NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 2

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPER

CONDEMNED to death, in November 1897 anarchist Samuel Fielden of Todmorden sat alone in a Chicago prison cell awaiting execution on the 11th of the month. On 2 November the United States Supreme Court ruled there were no federal issues involved and it would not intervene. Only an act of clemency by State Governor Robert Oglesby might stay the executioner’s hand.

LIBERTY or DEATH?

THE political prosecution of Fielden and his comrades disabused radicals around the world of any lingering belief in the United States as the embodiment of liberty. The socialist historian Edward Thompson judged this state-sponsored prosecution the decisive factor in turning Britain’s Socialist League (SL) in an anarchist direction. William Morris (founder of the SL) excoriated the USA as “a society corrupt to the core and at this moment suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar of all the Russias.”

OGLESBY DECIDES

AT 9am on the eve of execution one of Fielden’s comrades cheated the hangman, ignited an explosive cartridge in his mouth and blew himself to pieces. Eight hours later Governor Oglesby intervened, commuting Fielden’s death sentence to life imprisonment but four of Sam’s five condemned comrades would still be hanged the following morning.

On Saturday 12 November Fielden was taken from Cooke County Jail to serve his sentence at Joliet, 30 miles south-west of the city of Chicago. At Joliet, Sam could leave his cell, exercise in the open air and resume his old work, labouring in the prison’s stone yard. Visits from family continued although little Alice no longer searched Sam’s cell as she initially did at Cooke County, looking for the candies her father, in happier days, hid around the house for her to triumphantly discover.

In 1890 a recently released prisoner, Thomas Broderick, claimed Sam was being singled out for harsh treatment, “Fielden, the English anarchist, shows the most marked fortitude and faces his dreary fate with wonderful patience and resignation. This has called down upon him the hatred of his guards. I have frequently seen the unfortunate man treated with great cruelty. Once I saw him chained to the wall for several hours and during that time all sorts of epithets were directed towards him by one of the guards and he was abused as though he had been the worst convict in the prison instead of one of the best.”

UNFOGOTTEN

“HAYMARKET MARTYRs” commemorations were organised around the world every eleventh of November and campaigning continued everywhere to secure the release of the remaining prisoners. After enduring seven years long years in jail hopes were raised in January 1893 with the inauguration of a new liberal State Governor, John Peter Altgeld who agreed to review the original prosecution. Confidence in Chicago’s police and judiciary had been severely eroded in the intervening years by a series of shocking discoveries. In January 1889, it was revealed that Inspector Bonfield, who’d led the police assault on the Haymarket meeting, “had for some time been receiving payments from saloon-keepers, prostitutes and thieves and had been trafficking in stolen goods”. Personal items stolen from one of the dead anarchists were subsequently found at the home of Detective Jacob Loewenstein.

On 25 June 1893 a magnificent “Haymarket Martyrs” monument was unveiled at Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, where years before Sam, the teamster, had regularly delivered decorative stonework. On 26 June Governor Altgeld formally ended Sam’s imprisonment with a report that rubbished the entire prosecution process that had in 1886 condemned him and his comrades to death. Altgeld emphasised this was no merciful pardon but a public declaration that Sam and his fellow Haymarket anarchists were falsely convicted and entirely innocent.

RELEASE

AT 4.20pm on 26 June 1893 Samuel Fielden, wearing a striped uniform distinguished only by his prison number, “8526”, was summoned to the office of Joliet’s Chief Warder. A special messenger, “Mr Dreyer”, handed Sam an engrossed document authorising his release. “Fielden took his pardon and folding it up carefully placed it under the brown and white striped jacket, worn black with long service, and without saying a word he reached out and grasped Mr Dreyer by the hand and then turning shook the warden’s hand fervidly.” The warden advised Sam, “If you call on Stewart Leland he will fit you out with the best suit of clothes that can be purchased outside of the World’s Fair City…Governor Altgeld has pardoned you and I can congratulate you and feel glad for I believe it is only your just dues.”

HOMECOMING

ARMED only with a rail permit and some pocket money, Sam, smoking a big cigar, left Joliet by the 6.15pm train for Chicago. He reached home, 117 West Polk Street, at 8.45pm where he was received by a large crowd. “His wife had been at the windows of their apartment on the second floor every few minutes on the lookout for him. Their little children, Alice who is 8 years of age and Harry who is nearly 7 were on the steps of the house ready to welcome their father while beside them were many of their father’s old associates…The meeting between the long separated husband and wife was tender though not demonstrative. They embraced each other for a moment and kissed each other for a moment and kissed each other tenderly. The wife murmured a welcome but the husband remained silent. He evidently desired to be stoical and did not want to give any indication of deeper feelings than a quiet sort of pleasure in returning home.”

POSTMAN BEN

THAT summer the Fieldens met old acquaintance, Benjamin Butterworth, the Walsden postman who’d come to Chicago to see the World’s Fair. In fact Butterworth made two visits, arriving first on Sunday 20 August, he returned the following Tuesday. “Glad that he had been permitted to shake hands with an old school fellow so far away from Todmorden, he heartily congratulated Mr Fielden on regaining his liberty after seven long years in Joliet.” For his part, Sam presented Benjamin with two “Haymarket” books, a sympathetic account compiled by lawyer Matthew Trumbull who’d been a Chartist in his youth in England, the other volume was Governor Altgeld’s justification for quashing Sam’s prosecution.

WORK

FIELDEN resumed his stone-hauling business, occasionally supplemented by driving a beer wagon. When he hadn’t returned to rabble rousing, after a year or so he was briefly pursued by reporters keen to depict a disillusioned anarchist but Sam wouldn’t oblige. “I will not change my mind on economic and social questions but I have not spoken at a public meeting for a long time and do not expect to.” When pressed on the matter Samuel revealed himself to be older and wiser. In the heady days of 1886 Chicago’s anarchists had convinced themselves they stood on the rim of a revolutionary cauldron; one more fiery speech and the workforce would erupt, overwhelm the plutocracy and wrest control. In reality the anarchists’ driving class consciousness ran far ahead of the everyday concerns of their fellow labourers. The anarchists provoked the tiger without the means to strike it dead. Now, on Sam’s release “He thinks the people too patient to effect any great reform in his lifetime”. He hadn’t abandoned his former aims or values but had emerged from prison with a more mature, considered anarchist philosophy which involved reconnecting with his family, nature and the land. He informed reporters he’d saved a bit of money and was looking for a farm.

SHOESTRING RANCH

IN April 1895 the Fieldens bought a small ranch situated high up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, fifty miles south-west of Denver and a thousand miles away from the mean streets of Chicago. City newspapers lost interest in Sam although his arrival in the Rockies was warmly received by local reporters, with this particular October 1895 account republished in Todmorden:

“Up towards the western extremity of the beautiful La Veta valley where the ground begins to rise to form the might range of which La Veta pass is a gateway lies a lonely ranch…It stretches along the winding, tumbling, sparkling stream called Indian Creek… and in the vernacular of the western is called a 'shoestring ranch'. Great, graceful trees border the creek and lofty hills rise clothed in the richest verdure on either side. Westwards the huge mountains themselves tower above it. It is a romantic spot, looking secluded and peaceful enough to satisfy the most weary soul imaginable. It is the home of a man whose name has probably been spoken in every civilised country in the world and whose existence cannot but hold some interest for every working man the class whose cause he zealously advocated and risked his life for.

“He looks the typical ranchman already with his sunburned face, flowing beard, unclipped hair, wide hat and dusty farmer’s suit. He seems perfectly at home holding the halters of his horses and expiating on the good points of the meek brown cow which he had just purchased…He feels the wrongs of the people as deeply as ever but as a public figure his part has been acted…Only those who seek him with sympathetic hearts and congenial minds will hear his thoughts expressed. He keeps in touch with the radical world by reading the papers and pamphlets printed by the workers…His bright children whom he takes to their country school nearly three miles away; his faithful wife…his picturesque home, his domestic animals, the state of his crops and the prevailing market prices will now occupy all his energies.”

FRIENDS & NEIGHBOURS

FAR from the madding crowd the Fieldens were widely respected throughout this scattered, self-sufficient but close knit community. When Mr Butler, a neighbour, dropped by in June 1897 he expressed admiration for Sam’s agricultural achievements; his recently completed system for irrigating crop fields, his select herd of eighteen cattle, plus a few hogs and when Butler departed he was accompanied by several choice pigs he’d purchased to stock his own ranch.

In 1898 a few Colorado friends, led by the radical Rev. Myron W Reed, who chaired the event, organised a Denver “Haymarket Commemoration”. At this now rare public expression of his sustained solidarity, Sam “seemed imbued with much of his old-time spirit and fire… his body swayed with emotion, he gesticulated freely and his voice rang with indignation against the robbers and oppressors of the poor.” The event drew an unexpectedly hostile response from the Salida Mail, which doubted the validity of the Governor’s pardon; “Samuel Fielden, one of the anarchists who escaped the noose and was given a life sentence was present. It will be recalled that the arch sympathiser with anarchy, Governor Altgeld pardoned this man…sentenced for the awful murder at Haymarket square.”

William Holmes, a fellow Englishman and fellow anarchist, who visited the Fieldens’ the same year, reflected the other side of the Governor’s action, “(Sam) is happily in possession of good health and spirits and looks back upon his long years of imprisonment as upon a frightful dream…his soul is filled with eternal gratitude for his brave deliverer – John P Altgeld”.

Another old anarchist buddy, William J Lloyd dropped by in 1903 and as they talked, Lloyd observed that despite his rocky isolation Sam was “up to date on all passing questions”. One evening after dinner, reminiscing as they rode together along Indian Creek, Sam confided, “there was no conspiracy and none of the leaders knew of the bomb thrower or his intentions and so little did they anticipate violence that they brought their wives and little children to the meeting.”

LIFE ALONG INDIAN CREEK

IN 1905 when “little Alice” turned twenty-one she was struck down by typhoid but after eight weeks at death’s door made a full recovery. The four Fieldens lived, worked and prospered together and in 1909 added Benton Vories’ ranch to their holding, after paying him $4,200 so he could take up an appointment as the local District Water Commissioner. Sadly Sam’s wife Sarah didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy their newly acquired land as she passed away two years later. As Sam’s labouring life began to take its toll, Harry made more of the major decisions on the farm, assisted by his invalid father.

In January 1915, the local paper reported that the area’s farmers had collectively shipped 16 carloads of cattle from La Veta for sale at Denver, and was impressed by prices achieved by Harry Fielden’s 66 calves. Investing for the future, in 1916 the Huefano County News reported that “the Fielden ranch has been improved with the erection of a 20 by 100 foot barn.” As the years slipped by along Indian Creek, Sam’s children remained on the ranch, unmarried, until Harry died 2nd July 1972 followed by Alice on 11th March 1975. Samuel Fielden had passed away half a century earlier on 7th February 1922, just a couple of weeks short of his 75th birthday. All four Fieldens lie together in the simple, small, enclosed La Veta cemetery.

(Part one of this story along with many other fascinating episodes of radical history are archived and easily accessible on this NV website – CD 2021)

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NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 1

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPERr

ON 20 August 1887 a Chicago jury condemned a Todmorden man to be hanged for a bomb-throwing incident that killed eight policemen and injured sixty more. As the turning point in Chicago’s bloody class war this sensational case was reported around the world. Back home in England, when Samuel Fielden’s invalid father was informed of his son’s death sentence he became another victim and expired within the week. Details of the bombing and trial were comprehensively recorded at the time but Samuel Fielden’s lifestory has never before been fully told.

A Northern Childhood

Samuel Fielden was born on 25 February 1847 in Walsden, on the Lancashire side of Todmorden. There’ve always been Fieldens in Todmorden and Samuel’s father, Abraham (1816-1886) worked as an overlooker at the town’s enormous Fielden Mill, though Sam’s family occupied a much lower social level than millowner, John Fielden MP (1784-1849) whose statue graces the town’s Vale Park. Sam’s mother, Alice bore Abraham seven children although only four survived into adulthood. She’d endured an impoverished childhood selling polishing sand door-to-door. Abraham first met her as she hawked her wares around the houses in the bitterest of winters, trudging through snow in bare feet.

Sam learnt nothing of anarchism or socialism in his youth but acquired an overwhelming ethical sense from the non-conformist religion and politics of his parents. Tragically, Sam’s mother died in 1858 when he was just eleven. He inherited a basic understanding of politics from Abraham who campaigned on many social issues of the day, Chartism, the ten-hour day, the co-operative movement and much more besides. When Sam was six or seven, he learned to read by attending a local dame school for six months.

Work

Aged eight, Sam started work at Fielden’s Mill. His first job was to race along the machines removing empty bobbins, taking care to keep fingers safe from the moving parts. After a couple of years he was promoted to the heavier task of taking full spools to the weavers. At this stage Sam was a statutory “half-timer”, required to attend the factory school for half of his time at the mill. He became a “full-timer” at the tender age of thirteen when he transferred to working in the factory’s warehouse. After a couple of years he learned to weave and laboured at that until he was twenty one when he’d resolved to seek his fortune in America.

Awakening

Several incidents in Sam’s youth came to shape the character that was so forcefully emerged in later life. In 1860, at the conclusion of Sam’s factory schooling, Mr Harrison, his teacher was accused by a local Methodist of brainwashing his pupils with Unitarian heresy. When Harrison sued for libel Sam was required to give witness at a Liverpool Court hearing. He was overjoyed at the prospect. Not only did he get to spend a week away from home but visited the new Menai Bridge and at Liverpool docks Sam was thrilled by the tall ships bound for America. His imagination was stimulated by the “dime novels” he brought back from Liverpool and with the outbreak of Civil War in 1861, everyone in Todmorden’s thoughts turned to events in America as supplies of mill cotton from the Southern States slowed to a trickle. Initially Fielden’s mill supplemented the raw material with inferior Surat cotton from India but this so clogged the machines that production ground to a halt. Until hostilities ceased in 1865 milling resumed only intermittently and in the interim Sam carried tiles for workmen laying drainage for the ground on which the millowner’s magnificent new Dobroyd Castle would soon arise.

Sam learned of the cultivators of that Southern cotton when escaped slave Henry Box Brown visited Todmorden in 1861 and told of how, with the assistance of abolitionists, he’d gained his freedom concealed in a crate posted away from the plantation as a parcel. Sam’s inherent disrespect for elitism was reinforced when William, his older brother, who worked as a gardener for the Fieldens, was dismissed for showing insufficient deference. Sam’s oratorical skills which came to be recognised as his political strong suit were nurtured in the chapels of Todmorden’s Methodist circuit where from 1865 until 1868 he was admired as a fervent “exhorter” well on his way to becoming a full-blown religious minister but it was not to be.

Wanderlust

Drawn by tales of the “Wild West” Sam longed to leave home but obeyed his father’s wish to remain until he was twenty-one. He’d also given his word to marry Sarah Gill, a weaver at the factory. When Sarah promised to wait for him until he was established in America, he booked his passage and in July 1868 sailed from Liverpool. His first job on landing in New York was at Prentice’s Brooklyn hat factory, but he didn’t like the work or the wages and left after only two days. Moving north to Providence, he returned to his old trade of millwork before in March 1869 starting out West. He reached Chicago in August, by way of a bit of sightseeing at Niagara Falls. Coincidentally, the very first building he entered on reaching the city belonged to John Still and his brother who ran a plumbers business and originated from Todmorden where Sam had known some of their relatives. Less happily, it was outside this building that seventeen years later the bombing occurred that led to Sam’s death sentence.

That autumn of 1869 Fielden worked on John Wentworth’s farm and the following spring laboured at dredging the Illinois & Michigan canal. His religious fervour continued to diminish as his political awareness grew. As a deck passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, in spring 1870, he embarked on a working tour of the southern states that enlightened him on the falsity of “abolition”. The “liberated” blacks continued to be dispossessed and exploited by a myriad of sophisticated social and economic measures.

Chicago Again

On returning to Chicago in May 1871 Sam laboured around the region on a variety of navvying tasks until, after a year or so, he settled into heavy haulage work serving the city’s stone yards. Belying his big, rough, burly appearance Sam never neglected his intellectual development, spending every free hour at lectures or reading in Chicago’s public library. He returned to Todmorden in the autumn of 1879 for the first and only time. After embracing his aged father who was no longer the vigorous patriarch of memory, Sam visited the overgrown grave of his mother. He also fulfilled the pledge of two decades before and married Sarah, his childhood sweetheart. The pair sailed from Liverpool on the Germanic, arriving in New York harbour on 26 January 1880 eager to start their new life together in the “Land of the Free”.

Teamwork and Anarchy

Having saved his wages over the years, on his return to Chicago Sam bought his own team of heavy horses and worked for himself in the thriving stone haulage business. After starting a teamsters union Sam was duly elected Vice President. In the autumn of 1880 he helped reorganise Chicago’s Liberal League which existed to ensure the total separation of church and state. Over time he successively served as the organisation’s secretary, vice president and conference delegate and this involvement served to enhance his growing intellectual development, confidence and political awareness.

By 1883 his involvement with the Chicago labor movement brought him to socialism which evolved into anarchism. The following year he joined the International Working People’s Association with divisions organised on the basis of language; Fielden joined the English-language “American Group”. Confronted by a corrupt oligarchy of employers and politicians intent on smashing organised labor, Chicago IWPA was defiantly militant. Sam Fielden subsequently recalled, “I wish to say (we) were all anarchists at that time.”

Chicago’s May Days

On 3 May 1886 an “army” of Pinkerton thugs and city police opened fire on striking workers at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works, killing two and injuring many more. In response, Chicago IWPA organised a mass protest for the next day at 7.30pm, 4 May at “Haymarket”. There were to be three speakers with Samuel Fielden to close the event. The meeting was peaceful but as Sam was ending his speech two hundred armed police officers led by Inspector Bonfield rushed from an adjacent building, panicking the crowd. Fielden was ordered to cease immediately and assist in dispersing his audience. As Sam remonstrated a bomb arced through the air and exploded amidst the police, who responded by shooting indiscriminately, injuring officers and workers alike. Fielden was shot in the knee and when records were compiled there were eight dead policemen, another sixty seriously injured and probably similar casualties amongst the workers though, understandably, few of these injuries were reported to the authorities.

Judicial Murder

Fielden managed to limp home and the next morning, police, without warrants, searched the house, found nothing but arrested him anyway. At the police station Sam was sworn at by Lieutenant Shea and ordered to remove his bandage and expose his leg wound. Police Chief Ebersold pointing at Sam’s forehead said, “it ought to have gone in here!”

The authorities never claimed that any named individual made, threw or had prior knowledge of the bomb. No relevant evidence tying any suspect to the bomb was ever presented in court yet Sam, along with seven other anarchists, was charged with murder. Evidence wasn’t required, for the judge, prosecutor and jury were hand-picked and the verdict a foregone conclusion.

Verdict

The verdict was delivered shortly after 10am August 20 1896. Mr Osborn, the foreman intoned, “We, the jury, find Samuel Fielden (and comrades)… guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment and fix the penalty at death.” Samuel Fielden responded from the dock: “Today as the beautiful autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheek of every free man I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again. I have loved my fellow man as I have loved myself. I have hated trickery, dishonesty and injustice. The nineteenth century commits the crime of killing its best friend but as I have said before if it will do any good I freely give myself up. I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence; and above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”

“Murderers’ Row”

Fielden was imprisoned in Cook County Jail in a stone cell measuring 6ft by 8ft, reached by a flight of iron steps. In front of the cell ran a narrow footway. Sam occupied “Cell 31” in this section known as “Murderers’ Row”. Awaiting execution he was visited by his wife Sarah and their two children, Alice and Sam junior. He’d never seen his son before as the boy was born on 1 November 1886, six months after Fielden was imprisoned and, ironically, four days after the unveiling of a giant statue in New York harbour; “Liberty Enlightening the Word”!

Despite continuing world-wide protests and a further 1½ years of legal wrangling, it was confirmed that Samuel Fielden would be hanged at 12 noon, 11 November 1887, but this isn’t quite the end of the story….

(The concluding part of this story will be posted on NV in 3 weeks. Search our archive for more of CD’s articles of Northern Radical History)

Men, Women, Covid and Risk 'Take 2' by Les May

THE expert group advising the Government on Stage 2 of the vaccination programme which will is now being extended to people under the age of 50 have chosen to continue with the present procedure of offering injections to people based upon age. This is by far the simplest procedure as information about a patient’s age is included in the medical record held by their doctor.

It also takes account of the fact that even with these relatively younger individuals, age remains the major risk factor. What was however striking about the graphic presented during the briefing was that it showed the significantly heightened level of risk to men in the 45 to 49 age group compared with women of the same age. Men have about twice the risk of women.

I previously pointed to this higher level of risk for men compared with women in my NV piece of January 27th ‘Men, Women, Covid and Risk’, though the disparity has attracted little or no attention in the broadcast or print media. This is in sharp contrast to the uncritical attention given by news outlets to the higher level of risk which may be suffered by some ethnic groups.

Significantly the speaker highlighted the need to encourage men under 50 to come forward for vaccination, as well as people from non-white backgrounds. Attention is often focused upon the reasons why some individuals from non-white backgrounds exhibit some reluctance to receive the vaccine. Often this is couched in terms of lack of trust or past experiences.

It would be difficult to claim that the public face of the NHS prioritises men’s health issues. Much attention is paid to promoting screening for breast and cervical cancers. Is there similar promotion of health issues affecting men?

Such services are available, screening for colo-rectal cancers and thin aortas are two examples, but there seems little effort to promote them.

Will the print and broadcast media take a stance which encourages men to come forward? Will any perceived reluctance of men to take up the offer of vaccination be couched in terms of lack of trust or past experiences with the Health Service? I’m not holding my breath!

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The Great Post Office Strike of 1971

by DAVE CHAPPLE

The 15th February 1971 was United Kingdom Decimalisation Day: no longer were there 12 pennies to a shilling, half-crowns, or 240 pennies to the pound. That day, 50 years ago, was also just over half-way through the greatest strike this country had seen since the General Strike of 1926: the 44-day national strike of 200,000 Post Office workers.

Telegraphists, telephonists, Post Office counter clerks, cleaners, postmen (170,000 of them!) and PHGs (Postmen Higher Grade), members of the Union of Post Office Workers, struck for their claim of 15%, or £3 a week for lower-paid grades such as cleaners. They picketed, they lobbied, they marched, but after six and a half weeks they went back to work defeated: why was that? This article attempts to find an answer.

In October 1969 the Post Office Corporation was created, carved out of an iconic part of the British Civil Service. Profits and budgets were increasingly emphasised at the expense of public service obligations, while Civil Service collective bargaining was side lined. When Ted Heath’s Tory Government was elected in 1970, many right-wing Tory MPs like Christopher Chataway, the new Posts Minister, openly argued for the part-privatisation of the vastly profitable telecommunications part of the Post Office.

On November 24th 1970, just after the UPW submitted its claim for 15%, the Tories sacked Lord Hall, the Labour Government-appointed Post Office Chairman. Result: spontaneous UPW walkouts in many large sorting offices! Bill Ryland, his replacement, was a Post Office career man with a mission to ‘modernise.’ That meant maximising telecoms profits, mechanising sorting offices, and replacing straight wage rises with productivity schemes.

Inflation was rampant, and the UPW claim for 15% would mean, at least, a real rather than an apparent pay rise. The Post Office offered 7%, then raised it to 8%. The UPW Executive Council, with Tom Jackson as General Secretary, saw this as an insult, and, under UPW Rules, without a ballot, called an all-out national strike from Wednesday January 20th!

Militant day telephonists at the Bristol UPW Rally in the Colston Hall, January 1971. Pic Bristol Evening Post From the Shetland Islands to Penzance, from Anglesey to Yarmouth, Post Office workers struck. The UPW produced a poster to accompany the claim: “Albert Edmondson, postman, works a 43 hour, six-day week, for this he takes home less than £16; Jenny Merritt, a telephonist, works a 41-hour, six-day week. For this she takes home £10.15s. Ian Moyes, a counter clerk, works a 42-hour six-day week and takes home £14 10s, even with five hours overtime.”

On Sunday 24th January, 20,000 UPW members took their first strike march down the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” used by the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and rallied in Hyde Park. Rallies were held every Thursday thereafter. For most of the six weeks, these were loud, confident working-class celebrations of struggle, and Tom Jackson, left-wing Labour with handle-bar moustache, was, to start with, a popular leader. Strike rallies took place in all of the UK’s cities, some, as in Bristol, led by militant young telephonists.

During the intermittent talks held during the strike, Ryland, an ambitious hard-liner who may even have acted without day to day orders from Tory Home Secretary Robert Carr, upped the pay offer to 9%, but only if the UPW agreed to a massive increase in part-time labour into the postman grade, which was a “closed shop”, ie. 100% trade union, and nearly 100% male. The UPW refused this ‘offer’, and the strike carried on, a war of attrition that affected every city, town and village in the country.

From the Shetland Islands to Penzance, from Anglesey to Yarmouth, Post Office workers struck. The UPW produced a poster to accompany the claim: “Albert Edmondson, postman, works a 43 hour, six-day week, for this he takes home less than £16; Jenny Merritt, a telephonist, works a 41-hour, six-day week. For this she takes home £10.15s. Ian Moyes, a counter clerk, works a 42-hour six-day week and takes home £14 10s, even with five hours overtime.”

On Sunday 24th January, 20,000 UPW members took their first strike march down the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” used by the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and rallied in Hyde Park. Rallies were held every Thursday thereafter. For most of the six weeks, these were loud, confident working-class celebrations of struggle, and Tom Jackson, left-wing Labour with handle-bar moustache, was, to start with, a popular leader. Strike rallies took place in all of the UK’s cities, some, as in Bristol, led by militant young telephonists.

From the Shetland Islands to Penzance, from Anglesey to Yarmouth, Post Office workers struck. The UPW produced a poster to accompany the claim: “Albert Edmondson, postman, works a 43 hour, six-day week, for this he takes home less than £16; Jenny Merritt, a telephonist, works a 41-hour, six-day week. For this she takes home £10.15s. Ian Moyes, a counter clerk, works a 42-hour six-day week and takes home £14 10s, even with five hours overtime.”

On Sunday 24th January, 20,000 UPW members took their first strike march down the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” used by the anti-Vietnam war protesters, and rallied in Hyde Park. Rallies were held every Thursday thereafter. For most of the six weeks, these were loud, confident working-class celebrations of struggle, and Tom Jackson, left-wing Labour with handle-bar moustache, was, to start with, a popular leader. Strike rallies took place in all of the UK’s cities, some, as in Bristol, led by militant young telephonists.

During the intermittent talks held during the strike, Ryland, an ambitious hard-liner who may even have acted without day to day orders from Tory Home Secretary Robert Carr, upped the pay offer to 9%, but only if the UPW agreed to a massive increase in part-time labour into the postman grade, which was a “closed shop”, ie. 100% trade union, and nearly 100% male. The UPW refused this ‘offer’, and the strike carried on, a war of attrition that affected every city, town and village in the country.

The last Bristol strike rally at Queen’s Square was snowbound: speaking is deputy branch secretary Monty Banks. Strikers carried a black coffin, borrowed from the Cardiff Outdoor UPW Branch, on which was painted: “Here lies the body of Postman Sid: he could not exist on fourteen quid!”

If the postmen, PHGs and telegraphists were solidly behind the UPW, the strike did have its weaknesses. Some Post Office Crown Offices were open, and, at the start, staffed by UPW striking volunteers on pension and social security days, until strikers refused to work alongside scabs. Telephonists were the weak link: only a minority of night full-time male telephonists were in any union, and many were in the non-TUC National Guild of Telephonists; many female day telephonists were UPW, but others were non-union. Not surprisingly, it was outside the main city telephone exchanges that angry mass picketing took place. Police were often called out, as scabs alleged harassment, and pickets complained of liquids being poured on them from the exchange’s upper floors. Many telephonists came away in tears from claiming their last pre-strike wage, £8, paid in arrears, when managers withheld a five-pound note and told them: “You will get this only if you stay in work now!”

The telephonists grade apart, the strike was solid from beginning to end: there was no drift back to work at all. This applied to rural areas as well as cities. In Ilfracombe, North Devon, Mike Creek, for decades now the Ilfracombe TUC Secretary, recalls that only one PHG UPW member scabbed, out of a branch of 53. Mike says this PHG was given a hard time for years afterwards.

In Bridgwater, Somerset, postman Eric Payne remembers shouting out “The wages of sin are death!”, to a solitary scab who gave a religious excuse for crossing the picket line. The only scab in the Bridgwater Crown Post Office Counter was a Tory Borough Councillor, Trevor Donaldson. The Middlezoy village postman Leggatt scabbed, delivering letters from one part of this Sedgemoor village to another, but then, as Bridgwater striking postmen pointed out angrily, he had his own market garden business!

The UPW only had £330,000 in its strike fund on January 16th, which did not go far, with 200,000 strikers! Public support was impressive: one survey claimed 47% sympathy, which was unprecedented for a trade union dispute. A postman’s wife in Totton, Southampton had her strike collection of £15 confiscated by the police!

It was generally agreed that the union had the better of the strike publicity: why then, did Tom Jackson and the UPW Executive Council call off the strike, suddenly and without any warning to the members, after six weeks, with nothing but a state-sponsored Inquiry to compensate for the abandonment of its 15% claim?

The ‘official’ UPW reason given was a simple one: the union had run out of money and was close to bankruptcy. Of course, the hardship fund was running out, but this explanation cannot, surely, be accepted by historians now, without investigating alternative strategies that had been, and were available to WIN the dispute.

What were they? First and perhaps foremost, the UPW could have asked the other Post Office unions to show real solidarity and strike with them till they won. The UPW could even have called out its own “Ship to Shore” radio operators, such as its members at Portishead Radio Station in Somerset: only a few hundred UPW members nationally, yet crucial to the whole operation of the UK merchant fleet; the UPW could also have appealed to ASTMS members (‘Left-winger’ Clive Jenkins union) who staffed the Telex Service to strike in sympathy. POMSA, the Post Office Management Staff Association, had many members who wanted to walk out with their UPW colleagues, but they were never asked. George Massey, the Communist POMSA Secretary for Bristol, remembered secretly collecting money for the UPW strike fund from about 20% of his supervisor members at the Small Street Head Post Office.

Most important, of all these sister Post Office unions, the UPW should have appealed to the powerful skilled Post Office Engineering Union, whose telephone engineers, despite automatic STD/Subscriber Trunk Dialling, could have put major pressure on industry and commerce. Despite a one-day POEU strike in solidarity with the UPW towards the end of February, this was too little and far too late. If their General Secretary, a member of the House of Lords, might have been less than keen, what about the POEU Branches and members?

Second, the TUC, and especially the key TUC unions, including those ‘left-wing’ led such as ASTMS, the AEU and the TGWU, need not have failed the UPW. When they failed the UPW, failing with either substantial hardship donations or supportive strike action, they should have been challenged and publicly shamed. After all, even from a ‘reformist’ parliamentary-socialist outlook, it was surely in the interests of their own members to ensure the UPW was not defeated!

The National Union of Railwaymen, 600,000 strong, had a pay claim lodged at the same time as the UPW. Even if they had struck for their own aims, Robert Carr and Ted Heath would have been forced to settle both NUR and UPW claims to the full. Yet right-wing NUR General Secretary Sidney Greene was incapable, or unwilling, to see this opportunity to strike alongside the UPW, probably defeat the Tory Government, and advance his own members standard of living.

The Tory Industrial Relations Bill, sponsored by Home Office Minister Robert Carr, was being opposed by the TUC, somewhat inconsistently at first, but one TUC-sponsored London Rally during the UPW strike, on 23rd February, had called over 100,000 trades unionists out. At that Hyde Park Rally, Tom Jackson was the most popular speaker, while the forked tongue of TUC General Secretary Vic Feather ‘gave his full support.’ When Feather failed to deliver on this TUC promise, and others, Tom Jackson kept silent, and when the strike collapsed, allowed his members’ anger to be concentrated upon himself.

The trade union movement in the UK in 1970 was, in numbers of members, number of shop stewards, number of closed shop agreements and numbers of disputes, extremely strong. Strong enough to force the TUC to call a one-day general strike against the Industrial Relations Bill: so why not a general strike to support the UPW? Such a strike would not even have been illegal, as it would have been by 1984! The TUC General Council also promised workplace collections that came to nothing. While some unions gave substantial donations, others made double-edged loans to the UPW: the NUR loaned £100,000; the TGWU, the AEU and the Furniture Trade Union £50,000 each. Yet, it was just these loans, or the UPW’s inability to re-pay, which, after four or five weeks, caused the UPW’s bankers to threaten the confiscation of the union’s Clapham HQ.

Trains and lorries carried vast numbers of parcels throughout the strike, which, despite donations to the UPW, the NUR and TGWU did little or nothing to prevent. Local Government and Civil Service union members were allowed by their leaders to deliver mail between their departments.

All in all, if the strategic thinking of the UPW leadership was non-existent, and its tactics both timid and over-confident, it was the TUC and the trade union movement that deserves most of the blame, they clearly deserted the UPW in 1971, its unique time of great need. With creditors pressing, the UPW Executive lost its confidence, as suddenly as the strike had been called. Feelers were put out; the Post Office, sensing UPW surrender, ‘chivalrously’ agreed a binding Court of Inquiry into the dispute, and so, on March 3rd 1971, the UPW Executive, led by Jackson, put the union’s bureaucracy and bricks and mortar before its membership, and decided by 27 votes to 4 to call an immediate Branch Ballot for a return to work.

These meetings were held within 5 days, amid some accusations of undue haste: for example, Mount Pleasant meetings were always held on Sundays, yet many members awoke on that Sunday to find their branch meeting had already been called on the Saturday! Moreover, if a Branch of 2,000 members had voted to call the strike off by 1,100 votes to 900, under UPW Rules, all 2,000 votes were cast for ending the strike. The final vote, translated into actual membership figures, was 190,614 to 10,427.

During the intermittent talks held during the strike, Ryland, an ambitious hard-liner who may even have acted without day to day orders from Tory Home Secretary Robert Carr, upped the pay offer to 9%, but only if the UPW agreed to a massive increase in part-time labour into the postman grade, which was a “closed shop”, ie. 100% trade union, and nearly 100% male. The UPW refused this ‘offer’, and the strike carried on, a war of attrition that affected every city, town and village in the country.

The last Bristol strike rally at Queen’s Square was snowbound: speaking is deputy branch secretary Monty Banks. Strikers carried a black coffin, borrowed from the Cardiff Outdoor UPW Branch, on which was painted: “Here lies the body of Postman Sid: he could not exist on fourteen quid!”

If the postmen, PHGs and telegraphists were solidly behind the UPW, the strike did have its weaknesses. Some Post Office Crown Offices were open, and, at the start, staffed by UPW striking volunteers on pension and social security days, until strikers refused to work alongside scabs. Telephonists were the weak link: only a minority of night full-time male telephonists were in any union, and many were in the non-TUC National Guild of Telephonists; many female day telephonists were UPW, but others were non-union.

Not surprisingly, it was outside the main city telephone exchanges that angry mass picketing took place. Police were often called out, as scabs alleged harassment, and pickets complained of liquids being poured on them from the exchange’s upper floors. Many telephonists came away in tears from claiming their last pre-strike wage, £8, paid in arrears, when managers withheld a five-pound note and told them: “You will get this only if you stay in work now!”

The telephonists grade apart, the strike was solid from beginning to end: there was no drift back to work at all. This applied to rural areas as well as cities. In Ilfracombe, North Devon, Mike Creek, for decades now the Ilfracombe TUC Secretary, recalls that only one PHG UPW member scabbed, out of a branch of 53. Mike says this PHG was given a hard time for years afterwards.

In Bridgwater, Somerset, postman Eric Payne remembers shouting out “The wages of sin are death!”, to a solitary scab who gave a religious excuse for crossing the picket line. The only scab in the Bridgwater Crown Post Office Counter was a Tory Borough Councillor, Trevor Donaldson. The Middlezoy village postman Leggatt scabbed, delivering letters from one part of this Sedgemoor village to another, but then, as Bridgwater striking postmen pointed out angrily, he had his own market garden business!

The UPW only had £330,000 in its strike fund on January 16th, which did not go far, with 200,000 strikers! Public support was impressive: one survey claimed 47% sympathy, which was unprecedented for a trade union dispute. A postman’s wife in Totton, Southampton had her strike collection of £15 confiscated by the police!

It was generally agreed that the union had the better of the strike publicity: why then, did Tom Jackson and the UPW Executive Council call off the strike, suddenly and without any warning to the members, after six weeks, with nothing but a state-sponsored Inquiry to compensate for the abandonment of its 15% claim?

The ‘official’ UPW reason given was a simple one: the union had run out of money and was close to bankruptcy. Of course, the hardship fund was running out, but this explanation cannot, surely, be accepted by historians now, without investigating alternative strategies that had been, and were available to WIN the dispute.

What were they? First and perhaps foremost, the UPW could have asked the other Post Office unions to show real solidarity and strike with them till they won. The UPW could even have called out its own “Ship to Shore” radio operators, such as its members at Portishead Radio Station in Somerset: only a few hundred UPW members nationally, yet crucial to the whole operation of the UK merchant fleet; the UPW could also have appealed to ASTMS members (‘Left-winger’ Clive Jenkins union) who staffed the Telex Service to strike in sympathy. POMSA, the Post Office Management Staff Association, had many members who wanted to walk out with their UPW colleagues, but they were never asked. George Massey, the Communist POMSA Secretary for Bristol, remembered secretly collecting money for the UPW strike fund from about 20% of his supervisor members at the Small Street Head Post Office.

Most important, of all these sister Post Office unions, the UPW should have appealed to the powerful skilled Post Office Engineering Union, whose telephone engineers, despite automatic STD/Subscriber Trunk Dialling, could have put major pressure on industry and commerce. Despite a one-day POEU strike in solidarity with the UPW towards the end of February, this was too little and far too late. If their General Secretary, a member of the House of Lords, might have been less than keen, what about the POEU Branches and members? Second, the TUC, and especially the key TUC unions, including those ‘left-wing’ led such as ASTMS, the AEU and the TGWU, need not have failed the UPW. When they failed the UPW, failing with either substantial hardship donations or supportive strike action, they should have been challenged and publicly shamed. After all, even from a ‘reformist’ parliamentary-socialist outlook, it was surely in the interests of their own members to ensure the UPW was not defeated!

The National Union of Railwaymen, 600,000 strong, had a pay claim lodged at the same time as the UPW. Even if they had struck for their own aims, Robert Carr and Ted Heath would have been forced to settle both NUR and UPW claims to the full. Yet right-wing NUR General Secretary Sidney Greene was incapable, or unwilling, to see this opportunity to strike alongside the UPW, probably defeat the Tory Government, and advance his own members standard of living.

The Tory Industrial Relations Bill, sponsored by Home Office Minister Robert Carr, was being opposed by the TUC, somewhat inconsistently at first, but one TUC-sponsored London Rally during the UPW strike, on 23rd February, had called over 100,000 trades unionists out. At that Hyde Park Rally, Tom Jackson was the most popular speaker, while the forked tongue of TUC General Secretary Vic Feather ‘gave his full support.’ When Feather failed to deliver on this TUC promise, and others, Tom Jackson kept silent, and when the strike collapsed, allowed his members’ anger to be concentrated upon himself.

The trade union movement in the UK in 1970 was, in numbers of members, number of shop stewards, number of closed shop agreements and numbers of disputes, extremely strong. Strong enough to force the TUC to call a one-day general strike against the Industrial Relations Bill: so why not a general strike to support the UPW? Such a strike would not even have been illegal, as it would have been by 1984! The TUC General Council also promised workplace collections that came to nothing. While some unions gave substantial donations, others made double-edged loans to the UPW: the NUR loaned £100,000; the TGWU, the AEU and the Furniture Trade Union £50,000 each. Yet, it was just these loans, or the UPW’s inability to re-pay, which, after four or five weeks, caused the UPW’s bankers to threaten the confiscation of the union’s Clapham HQ.

Trains and lorries carried vast numbers of parcels throughout the strike, which, despite donations to the UPW, the NUR and TGWU did little or nothing to prevent. Local Government and Civil Service union members were allowed by their leaders to deliver mail between their departments.

All in all, if the strategic thinking of the UPW leadership was non-existent, and its tactics both timid and over-confident, it was the TUC and the trade union movement that deserves most of the blame, they clearly deserted the UPW in 1971, its unique time of great need. With creditors pressing, the UPW Executive lost its confidence, as suddenly as the strike had been called. Feelers were put out; the Post Office, sensing UPW surrender, ‘chivalrously’ agreed a binding Court of Inquiry into the dispute, and so, on March 3rd 1971, the UPW Executive, led by Jackson, put the union’s bureaucracy and bricks and mortar before its membership, and decided by 27 votes to 4 to call an immediate Branch Ballot for a return to work.

These meetings were held within 5 days, amid some accusations of undue haste: for example, Mount Pleasant meetings were always held on Sundays, yet many members awoke on that Sunday to find their branch meeting had already been called on the Saturday! Moreover, if a Branch of 2,000 members had voted to call the strike off by 1,100 votes to 900, under UPW Rules, all 2,000 votes were cast for ending the strike. The final vote, translated into actual membership figures, was 190,614 to 10,427.

A Comment On the Sukuta Project by Les May

THE most striking thing about the recent piece by John Walker on the Sukuta Project which intends to renovate the Gambia’s largest primary school is the relatively small amount of money, £60,000, which will be needed to accomplish a project which will benefit 2,000 children immediately and go on benefiting similar sized cohorts for many years to come.

In July 2020, I wrote an article for NV with the title ‘Why Black Lives Matter Will Fail’. Something I wrote at the end of that piece seems pertinent here.

In the article I mentioned a disclaimer which read ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

If you check out the website https://uk.gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund which appears to be the group referred to in the disclaimer, you will find passages like ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’ and ‘we lift up the experiences of the most marginalised in our communities, including but not limited to working class queer, trans, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, sex workers, women/non-binary, HIV+ people.’

You’ll also find the group have been given £1.2 million by 35,000 donors. At the risk of being tedious I will mention that this sum would change the lives of almost 7500 black children in Africa who were born with a cleft palate and face a lifetime of ridicule and social isolation, or pay for nearly 75,000 ingrowing eye lash operations or nearly seven and a half million doses of a drug to cure trachoma and prevent this many black people going blind.

Clearly all those donors have different priorities to mine.

£1.2 million would fund 20 similar projects in Africa meaning that 40,000 black children would benefit immediately and would be followed by the same number of children benefiting long into the future.

As someone recently wrote to me, ‘organisations like BLM are more concerned about displaying sentiments rather than addressing issues.’

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This Cotton-Built Town by Trevor Hoyle

[after Betjeman. A long way after]

It once were great, this cotton-built town

A grand night out for half-a-crown,

Go out now you get knocked down

Or summat worse

We had cobbles and ginnels and gaslit streets,

A clip round th’ear from bobbies on beats.

No muggers or druggies, no benefits cheats,

Our nation’s curse.

Gradely folk they were back then

Slogged all week at mill for six-pound-ten:

Lancashire’s best – la crème de la crème,

Gone and forgot.

Walk down Drake Street now and weep

For Ivesons, Fashion Corner, the Carlton creep,

The legacy of civic pride sold cheap.

Who gives a jot?

It’s council top brass in the main

Who’ve least to lose and most to gain.

(1st class seats on the gravy train!)

Just hear their cries:

Sack the workers but keep the bosses!

That’s the way to cut the losses!

And round our necks like albatrosses

Hang the PFIs.

And where do all our taxes go?

You must be joking – don’t you know?

On bods with clipboards on go slow,

On Manchester Road –

Where roundabouts once did the job

The planners have incensed the mob,

Who write in fury to the Ob:

“Stop this load

Of nonsense, quick, it’s puerile,

Are they trying to compete in style

With illuminations on’t Golden Mile

And make things worse?”

Come, gentle Kong, and dump on Dale

Bury it deep so it can’t inhale.

Beyond a joke, beyond the pale,

Armpit of the universe.

**********************************************

Preying On The Private Renter by Les May

THE Government is rightly proud that almost 17 million people have received the first dose of a vaccine which it is hoped will make them safe from Covid 19. It has nothing to be proud of in the fact that almost half that number of people, 8 million, are living in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable housing, according to a recent report by the National Housing Federation. This figure is revealed in a report published today with the title ‘Coming Home: Tackling the housing crisis together’.

The new report describes as 'a national scandal' the fact that eight million people in England live in overcrowded, unaffordable, or unsuitable homes, and says that this is 'neither accidental nor inevitable… The present situation is unjust, and the burden of bad housing is falling unjustly on the poor'.

Among the list of recommendations:

- a 20-year political programme to improve the quality and affordability of the nation’s housing stock, agreed by all parties and thus immune to changing political fortunes;

- a redefinition of 'affordability' that relates to income rather than property prices;

- a short-term reform of the benefits system to meet the shortfall between housing support and the true cost of housing;

- a review of tenancy agreements, redressing the present imbalance, introducing an explicit duty of care of landlords for their tenants, and removing Section 21 (”no fault”) evictions;

- an improvement in the stock of temporary housing;

- new mechanisms for improving the existing housing stock, 11 per cent of which is defined as sub-standard, and making it more sustainable;

There is also a draft charter for new housing, which suggests it should be:

Sustainable: adapt and reuse existing building stock where possible; water, waste and energy designed to minimise impact on the environment: plant one tree per house.

Safe: landowner to maintain an interest and participate in the project; design criteria to be built into partnership agreements to ensure compliance.

Stable: encouragement to people to put down roots through community site-management schemes; reference to the wider community.

Sociable: mixed-use dwellings in walkable neighbourhoods; design to ensure that affordable houses are indistinguishable from private-tenure houses, and 'pepper-potted' throughout the site.

Satisfying: use design to create distinctiveness and encourage a sense of belonging; ensure that the development fits into the natural landscape.

Polly Neate the chief executive of the charity Shelter responded to the report by saying: 'It is brilliant to see the Church of England showing leadership and taking action to tackle our growing housing emergency. Looking at how church land can be best used to fight homelessness is extremely welcome.

'Homelessness isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of decades of political failure to build social homes. This is the reason over a quarter of a million people in England are homeless and trapped in temporary accommodation during the pandemic — half of them children.

'The Church is right that homes have to be affordable to local people and tied to local incomes. This is what social housing does, which is why we want to see the Church, the Government, and other landowners play their part in building a new generation of social homes.'

There may be a shortage of affordable housing but there has never been a shortage of worthy reports about the problem. It will be interesting to see if after all the fanfare it is allowed to fade into the background.

We can pray it does not or we can vote for the politicians who will recognise the fundamental economic forces that work against affordability and do something about it. Sixty per cent of the nation’s wealth is reckoned to be held in property, leading to its being regarded as a financial asset rather than a universal necessity. Are we willing to change that?

******************************************************

Protests & funeral follow shootings in Myanmar

“Stop the genocide. Stop using lethal weapons," said protester Min Htet Naing.

Feb. 21, 2021, 10:46 AM GMT

By The Associated Press

YANGON, Myanmar — Protesters gathered again Sunday all over Myanmar, a day after security forces shot dead two people at a demonstration in the country’s second biggest city. A funeral was also held for a young woman killed earlier by police.

Mya Thwet Thwet Khine was the first confirmed death among the many thousands who have taken to the streets to protest the Feb. 1 coup that toppled the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The woman was shot on Feb. 9, two days before her 20th birthday, at a protest in the capital Nayptitaw, and died Friday

.

About 1,000 people in cars and bikes gathered Sunday morning at the hospital where her body was held amid tight security, with even the victim’s grandparents who had traveled from Yangon, five hours away, denied entry. When her body was released, a long motorized procession began a drive to the cemetery.

In Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, about 1,000 demonstrators honored the woman under an elevated roadway.

“I want to say through the media to the dictator and his associates, we are peaceful demonstrators,” said protester Min Htet Naing. “Stop the genocide. Stop using lethal weapons.”

Another large protest took place in Mandalay, where police shot dead two people on Saturday near a dockyard as security forces were trying to force workers to load a boat. The workers, like railway workers and truckers and many civil servants, have been taking part in a civil disobedience campaign against the junta.

Shooting broke out after neighborhood residents rushed to the Yadanabon dock to try to assist the workers in their resistance. One of the victims, described as a teenage boy, was shot in the head and died immediately, while another was shot in the chest and died en route to a hospital.

Several other serious injuries were also reported. Witness accounts and photos of bullet casings indicated that the security forces used live ammunition, in addition to rubber bullets, water cannons and slingshots.

The new deaths drew quick and strong reaction from the international community.

“The shooting of peaceful protesters in is beyond the pale,” said British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Twitter. “We will consider further action, with our international partners, against those crushing democracy & choking dissent.”

Britain last week froze assets of and imposed travel bans on three top Myanmar generals, adding to already existing targeted sanctions.

Singapore, which together with Myanmar is part of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, issued a statement condemning the use of lethal force as “inexcusable.”

Urging “utmost restraint” on the part of security forces, it warned that “if the situation continues to escalate, there will be serious adverse consequences for Myanmar and the region.”

Another shooting death took place Saturday night in Yangon in unclear circumstances. According to several accounts on social media, including a live broadcast that showed the body, the victim was a man who was acting as a volunteer guard for a neighborhood watch group. Such groups were established because of fears that authorities were using criminals released from prison to spread panic and fear by setting fires and committing violent acts.

The junta took power after detaining Suu Kyi and preventing Parliament from convening, saying elections last November were tainted by voting irregularities. The election outcome, in which Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won by a landslide, was affirmed by an election commission that has since been replaced by the military. The junta says it will hold new elections in a year’s time.

The coup was a major setback to Myanmar’s transition to democracy after 50 years of army rule that began with a 1962 coup. Suu Kyi came to power after her party won a 2015 election, but the generals retained substantial power under the constitution, which was adopted under a military regime.

*************************************************************

Deja Vu? by Andrew Wastling

HOMES are as we all know far more than concrete and brickwork. Our decision makers need to get things right. Some readers may recall that for all of its issues Ashfield Valley did at least provide easy access accommodation for a generation of Rochdale's youth. Ashfield Valley it's often airbrushed out of local social housing history and despite winning a housing award in the 1967 'Summer of Love', it quickly declined and by the 1980s was a double edged sword which on one hand was a notorious haven for drug users, glue sniffers whilst on the other a vibrant safe haven for a small army of squatters , artists and writers as well as being home to a large number of families, OAP's and single people'. 'Ashy Valley' comprised just over 1,000 flats and it's eventual demolition it can be argued artificially increased rents in the private sector locally by reducing housing unit supply , along with Margaret Thatcher's who passed two pieces of major housing legislation in 1980 & 1989.

The 1980 Housing Act extended the right to buy to tenants with generous discounts following decades more than a million council homes were sold at an estimated cost in today's money of more than £60bn. The majority of sold-off homes were not replaced, leaving social housing as a residual tenure. Since 1990, a further 500,000 Council Houses have been sold off. The 2021 local housing crisis has been manufactured by generations of town planners and politicians from all political parties not arrived at by sheer chance.

Writing in the guardian in 2017, Faiza Shaheen, (Director of CLASS Centre for Labour and Social Studies) argued convincingly that thirty years of bad policy have encouraged house hoarding, avarice and the massive accumulation of wealth – to the detriment of the rest of society , pointing out that:

'The richest 1% of adults, some 488,000 people, own 14% of the nation's assets ,– worth about £11tn. At the other end of the financial scale, 15% (7.3 million people) either own no assets at all, or are in debt. And things are potentially about to get a lot worse – house prices are forecast to rise by 50% over the next eight years, according to the National Association of Estate Agents and the Association of Residential Letting Agents.'

Locally we are in danger of repeating the exact same failed solutions to the same problems on local social housing only on a much larger scale.

Despite some of the swearing mandatory viewing of the Tony Wilson narrated documentary Hard-core Valley - Ashfield Valley Flats' (1) might be advisable for those RBH / RMBC making the decisions on College Bank & Lower Falinge. Not least for the nostalgia trip some of us might have seen familiar faces admiring the spiked hair , the dreadlocks ,& colourful punk fashions & music of the time. Readers of Northern Voices will be aware that Cult 1975 novel Rule of the Night, by Rochdale author Trevor Hoyle, is largely based on the estate. (please see Greater Manchester's forgotten Punk Estate : Greater Manchester's forgotten punk estate - Manchester Evening News).

Tragically one of the well known punk squatters , Jon Rimmer, who was a familiar sight once a fortnight carrying a huge bag of spuds over his shoulder bought with his Giro from Ron Chalker 'The Potatoe Mans' warehouse on Mellor Street, walking through town barefoot accompanied by his placid natured alsatian Rebel, was his was murdered in 2019 (Rochdale News | News Headlines | Funeral fundraiser launched for Jon Rimmer - Rochdale Online) whilst the various disparate tribes making up the valley were dispersed locally to Sheffield, Hebden Bridge, Totnes and Brighton and some as far afield as to the anarchist squat in Christiania in the heart of Copenhagen. It was the end of an era for many. The start of a long journey of self-discovery for others.

In Wilson's documentary there is an unfortunate incident of camera photobombing by an unwelcome local politician ( Cyril Smith ) who was renowned for avoiding the estate & its residents like the pneumonic plague when cameras were not present and it came to doing his job as town MP. The documentary is a snap-shot in time from Rochdale's housing archive. To see this vile politician brazenly stand beside the flats and shamelessly say he's been an MP for eighteen years tells it's own story when we are mindful that his brother Norman held a Rochdale Council housing portfolio at the time.

As does some rudimentary investigation of which local establishment politicians who oversaw this social housing scandal who are still unbelievably active in local council politics well past their sell by date?

As with Ashfield Valley asbestos is reportedly present in College Bank. Lower Falinge has taken over the unenviable & undeserved mantle of a 'failed estate' from Ashy Valley - despite having wonderful community initiatives and brilliant residents who struggle to maintain a vibrant community despite being consistently failed by Rochdale Borough Housing and local politicians of all parties over the decades.

Our mainstream media frequently uses social stereotyping images of Lower Falinge when they wish to indulge their penchant for poverty safaris to illustrate numerous & serial articles on 'welfare dependency' & 'broken Britain'. Ashfield Valley was a planning & delivery disaster that could & should have been averted. It was an abject failure & scandal, a 'masterclass' in how not to run social housing. The demolition of Great Howarth by Rochdale Borough Housing and the current state of and proposals for College Bank and Lower Falinge - as well as other Rochdale Borough Housing managed properties - shows that absolutely nothing has been learned by our decision makers who seem intent on making the exact same mistakes, using failed 'solutions' to mediate what appear to be institutionally engrained repeated failures with getting to grips with social housing in Rochdale over half a century.

Proving there's nothing really new under the sun .We can see that Rochdale already has considerable form when it comes to home regeneration, redevelopment, failure & eventual demolition due to years of mismanagement of housing stock by criminal & inept local politicians.

Am I alone in getting a sickening sense of Déjà vu about RBH kamikaze plans to demolish College Bank flats?

What's the betting Rochdale's local propertied class once again trouser private rents hand over fist in the aftermath of this exercise in turbo drived gentrification?

Historical Archive:

Tony Wilson's 1990's documentary : Harcore Valley from Granada and Simon Armitages ' Xanadu from 1992 both give powerful insights into a community about to be demolished and can be seen on YouTube.

In Hardcore Valley : Tony Wilson focuses on the marginalsied voices from the Estate both old and new in Granada TV documentary made during the demolition of the infamous Ashfield Valley estate, Rochdale. early 1990s The piece now stands as a fascinating piece of social history into an era in the history of Social Housing which has been airbrushed almost completely from history by local Town Planners intent on seeing history repeats itself

In Xanadu : Simon Armitage focuses on housing problems on the notorious Ashfield Valley Estate in Rochdale, Lancashire. To the background sound of the estate being demolished, Armitage discovers that life is continuing there in gentle and surprising ways. The only remaining caretaker is a survivor of the 1956 uprising in Budapest, while a neighbour rescues local stranded cats. One couple are not looking forward to moving from their immaculate flat, and another resident is cultivating a forest in his home.

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UK Supreme Court says Uber drivers are not independent contractors

Uber's "gig economy" business model is under attack around the world.

by Timothy B. Lee in ars Technica- 2/19/2021, 5:14 PM

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has ruled that Uber drivers are legally workers, not self-employed contractors as Uber has argued in courts around the world. The ruling means that drivers in Britain and Northern Ireland are eligible for additional benefits and protections, including a minimum wage.

Uber claims that it merely acts as a technology provider and broker between independent drivers and their customers—much as eBay facilitates sales between buyers and sellers. In Uber's view, this means that it doesn't owe its drivers benefits like unemployment insurance, doesn't need to reimburse drivers for their costs, and isn't bound by minimum wage and overtime rules. Uber emphasizes that its drivers are free to decide when, where, and how much they work.

But critics point out that Uber exerts a lot more control over its drivers—and over the driver-passenger relationship—than a conventional platform like eBay or Airbnb. Uber sets fares, collects payments from customers, deducts its own fee, and remits the remainder to the driver. It requires drivers to accept a large majority of the rides they are offered. It handles customer complaints and kicks drivers off the platform if their average rating falls too low.

“A position of subordination and dependency”

So the UK Supreme Court ruled Friday that Uber drivers are legally Uber workers, not independent business owners who happen to get most of their business from Uber.

“Drivers are in a position of subordination and dependency in relation to Uber such that they have little or no ability to improve their economic position through professional or entrepreneurial skill,” said Lord George Leggatt, one of the justices of the Supreme Court, as he handed down the ruling.

One consequence is that Uber drivers must be paid at least the minimum wage. And importantly, the high court held that drivers must be paid not only for the time when they're driving but also for time they're logged in to the app waiting for another fare.

This could have significant implications for Uber's relationship to drivers. While drivers will presumably appreciate a minimum earnings guarantee, this could also mean that Uber will restrict when drivers are allowed to work—since having too many drivers online during periods of low demand could cost Uber more than it earns in fares.

According to the Financial Times, the ruling means Uber must set up a pension program for its drivers. Thousands of drivers could be eligible to sue for back pay as a result of the ruling.

A global battle

In recent years, Uber has been fighting over the same issue in jurisdictions around the world. California passed legislation in 2019 requiring Uber (and Lyft) to treat its drivers as employees. Uber and Lyft fought the law in court for the next year, delaying its implementation until voters overturned it in a November 2020 vote.

According to the Financial Times, UK law has three legal categories—employees, workers, and independent contractors. Workers in the UK have more rights than independent contractors, but not as many as employees. Employment law in the US generally just has two categories—employees and independent contractors.

Last year, France's top court ruled that Uber drivers must be treated as employees. Spanish courts reached a similar conclusion in September. Uber is facing a class-action lawsuit in Canada over the same issue.

Uber is also facing litigation in Massachusetts over the legal status of its drivers.

Of course, Uber may ultimately overturn some of these rulings in the courts or national legislatures, or through referenda. But it seems unlikely that Uber will prevail in all of these fights. Which means that unless Uber wants to abandon broad swaths of hard-won territory, it's going to have to figure out how to make its business model work while treating drivers as employees.

That might mean higher prices for consumers and less flexibility for the drivers. But advocates say that drivers will ultimately benefit from having the same legal protections as most other workers.

Trees not Cars by John Wilkins

.– a victory for the people

I GOT an e-mail today that lifted my spirits. It asked me to tell my friends about the success of a campaign to stop Manchester City Council turning derelict land (formerly a retail park) into a 440 space car park.

Well done to all the people of Ancoats and others who had who started to turn this derelict land into green open space for adults and children to use. The campaign called 'Trees not Cars' petitioned the Council with over 12,000 signatories supporting it.

Trees Not Cars have won a judicial review against Manchester City Council, blocking them from using the former Central Retail Park as a temporary 440-space car park next to the city centre's only primary school.

 

It marks a major victory for “a grassroots community group that has campaigned tirelessly for over 18 months to stop the plans which completely ignored the impact on air pollution in an attempt to force the plans through.”

In finding in favour of 'Trees not Cars' the review found that Manchester Council had:

• Failed to consider the impact of air quality on the local area around Ancoats

• ​Failed to consider the impact of building a polluting 440-space car park next to the only primary school in Manchester city centre.

 

• Was unlawful in that the Council recommended planning approval based on the wrong information, the wrong air quality assessment, and traffic analysis.

 

Manchester Council was represented by a team of lawyers led by Christopher Katkowski QC, a London-based barrister  said to be  one of the leading planning specialists in the country.  Katkowski is an advisor to Boris Johnson痴 Government and  architect  behind the Government’s proposed controversial new planning laws that would see sweeping changes to the planning system.

The campaign is now calling for the council to reopen their development framework for the 10 acre site to genuine community input. Trees Not Cars, following their legal victory, have reiterated their call that the Council “must now include significant green space and affordable housing on the site.”

The Council seemed to think the money they would have raised from turning the land into a large car park was more important than residents well being. As well as a victory for the environment it can now be a pleasant open space for local people, many of whom live in high rise buildings!

 

Despite the excessive amount of money the Council has put into defending their actions they lost. It should give encouragement to us that if enough people speak out then they can effect change.

Sorry Sir Richard Leese the people have spoken!

Read more @ https://tinyurl.com/y6v5a46m

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Renovating the Gambia's largest primary school! by John Walker

A couple of years ago we had raised the funds to commission our most ambitious project in Sohm, the building of the new school hall, and felt that once it was complete, we could switch off our charity’s fund-raising engine, take the hand break off and slowly cruise down-hill in future years at the Lower Basic school.

And so, on time, budget and target, a year later, the multi-function hall (assembly, gym, dining room, prayer room, village meeting room etc.) was opened, with much local fanfare and celebration. We felt very pleased – bordering on smug - at the achievement.

New hall at Sohm - ourmost successful project - to date!

But something was missing. It was our key contact at the school, with whom we had worked successfully on all of our other projects over the years: bringing electricity to the school, renovating the teachers’ accommodation, rebuilding dangerous and unhealthy toilets, restoring a library made unusable by the ravages of termites, renovating a broken six-classroom block, adding water standpipes, building a new sick room and providing PCs and stationery each year etc.

Lamin Saidy, the ever-reliable, unassuming but determined deputy head teacher and rock upon which our efforts had depended was not there to celebrate the hall opening, because he was busy in his new job. The Gambian education authorities had spotted his talents and transferred him to become deputy head teacher in the country’s largest primary school – with over 2,000 pupils. It was a great move for Lamin: promotion and fresh challenges in a less isolated location.

Lamin Saidy, ex-deputy head at Sohm, now at Sukuta

But it wasn’t all positive. He must have groaned when he saw the state of the place. Like Sohm Lower Basic, his new school in Sukuta was about forty years old and had suffered neglect, due to lack of funding from incompetent/corrupt governments for most of that period. The same deficiencies were obvious: insufficient water storage and standpipes, dangerously unhealthy toilets, a lack of safe eating area for children’s lunches, a library made inoperable because of termite attacks and cramped accommodation.

In some ways it was worse. There was no sick room in a school with 2,000 youngsters, many of whom were undernourished and would suffer fainting episodes in the sweltering heat, others who faced regular bouts of malaria, older girls with nowhere to go when menstruating for the first time. Never mind the lack of facilities to deal with the scrapes, cuts and bruises that would attend normal playground accidents for any large group of children aged 4 – 12.

No sick room at Sukuta - but there is a space crying out for one to be built in it!

The school hall was structurally damaged and out of bounds and there was no hygienic area in which to serve school meals, nor a staff room for a school with over 70 staff. The school was lucky in some respects, another UK charity had supplied it with a number of perfectly serviceable computers, but the only secure and relatively dust-free room was too small to accommodate them all. Children missed out on ICT lessons, not through lack of equipment, but due to a lack of appropriate accommodation.

To be fair to the new (three years old) government in The Gambia, they have begun to address the infrastructural neglect of the country’s education system. But they face a dilemma with an inevitably limited budget: repair the damaged buildings of the past, or build for the future? The country, in common with most of Africa, has a young population with an ever-increasing demand for school places. The government cannot afford to both renovate and build for the future. For wholly understandable reasons, they have largely embarked on the latter. So long-time neglect will continue to be evident, as priority spending is focused on the new build.

Dilemma for government: restore old facilities, like damaged water suppy (foreground), or build for future with new classrooms (background)?

We visited Lamin in his new school and he and the head gave us a guided tour. It was déjà vu on the dilapidation front and almost dispiriting.

Back in the UK, almost out of the blue, Rotarian friends of ours began to sow seeds. Why not apply to Rotary international, and see if funds can be forthcoming to help at Sukuta?

The seeds germinated during the lock-down period of COVID – in The Gambia and UK - and a year later the first signs of healthy growth are evident, as we embark on a complete renovation of the largest primary school in The Gambia – at a cost of £60,000!

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The only library in the school of 2,000 pupils is out of use because of termite infestation Most of the pieces of the financial and organisational jigsaw are in now in place as we hope to launch the project in the summer and complete the transformation of the school within twelve months. To return to the motoring metaphor, the fund-raising engine has been re-ignited and we have embarked on a long journey with a few bumps on the way. School lunches provided by local women from stalls without access to water or shelter - breeds disease This is the first of three fortnightly blogs on the Sukuta project – so watch out for further installments explaining what the project involves and how we have arranged (most of!) the funding for it. And finally, in this mini-series, we will provide a fourth blog: “Not forgetting Sohm”, explaining how we have continued to support the Lower Basic School in the village that first inspired the establishment of our charity. John Walker 07954 153 305 Gambia stuff: www.SohmSchoolsSupport.org.uk @GambiaSchools Forest Gate stuff: www.E7-NowAndThen.org, @E7_NowAndThen

BUS DRIVERS UNDER fire and rehire attack!

Unite the union February 2021

IN the next two weeks we need your help.

Bus drivers in Manchester are being bullied and threatened with the sack if they don’t agree to work more hours for less pay in a fire and rehire attack. They've voted to strike and will launch an all out strike later this month.

That gives us just over two weeks to pile the pressure on the company, Go North West and the Go Ahead Group to stop with its fire and rehire threats and get back around the negotiating table.

Will you join us in emailing the CEO, David Brown? The email’s all ready to go. You just need to click and add your name

.

Email the the Go Ahead CEO

Our members have worked throughout the pandemic, risking their lives to keep Manchester moving. The last thing they want is to strike, but being bullied and threatened with the sack for refusing to sign new contracts on inferior terms, and losing their sick pay too was the last straw.

With your help we can keep the pressure on. Join us in calling on the CEO of the Go Ahead group David Brown to act. He’s the top chief of the entire group and our best bet of getting the company to take fire and rehire off the table.

Please email him now. You just need to click here and add your name.

Email the CEO

Thank you

Ritchie James

Unite regional secretary

A Bit Of A Deadleg? by Les May

EARLIER today in a telephone conversation with a friend he commented that he thought his local MP was ‘a bit of a deadleg’. Now I’ve not had any dealings with this gentleman, who is the MP for Heywood and Middleton, so I cannot comment on the veracity of this statement. But it did take me back a few years to when our old friend Simon Danczuk, or as he is now more commonly called ‘the disgraced Simon Danczuk’, was MP for the neighbouring constituency of Rochdale.

MPs (and Councillors) hold their position thanks to the trust of the public so if you want to shift them because you don’t think they are up to the job or not being honest with the people who voted for them, it’s the public you have to find a way of telling.

After Danczuk published his book about Cyril Smith in 2014 the Letters page of the Rochdale Observer was for the next 18 months or so filled with correspondence challenging Danczuk account, asking that he produce some evidence for his attempts to link Smith with the unsavoury goings on at Knowl View school and pointing out that a story in the book involving the Northamptonshire Police was completely untrue.

If my friend wants to use the local media to publish his disquiet about his MP Chris Clarkson, he won’t be so lucky. The reader’s letters page of the Rochdale Observer has shrunk almost to the point of invisibility. In 2015 it occupied a full page and there was enough room for the editor to allow a three quarter page letter from Andrew Wastling, who now sends material to Northern Voices because he cannot get it published elsewhere.

Those of us who contribute to NV don’t fool ourselves into thinking that it is read by as many people as read the Rochdale Observer so it is no substitute for an inquisitive and questioning local paper with a boisterous letters page.

NV’s readership is more likely to be drawn from the subset of potential Observer readers who would identify themselves as to the left of the political spectrum, but who refuse to be be swayed by the present vogue for identity politics and the drift towards ‘cancel culture’, so in no sense does it compete with other local news outlets. Seeing it as a competitor was the mistake Rochdale Online made when it wanted to use material from Northern Voices without attribution to its author.

Local News Partnerships, which include both the Rochdale Observer and Rochdale Online, are a well intentioned attempt to support local news outlets and maintain their viability at a time when they have come under pressure from the availability of news on the World Wide Web 24/7. But the unintended consequences have been that the sense of place and local identity which local newspapers provided has vanished because essentially the same story can appear in a regional and local paper, and a diversity of voices has been replaced by what is essentially a single uninquisitive ‘foghorn’.

This lack of scrutiny has emboldened some of our local politicians to start down the track of believing that they no longer accountable for their actions. Rochdale already has one local councillor who first solicited a postal vote then voted twice in the 2018 local election, seemingly without suffering any consequences. In recent weeks we have seen that one councillor did not seem to think he had to even accept e-mails sent to his Rochdale MBC account. We have also seen that at least one councillor think it unacceptable that he should be questioned about why a council official who is supposedly doing a full time job with Rochdale MBC is being allowed to ‘moonlight’ in another well remunerated role.

In about eleven weeks time people in Rochdale are going to be asked to choose who they want to represent them on the Council. If all we are treated to are press releases from councillors because they are ‘good copy’ how can we do this in any meaningful way? It is time to shine some light on the murky political world of Rochdale.

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News From The Rumour Mill by Les May

EARLIER this month an article by Tom Taylor appeared on ‘The Mill’ website which contained the text of a letter from RMBC Director of Children’s Services Gail Hopper claimed that school staff had been ‘jumping the queue’ to get themselves vaccinated against Covid 19. The text is given below.

Inevitably this has been interpreted as it being teachers who are doing this and tenuously linked to Labour’s calls for these workers being prioritised over other groups.

When documents are ‘leaked’ like this it is worth asking who will gain? Certainly not the intended recipients.

This question is of more than passing interest as I am aware that the names of specific councillors who are also finding ways of jumping the queue by ‘volunteering’ at local vaccination centres have been passed to a Northern Voices editor and that at least one of the councillors named has been asked to comment on this report. Let’s hope s/he is conscientious at picking up their e-mails.

We live in interesting times!

Dear head teacher,

I am sorry to have to write to you all about this matter and hope that you will understand my purpose for doing so. It has come to our attention that a booking link sent to NHS employees to book a vaccination slot at one of the identified hospital sites, has been inappropriately shared. This was not the intention when the non-transferable link was provided and should not have happened. Not surprisingly it is now spreading widely.

This testing site in the hospitals listed are for NHS patients, staff and social care staff only. This protects community sites for the older age and high risk groups. We know that by it being shared, some school based staff (and others), who are not part of the priority groups identified by government, have booked appointments. Indeed some been [sic] vaccinated. Others are now planning to do the same. Our concern is we are fully committed, to ensuring vaccinations are directed to priority groups first. Rochdale has a tight target to vaccinate all care home residents and staff, residents over 75 years and Clinically Extremely Vulnerable residents, along with NHS and social care staff by 15th February – if sufficient vaccine supplies reach us. This is a really challenging target. For every vaccine given to someone outside the priority groups, the risk is increased of our most vulnerable residents being delayed in receiving it.

The publicity of this happening would be very damaging for the borough. It will also increase the risk that NHSE cancels future supplies until it can be assured that the borough follows the required process. This would be disastrous, given the success so far in delivering up to 1200 daily vaccinations.

I recognise that some colleagues feel unhappy that schools based staff have not been prioritised by government in the first two groups. I fully sympathise with that and if the choice was ours, schools staff would have been in the first group. We continue to lobby government about this issue. However, it cannot be right that individuals use unauthorised routes when to do so denies others with entitlement. The question that I would ask is how would any of us feel if, by one of our colleagues accessing a vaccination, our mother or father was denied.

As I’m sure you’ll recognise, we have to take action to prevent this activity. With immediate effect health and social care staff will be required to attend their booked appointment with ID and a letter that matches that ID from their employer / local authority. We have requested that anyone that cannot provide this be refused access.

We ask that you advise any colleagues who have accessed the link and plan to or have already booked an appointment not to do so. We would rather avoid the embarrassment of them not gaining admission to the vaccination site. Please ask anyone with an appointment booked to cancel it quickly, so it can be offered to those in priority groups. Could you also impress on staff the importance of not passing on this link to any others inside or outside the borough. Some may have received it from contacts in other boroughs as this link is shared with Bury, Oldham and Salford. Any such sharing undermines the efforts to ensure vaccinations are directed to priority groups first. We continue to work locally to identify how we can ensure that all schools colleagues can be invited for vaccination and will try to do this as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your assistance in addressing this difficult issue.

Yours sincerely,

Gail Hopper

Director of Children’s Services

Rochdale Borough Council