Main parts of our leaflet for EIS conference at the Caird Hall in Dundee.

The election of the Tories – the Twin Tories, with the treacherous Lib Dems joining forces with the Tory Butchers – marks a new threat to education workers, education services and communities. We all face a level of carnage to jobs, conditions and services not experienced since Thatcher at her most rampant.

Cameron and Clegg have lost no time in pronouncing their top priority is to cut public spending.

These upper class butchers want to wield the axe to jobs, pay, pensions, benefits, public services – to enrich their own class even further.

Cameron’s claims that we all face pain for years to come is false to the core.

The bankers who enjoyed a bountiful handout from public funds don’t face ‘pain’ – for instance, 100 of them at the RBS recently awarded themselves a £1m bonus each!

The richest 1,000 fat-cats whose incomes rocketed by 30% last year, to £353billion! – do not face ‘hard choices’ or ‘painful decisions’.

It’s Scotland’s 630,000 public sector workers, alongside workers in the private sector, our families, our communities, who face a massacre – unless a united, determined, militant campaign of resistance is built, starting now!

In resisting the cuts, EIS and other unions need two central guiding principles: unity in action is our best defence – and a convincing set of policies to explode the myth that cuts are unavoidable.

Teachers, civil servants, council and NHS workers have marched and taken strike action against cuts.

It would be fatal if these fights were kept separate and apart, or if any union adopted the notion that cuts are inevitable – but ‘not in our service’. That would weaken the resistance and guarantee cuts to all services.

So SSP members in the EIS (and in all other unions) strongly advocate united action – across all public sector unions and alongside community groups, anti-cuts campaigns, Save Our Schools campaigns…

EIS and other unions should build a united public rally on Saturday 26th June, after new levels of carnage are announced in the 22nd June Butchers’ Budget – as a springboard for building a mass march in the autumn, when even more cuts will be announced in the government’s Spending Review.

Such events would help build the fighting morale of tens of thousands who right now are terrified of what the future holds.

Equally important in building a rebellion against cuts from a government that has no mandate in Scotland – with 85% voting against the Tories – is a convincing set of policies that exposes the lie that cuts are necessary and unavoidable – a monstrous lie peddled not only by the Tories and Lib Dems, but also New Labour and the SNP! Otherwise many people will fall for the argument that there’s not enough money to defend jobs and services, that cuts are a necessary evil – and then fall out amongst themselves over where the cuts should occur.

That divide-and-conquer trickery lies behind the Tory plan to consult people over what to cut! There is no need for any cuts! There are oceans of wealth swilling around – but in the hands of the bankers. billionaires and boardrooms of oil companies – not in the hands of the public.

The SSP fights for alternatives that would create jobs, improve services, protect conditions. Commit EIS to action against the cuts – alongside other unions – and argue for socialist policies that would fund the expansion of jobs and services. And join the SSP – for an independent socialist Scotland.

Twenty’s Plenty in a class

The Scottish Socialist Party has an unrivalled track record of standing up for kids, communities and education. We have consistently fought school closures that lead to larger classes, job losses, increased stress for staff, worse education.

We have led several Save Our Schools campaigns, uniting parents, communities and trade unionists – demanding smaller classes and investment in community-based schools within easy, safe reach of children’s homes.

We led the mass opposition to Labour’s school closures in Glasgow last year. During that campaign we popularised the slogan Twenty’s Plenty in any class, and lobbied the SNP government to pass legislation to limit classes to 20 for all age groups.

At the recent STUC Congress, SSP members pushed this policy and won the backing of the conference for a campaign for classes of 20 maximum for all.

In East Dunbartonshire, when the Labour-Tory Coalition announced closure of 8 primaries last week,the SSP called a protest demo and public meeting to set up a Save Our Schools campaign.

150 local people joined the demo, the councillors took fright, and shelved their butchery – for now!

EIS shares the SSP’s policy of 20 max in a class. The time is rotten-ripe for the EIS leadership to lead action in support of this policy – including industrial action.

Tonights Evening Telegraph reports that the Balmossie station will not be downgraded.

This would be cause for celebration if not for the comments of Councillor Lyall in the Courier this morning.

If the plans aren’t approved tomorrow, they’ll simply come up next year and the year after that until they are.

Utterly contemptible.

So for those who have missed this the process of consultation is as follows:

1. Consultation on downgrading
2. People say NO!
3. Fire station not downgraded
4. wait a year
5. go to start of list

I think you get the idea.

Dundee SSP members were among the hundreds who took part in a march and rally today in Broughty Ferry to defend the Balmossie Fire Station from downgrading.

The Fire Board have for the second year in a row marked it for cuts. It needs to be defended for the second year in a row.

Read about the campaign at the website http://www.savebalmossiefireengine.co.uk/

If one of your councillors is on the Fire Board please contact them to ensure they vote against downgrading.

A list of members can be found at the campaign site

They include

• Elizabeth Fordyce (Maryfield)
• Helen Wright (Coldside)
• Rod Wallace (The Ferry)
• David Bowes (Coldside)
• Andy Dawson (North East)
• Richard McCready (West End)
• Christina Roberts (East End)

So basically 6 of the 8 wards in Dundee.

There are also other councillors from Angus and Perthshire.

Stop The Cuts

Professional Firefighters in Tayside are on the Threshold of taking Industrial Action to Protect Your Community from cuts to Your Front Line Emergency Fire Cover.

Join us on Saturday 20th March 2010
Protest Once Again Against the Chief Fire Officer’s Proposals

Speakers include
Matt Wrack, FBU General Secretary
Jim Malone, FBU Regional Organiser
Local Tayside Politicians

Assemble 12.30 Castle Green, Broughty Ferry
March Begins at 13.00.
Rally at St Aidens Hall.

CUTS COSTS LIVES – YOURS

March will be led by the Mains of Fintry Pipe Band

For more information see the campaign site

The Guardian has published an article on the Post Office closures and consultations. It details a parliamentary committee criticising the sham consultations and closure program.

When the press are telling us daily about the damage posties are doing to the service they are attempting to defend it’s worth remembering who the privatising parasites really are who are gutting the service by both tiny attacks and huge.

We wrote about the sham consultation at the time.

By Richie Venton, SSP National Workplace Organiser

The Scottish Socialist Party offers unqualified support to CWU members forced to strike against bully-boy bosses and their Labour government backers. They are out to crush the union, crucify jobs and rights at work – in the hope they can sell off Royal Mail to greedy profiteers at Jumble Sale prices.

Every worker, trade unionist and community needs to stand by their posties in a potentially vicious battle to defend the very survival of a public service under assault from Royal Mail bosses, the Labour government and large sections of the media.

Over-paid butchers knife jobs, services and rights

Over-paid Royal Mail bosses, with absolutely no history in the postal service, have prepared for this showdown since the 2007 strike settlement. The key phrase in the Pay & Modernisation Agreement was change will be introduced by agreement. The exact opposite has happened. Bullying, intimidation, threats of disciplinary action, workers taken off pay, have become the standard methods of imposing new conditions that have meant catastrophic job losses and unbearable workloads.

With this reign of terror, Royal Mail bosses have slashed 60,000 jobs since 2003 – and they aim to shed another 60,000 in the next 2 years. Record profits (£900,000 a day last year!) have resulted from vastly increased productivity and heavier workloads from drastically fewer workers. The workers’ reward? Zero pay rise; abolition of the Final Salary Pension Scheme; ‘absorption’ of extra work into existing workloads with no extra pay; not a penny reward for increased productivity … and 60,000 job losses!

Crozier’s 35,000 scabs

Crozier and his cronies are hiring 30,000 temps as an army of scabs – recruited from people desperate for a few weeks’ work in the midst of recession – in addition to 5,000 Royal Mail managers being deployed to scab on the actual strike days. Royal Mail bosses are spending a fortune (of the public’s money) to break the strike, break the union, break the backs of the workforce, to usher in later privatisation.

They have no interest in reaching a resolution that protects workers’ conditions and jobs whilst improving the public service. They only belatedly offer to go to ACAS to get the pre-Xmas strikes cancelled, so as to come back with a vengeance in January. They must not succeed!

Bosses launch war

Instead, they have prepared for war. The secret document, exposed by BBC Newsnight, shows they plan to remove union facilities to help prosecute their war on postal workers. That is already the local experience in many areas. And they are in collusion with the Labour government on this! Lord Mandelson, whose scheme to privatise Royal Mail was shelved in the face of public uproar and the threat of strikes, is out for revenge. He has publicly denounced strikes – legally balloted for according to his Labour government’s vicious anti-union laws – as suicidal.

Interviewed on TV, he showed an incriminatingly detailed knowledge of the secret Royal Mail document, homing in on how much union facility time costs Royal Mail, which suggests he either wrote it – or at the very least has been in cahoots with Crozier and his crew.

Labour government collusion

Labour government ministers have been quoted saying this could be our miners’ strike. They egg on Royal Mail bosses to confront the union, to casualise the workforce with floods of part-timers, in their anti-working class mission to create armies of cheap labour in a de-regulated labour market that maximises profits.

As sole shareholder in Royal Mail, the Labour government have the power to settle this dispute in defence of workers and the public, but instead they encourage vicious hysteria in the press against the CWU – such as reports of riot cops preparing for battles between strikers and scabs. They let Royal Mail bosses enjoy a 13-year pension fund holiday, creating a record pension fund deficit, which workers are being punished for.

Don’t feed the hand that bites you!

New Labour has never been innocent by-standers in this long-running conflict, contrary to their protestations – and in stark contrast to the mind-boggling continuation of funding of New Labour by the CWU. Last year alone the CWU gave their arch enemies over £1million.

The national union should unreservedly declare an end to this crazy support for the party that is butchering CWU members, as one strand to the current war for survival. As we first wrote in SSP workplace bulletins in January 1999: make the break from New Labour’s New Tories – don’t feed the hand that bites you!

Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full part in winning the landslide majority for unified national strikes. The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members on strike. We will build public support, until you win a deal that defends jobs, services, conditions and workplace rights.

UNITE – stop scabs!

SSP members in UNITE will press the UNITE leadership to call on their members not to be used as organised scabs. Royal Mail regularly jets managers into local offices on strike, taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.

Leaders of UNITE should instruct their members to do their normal duties, not other people’s jobs, and not to manage Crozier’s scabs – and start a campaign for a strike ballot of their members in Royal Mail – whose jobs are on an extremely shaky nail.

Other unions, and the TUC/STUC, should call and build mass solidarity marches – and appeal to the unemployed not to scab.

If Royal Mail and the Labour government raise the stakes even higher, for example by taking court action against the CWU, other unions should call members out in defiant days of solidarity strike action to help win this critical battle.

• No suspension of strikes – pre-Xmas is the best time to hammer
• Royal Mail bosses – it makes up two-thirds of their annual profits.
• Stand firm and united – victory to the CWU!

Note: Apologies for the delay, holiday meant there was a backlog of e-mail to sort through and this slipped back a bit.

Dundee East and West branches of the Scottish Socialist party organised a public meeting in the city’s Queens Hotel on the evening of Wednesday, September 23, to protest at the continuing war in Afghanistan, and calling for the troops to be brought home.

It was a particularly poignant time to hold this meeting in Dundee, as two young soldiers from the area, one from Dundee itself and the other from nearby Monifieth, had lost their lives in the fighting in Afghanistan during the previous three weeks, in this pointless and senseless war.

Street stalls were held on the five days leading up to the meeting and the reaction from the public was overwhelmingly against the war and agreeing with the SSP‘s position.

Many of those signing our petitions and pledging support for our stance told us that they were either family or friends of service personnel currently on duty in Afghanistan.

In the two days leading up to the meeting, Dundee West member Angela Gorrie was interviewed on the two local radio stations, Radio Tay and Wave 102, giving her the opportunity to state the Scottish Socialist Party’s case against the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.

The meeting itself was well attended with around thirty members of the pbulic turning out to show their anger at Britain’s continuing involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

Speakers at the meeting were Colin Fox, national spokesperson of the Scottish Socialist Party; former MP and MSP and Scottish Socialist Party member John McAllion; and Mohammad Asif, of the Scottish Afghan Society.

First to speak was John McAllion, who highlighted the enormity of the lies and deceptions surrounding the war, while the next speaker, Mohammad Asif, told of the countless unnamed Afghan casualties who never seem to rate a mention as victims of a war being fought on their own soil.

In the final speech of the evening Colin Fox stated that on the run-up to next year’s general election the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing crisis of captitalism would be the main issues on which the election would be fought.

Following their speeches, the speakers then answered various questions from the floor of the meeting.

As regards further anti-war activity, it was agreed that we should use the time between now and the anti-war demonstration in Edinburgh on November 14 to build for the demo, and we should attempt to get the maximum number of people from Dundee through to Edinburgh for the event in order to keep up the pressure on the government.

Excellent educational short explaining neoliberalism and what’s happened to the economy.

Neoliberalism As Water Balloon

By Richie Venton SSP national workplace organiser

Royal Mail workers have voted by a record-breaking majority to take national strike action against the concerted assault on their jobs, pay, workloads, the service they deliver to the public – and the attempts to smash the Communication Workers’ Union as a national union.

They voted by over 3:1 for national strikes – a 76.24 per cent Yes vote in an extremely high turnout of 67 per cent. 61,623 voted Yes, 19,207 No.

This is a mass rejection of the bully-boy rule of Royal Mail bosses – egged on in their reign of terror by the job-cutting, privatising New Labour government, headed up in their crusade against CWU members by Lord Mandelson.

It is a mass mandate for effective, united and immediate strike action, at a time of year when the volume of mail rockets, workloads rise, and the value of our posties is even more recognised by the public.

Royal Mail spin-doctors are trying to whip up public fury at these workers daring to ‘disrupt Christmas’ – the same bosses who have ‘disrupted’ the lives of 60,000 workers (and their families) who have lost their jobs with Royal Mail in the last 5 years.

Willie Marshall, secretary of the Scotland no2 branch of the CWU, told me what he thinks of the vote.

This is a bigger majority even than the 74 per cent YES vote in 2007, the last time we had a national strike. I wasn’t surprised at the massive turnout, when you look at the level of anger amongst members.

It proves members are ready for the fight. And this is not about pay; it’s about the survival of Royal Mail.

Members want the strike action within 7 days after the national meeting of regional secretaries and divisional reps on 12th October. We want the action as soon as possible, and for at least the first strikes to involve the entire workforce, all out together, to show our unity and solidarity.

Members of the Scottish Socialist Party inside the CWU played their full part in winning this landslide for unified national strike action. The SSP does not hesitate in giving full-blooded support to CWU members forced to strike against the decimation of jobs, public services, pay, pensions and union rights. We will do all we can to build public support for their strike action, until they win a decent deal that defends jobs, services, conditions and workplace rights.

And we will do what we can to press the leadership of UNITE to call on their members not to be used as organised scabs during strikes.

Royal Mail managers used to be in a union called CMA, which has now merged into UNITE. Top dogs in Royal Mail have prayed in vain for a No vote, or at least a poor turnout in the strike ballot, but lost no time in organising for managers to be deployed as scabs to sustain the pretence of a postal service just in case CWU members had the audacity to vote Yes!

They have regularly jetted managers into local offices on strike, usually taking care to deploy them from far-flung places, to reduce the likelihood of them taking sympathy action with CWU members they already know.

Willie Marshall commented to me, The excuse they used for doing striking CWU members’ work during local strikes is that nobody informed them! That is nonsense, but they can’t use that excuse this time.

Leaders of UNITE should instruct their members to do their normal duties, not other people’s jobs, and start a campaign for a strike ballot of their own members in Royal Mail – many of whose jobs are also on an extremely shaky nail.

The national CWU leadership have been handed a massive mandate to forge ahead with national strikes, to keep up the momentum, and they should immediately approach UNITE to organise solidarity with their battle for the survival of Royal Mail as a public service – rather than stand silent as UNITE members are organised by top management as a battalion of scabs.

Stand by your posties – victory to the CWU!

by Richie Venton – Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign organiser

Several developments on the provision of schools and education in recent weeks have exposed the rotten stench of New Labour’s hypocrisy, the backsliding of the SNP in the face of the recession, and the truth of the predictions and policies of the Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign, consistently championed during our mass struggle against school closures since January.

At the heart of the matter is the key issue of class sizes.

In ferociously fighting 25 primary and nursery closures by the Labour-run Glasgow City Council, we countered their excuses about falling school rolls dictating closures by demanding cuts to classes of 20 maximum, for all age groups – as a means of protecting and creating teachers’ jobs, improving the attention given to individual children and therefore the quality of their education.

We coined the slogan Twenty’s Plenty in any class, popularising the policy of the teachers’ union, EIS, and the Scottish Socialist Party.

We welcomed the pledge of the incoming SNP government to reduce classes to 18 in Primary1-3, as a radical step in the right direction. In the SOS Campaign’s official meeting with SNP Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop in June, I argued the case that her government’s reliance on the ‘Concordat’ between Holyrood and local authorities – whereby they appealed to councils to retain teaching staff levels whilst school rolls fell as a means of implementing P1-3 classes of 18 – was being ripped to shreds, incapable of achieving its own goals, and that surely the government should pass legislation to enforce smaller classes. That point was repeated in writing to her. No reply was forthcoming, oral or written.

Campaigning works!

However, the pressure of our campaign has played some part in two important recent steps in the parliament. The Public Petitions Committee recently agreed to seek the written responses of the government and several councils to the issues raised in our petition to the parliament, in which we demanded a public inquiry into the effect of school closures on class sizes, educational standards, jobs and other social impacts.

And now, under the pressure of parents and campaigners in revolt against school closures, plus legal cases enforcing larger class sizes in popular schools through placement requests, Fiona Hyslop has announced plans to legislate to enforce maximum classes of 25 in P1.

New Labour has unleashed the dogs of war against Hyslop, barking out accusations of betrayal, of desertion of the pledge of 18 maximum for a cap of 25.

Labour gives hypocrisy a bad name

Such accusations from New Labour stink to the high heavens. They give hypocrisy a bad name! This is the same New Labour who openly, publicly denounced smaller class sizes as unworkable in Glasgow – and whose Labour Lord Provost accused me of a middle class agenda(!?) for promoting classes of 20 maximum at public consultation meetings, telling me with a perfectly straight face that smaller classes don’t work for working class kids!

It’s the same New Labour whose Glasgow city council arrogantly dismissed our repeated arguments that the school population was set to rise again, with a 4 per cent growth in live births in recent years, and our dire warnings that their closures would lead to bigger classes and worse education – as well as job losses.
Well who was right and who was wrong? Average classes of 21 in the schools closed have leapt up to classes of 25 and more in the schools the kids have been shunted into this term. Only one in seven qualified teachers have got a full-time teaching job. Over 200 Glasgow teachers only heard which school they were working in the day before term started! And in an incredible, but shameless admission last week, Glasgow city council leaders conceded that actually there are more children in Glasgow than we had been expecting. In an ominous threat of further cuts and closures, they whined that this meant £2m less in savings through closures than projected.

So criticism of the SNP government from New Labour holds absolutely no water; and Labour pointedly says not a word about what they would do about cutting class sizes!

SNP backsliders

However, severe criticism of the SNP is richly deserved. They are backsliding on their election promises, whilst trying to disguise their cowardly retreat with headlines, smoke and mirrors. Alongside this miserably small step on reducing class sizes, they are slashing the intake to teacher training, as a perverse solution to the lack of permanent jobs for newly qualified teachers.

Of course any parent or teacher will welcome the legal limitation of P1 classes to 25 next year, in place of the current legal limit of 30, introduced in 1999. Of course if that was extended to P2 and P3 in later years it would be a painfully slow, gradual step in the right direction. And those of us who have fought a high profile battle for smaller class sizes, demanding legal measures to enforce them, as opposed to relying on the (non-existent) goodwill of councils, can celebrate making some impact on government policies.

But a ceiling of 25 for P1 is pathetic compared to the SNP manifesto pledges, and would only have a paltry impact in real life. Just 6 per cent of kids in Scotland in P1 are in classes above 25! So for 94 per cent of them, this has no effect – apart from the welcome protection against future increases as Labour, Lib Dem, Tory and SNP councils pass on cuts.

Twenty’s Plenty

And why restrict it to the first year of school? At present, P4-7 and the first two years of secondary school are only restricted to a maximum of 33, with a limit of 30 for the final four years at secondary.

And as any teacher at primary or secondary schools will testify, even a cap of 25 would still present them with the task of crowd control in many classes, rather than being able to devote time to the individual needs of kids’ learning.

The demand for no more than 20 in any class, right throughout school years, is justified, proven to be right by numerous academic studies, would transform kids’ learning experience and secure jobs for new generations of teachers, reducing the stress of the job in the process.

The Scottish Socialist Party will persist with this demand, alongside other parents and teachers, whereas the mainstream parties put cash before kids, whether in periods of recession and/or rampant profiteering for the few.