in fact, a fair amount of armed resistance, as Tibetans, backed by the American CIA, fought back. It should not be thought that the Americans were extremely concerned about Tibetan independence, it was just that, as one CIA man put it, one more opportunity to create a running sore for the reds .

This resistance went on for nearly twenty years, but times change, and when US president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the writing was on the wall for the CIA sponsored Tibetan resistance movement, leading to the eventual closing down of the operation.

In 1971 the seat of China at the United Nations was taken over from the Republic of China, situated in Taiwan, by the People’s Republic of China. The PRC, as permanent members of the security council, had the right of veto, making it virtually impossible to debate the fate of Tibet at the UN. (Which says much about the democratic structures of that organisation.)

With the lack of any meaningful debate on the question of Tibet at the United Nations, the occupation by the People’s Republic of China has become an almost forgotten occupation. While we have in recent years heard much about the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chinese occupation of Tibet rarely makes the headlines in the world press.

The United States and China drew ever closer, till in the year 2000, normal trade relations became permanent between them. All of this, it should be noted, against a background of brutal repression by the PRC in Tibet.

But now, the United States and the West had access to the world’s biggest supply of cheap labour and a gigantic new market for their exports.

Yet though the partners changed, for the Tibetan people the tune remained the same, and their slow dance of death continued seamlessly, uninterrupted.

With this change of partners, however, one of capitalism’s most enduring truths was revealed, namely, that for capitalist elites, the making of millions will always be more important than the lives of millions.

And how those millions and the very land of Tibet itself have suffered at the hands of the Chinese military occupiers!

Since the Chinese invasion over 1.2 million Tibetans have disappeared in labour camps and prisons, been executed, died of starvation or been tortured to death (1 in 5 of the population). With spies and informers everywhere it has been likened to the old Stasi of East Germany. It is very dangerous for Tibetans to talk politics publicly, leading to an almost permanent air of mistrust.

Apart from this racial genocide there is also a parallel cultural genocide taking place simultaneously. Over ten million Han Chinese have immigrated to Tibet, making the Tibetans the minority population in their own land. The very Tibetan language is under threat. In a scene from Ce Qu’il Reste De Nous (What Remains Of Us) a group of university students open up after viewing the secret film.

We’re university students, but since childhood we have studied in Chinese. It has become almost useless to learn our language. People of my generation already have difficulty speaking Tibetan. Imagine how hard it is for those younger than us. I worry about our future.

When a student is asked whether any one of them had ever thought about leaving Tibet he replies that everyone present would very much like to go to India.

Beijing has changed the names of rivers and mountains, and for the last three generations Tibet, in tour books and schools, is a suburb of the motherland.

As a further attack on Tibetan culture between 1959 and 1977 the Chinese invaders looted, burned and demolished over 6000 monasteries, leaving only twelve undamaged.

In March 2008, the Channel 4 series, Dispatches, screened an episode entitled, Dispatches: Undercover In Tibet. They discovered a horrific situation, including the forced sterilisation of Tibetan women. This is despite Tibetan women supposedly having exemption from China’s strictly enforced laws concerning birth control.

Forced abortions and sterilisations are commonplace if women cannot afford the fine (the equivalent of £70) for having more than one child.

In the programme, one woman, a married farmer, tells her horrific story.

I was forcibly taken away against my will. I was feeling sick and giddy and couldn’t look up. Apparently, they cut the fallopian tubes and stitched them up. It was agonisingly painful. They didn’t use anaesthetic. They just smeared something on my stomach and carried out the sterilisation.

Apart from aspirin for the pain there were no other drugs. I was so frightened, I can’t even remember how I felt. Some people were even physically damaged by the operation. They have limps and have to drag their hips.

Environmentally, too, the Chinese invasion has been a catastrophe for Tibet. Since 1950’s invasion 68% of the forests have been felled. Many rare animals unique to Tibet such as the snow leopard and the wild blue Tibetan sheep are now rarely, if ever, seen. And to add to this woeful tale, China is using Tibet as a dump for its nuclear waste and a store for its nuclear weapons.

Tibet is a land rich in natural resources. Gold, silver, some of the largest reserves of uranium in the world and even some oil have been discovered. But like some colonialist power of old the PRC plunder another’s land to enrich themselves.

But even with all the brutality, oppression, imprisonment without trial, torture and attempts at humiliating the Tibetan people, the spirit of resistance remains, the flame of freedom still burns. In 1989 and again in 2008 the people rose and were brutally and lethally put down by the Chinese military.

The whereabouts of many of those arrested two years ago in 2008 are still unknown but their fate is very unlikely to be a happy one.

Sixty years on from China’s original invasion of Tibet, and fifty years on from the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile, the Dalai Lama now adopts the approach that he would settle for Tibet to be an autonomous region within China, much like Hong Kong is, but the Chinese refuse to negotiate even with this concession. Some more radical elements within Tibet maintain that only independence should be considered if Tibet is to be truly free.

In the third century BC the Chinese began building the Great Wall of China. In the sixty years since the People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet they have been trying as far as possible to build a great wall of silence. Taking over the chair from The Republic of China at the United Nations has been a great help to them in this.

And they are not slow themselves when it comes to imposing censorship. When the uprising of 1989 took place foreign journalists and observers were quickly expelled, allowing China’s human rights violations and violent response to the uprising to go largely unreported in the west.

In the uprising of March 2008, by the seventeenth of the month, all foreigners and journalists had been expelled from Tibet, again making the reporting after that date of Chinese brutality in the repression of the uprising extremely difficult.

But the keystone in this great wall of silence is the complicity of the so-called free world, the west, whatever you wish to call it. As a major trading partner and source of cheap and plentiful labour China must not be offended at any cost. Why should the suffering of a small population at the roof of the world matter when placed against the vast profits to be made for the capitalists by simply ignoring the situation.

As socialists we side with the oppressed against the oppressor, we defend the small and the weak against the big and the powerful.

The Scottish Socialist Party has a great record when it comes to opposing military adventures and occupations. We have opposed the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this opposition did not mean that by implication that we supported Saddam Hussein or the Taliban.

Our stance was that if change was to come in those countries it had to come from within, from the Iraqi and Afghan peoples themselves.

So, it should follow from this stance that while we should support the Tibetan people in their struggle against brutal repression and occupation, some may not wish to see a free Tibet under the Dalai Lama, though some may.

What we should, however, look for is a free Tibet with the people of Tibet themselves deciding how their country should be run, and not having tyranny and terror forced upon them by an invading army every bit as brutal as anything that the old British or the new American empires ever came up with.

Editors Note: Last night the Dundee East branch of the Scottish Socialist Party passed a motion about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. This will be heard at the party’s conference in March.