Unite, Len McCluskey & Labour's Squabble

YESTERDAY Len McCluskey accused Labour'a deputy leader, Tom Watson, of being a 'poor imitation of Machiavelli' as alleged rumours were rife of another challenge against Jeremy Corbyn's leadership following Labour's poor showing in the EU elections.

McCluskey's remarks matter because his union is a major paymaster for the Labour Party.  Judging by what he had to say he seemed to suggest that Sir Keir Starmer was likely to be a challenger for the leader's job.


The Unite union's policy agreed by the union’s 2016 policy conference made it clear that the union accepted the result of the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union.  It also set out our union’s priorities for dealing with the process of Brexit, which included protecting jobs, defending employment rights, and opposing the racist backlash that the referendum campaign unleashed.

In June 2018, Unite even joined the National Shop Steward's Network (NSSN) which has long been dominated by the Socialist Party (formerly Militant).  The ideology of this group has been bitterly anti-EU and has been rooted in a belief in the old-fashion concept of the 'British Road to Socialism'.
The recent affiliation of McCluskey's Unite seems to have been encouraged by a decision by the NSSN in 2018 not to field candidates against the Labour Party in elections. 

By linking up with the hole-in-the-corner anti-EU Trotskyist NSSN must now suggest that Unite, which formerly backed Remain, is stuck in the BREXIT trough.

Sir Keir Starmer has now said a second referendum is the 'only way' to break the Brexit deadlock, after Labour suffered a mauling from voters in the European elections.

 Meanwhile,three former ministers are now daring Corbyn to sack them in solidarity with Alastair Campbell who was expelled yesterday for saying that he voted LibDem in the European elections.

Mr Corbyn's office has thus far refused to say if the trio would be expelled

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NHS London March & advocates of anonymity

'SPIKYMIKE', otherwise known as the now retired Manchester City Council housing manager Mike Ballard, on libcom on Feb 6th, 2017 commenting on the forthcoming London NHS March on the 4th, March wrote:

'This will be big I'm sure but although I've attended a few local NHS demo's and picket lines in the north west over the last couple of years I can't bring myself to get up before 5am to catch a coach with a load of lefties down to London for a tramp around the big smoke - its bad for my health. There are some useful local campaigns around but the trade unions that will be at the forefront of this have hardly shown themselves able to mount any genuine solidarity action in the workplace where it matters (during the doctors strike fore instance) and one wonders how much of this effort will be about garnering support for the Labour Party in forthcoming elections rather than anything else?  Still it would be good to get some reports and feedback from London comrades on this. The NHS really is descending into something of a crisis - round here for instance with at least two local hospitals planning big cuts in beds just as the national news is highlighting the shortage of both beds and staff!!'

Well, it was indeed a 'big' demo, and there wasn't a red and black banner to be seen on the march. 

Yet the National Shop Steward's Network, otherwise known as a front for the Socialist Party, estimated the numbers and reported it thus:

'But this march of over 100,000, although some reports say double that attended, must be the start not the end of the campaign. The health unions and the TUC must call another national demonstration that could be absolutely massive. This would give health workers the confidence to take co-ordinated strike action, which we believe last year’s junior doctors’ dispute showed, would have the full support of patients and communities.'

On an early TUC march against the cuts some years ago, I had just come out of the Gent's Urinals at John Lewis and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the red and black banners blowing in the wind on Oxford Street.  It soon sank as the anti-climax set-in, especially as I scrutinised the feeble figures with their pigeon chests who were carrying the flags.  These bands of fellows were being followed by a bunch of press photographers hoping no doubt for something untoward to happen, and trailing behind these were the Metropolitan Police.

Last Saturday, there was no sign of the BLACK BLOC  or the anarchists with their pigeon chests, just an orderly well organized demo put on by Unite and the Peoples Assembly.

Meanwhile, on the anarchist FREEDOM webpage on February 4th, the FREEDOM 'publishing House' ran a story recommending demonstrators wear mask and entitled:  'Why covering your face at a protest is the right thing to do' by someone called Kevin Blowe.

Mr. Blowe writes that:

'In June 2015 Netpol launched a campaign to try to encourage activists to start covering their faces when taking part in demonstrations and marches.

'We saw this initiative as one of the few remaining ways of resisting the growth of intrusive surveillance on the streets, which sees police monitoring social media for images and live-streamed video, chatting to protesters in the guise of ‘facilitating’ their activism and routinely filming everyone. This data-gathering is overwhelmingly overt rather than involving undercover officers — and most of the information is handed over by ourselves without objection. It is also carried out on an almost industrial scale, intended to build up a picture of different social movements, their structures and alliances.'

This is an interesting little essay and very typical of the kind of psychological state of mind of those who inhabit the metropolitan bubble of paranoid politics with its cheap thrills for the pigeon chested.  Such an approach has no insight into what was moving the participants on last Saturday's March.

The point about the March to save the NHS was that it had mass support from people who wouldn't normally consider themselves 'activists', indeed it was probably supported by many of the officers policing the demo.

For the organisers to introduce bundles of masks wouldn't have encouraged a spirit of revolutionary fervour it would have inspired fear and alienation among the crowds.

Mike Ballard above is right to ask the question 'one wonders how much of this effort will be about garnering support for the Labour Party in forthcoming elections rather than anything else? '

Last Saturday's demo had much to do with boosting support for the Labour Party, and there is a real underlying danger that inconclusive demos of the kind we were involved in actually undermines morale in the end.

Yet, covering one's face will not improve matters anymore than knocking off a few policemen's helmets.

'Anarchy' = Absence of government in Spain?

THE word 'anarchy' in its dictionary definition is often defined as 'an absence of government'.  Though pedantic thinkers, including anarchists, will often rely on narrow dictionary definitions of the meaning of words, modern philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein have discredited this approach to the pursuit of meaning.  Those of us come from a Wittgensteinian or ethnomethodological tradition consider the meaning of a word to be in its use.
Ironically the reality of the present situation in Spain is that for the first time since January 1492, when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon – the Catholic monarchs – occupied Granada completing their conquest of Moorish Spain, Spain has always had a government.  Even at the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37 when the Spanish anarchists were at their strongest, their was a government in Spain (actual there were two if we count the Nationalist one and even the anarchists ultimately accepted the invite to join the governments in Madrid and Barcelona).
And yet, since December 20^th, last year., when the elections failed to give any party a necessary majority to form a government and attempts to form a coalition failed, Spain has had no effective government.   Under the Spanish system a Spaniard votes for 'diputados' (MPs) who elect the prime minister.  Then with a parliamentary majority, the winning party proclaims its leader, but without a majority, the parties need to negotiate.  This means a voter may end up supporting positions he/ or she would not normally support.  Today voting for the Socialist Party may mean a leftist coalition if the Socialists join with the Podemos Party, or a vote for the centre-right may involve voting for the conservative Popular Party (PP) and then get an alliance of the PP and the Ciudadnos Party.  It offers a blank cheque to the parliamentary parties, but even then the Spanish parties have not been able to get any agreement.  
Because of this failure to get agreement a second election had to be called on June 26^th, which ended in a very similar result to the one last December.  For more than 250 days Spain has been unable to elect a government. 
As things stand a 'caretaker' government is in place: the Partido Popular.  But it can't appoint new ministers, and from its original 13-member cabinet, only 10 are left.  The caretaker government has no authority to approve next year's budget, a basic tool of government and which should be in place by October; as you read this experts in constitutional law are pouring over the legal texts to search for a line that suggests authority in the current situation.  It has been nine months since the government enacted any laws:  its members are too busy campaigning and negotiating. 
Martin Caparrós, a journalist on the New York Times writes:
'These days, the “meanwhile” government manages everyday matters, and not very well.  In a situation that lacks legal status, no one wants to be in charge of important decisions, affairs are delayed and decisions never made...'
The life of ordinary people continues much as always, and Seňor Caparrós continues:
'In everyday life, a country without a government looks dangerously similar to one with one. ...  There are those who wonder if governments are so necessary and seem uninterested in any attempt to form one.'
This week, Mariano Rajoy of the PP will try to be reinstated as qa fully functioning prime minister.  But his option are limited.  If he fails, his party will probably call for new elections to be held on the 25^th, December.  If so that should give a boost to any latent anarchism in Spain, because Seňor Ranjoy and his party will be hoping the by calling an election during Navidad will benefit the right with a low turnout, but it will merely deliver a death blow to any vain expectations in elections whatever the outcome.  Especially since the Spaniards have a long history of distrust of governments.

Rough Justice on the Left!

ON the 8th, August the former Scottish correspondent of the Morning Star posted the following post on his Blog:

'My name’s Rory MacKinnon, and I’ve been a reporter for the Morning Star for three years now. It’s given me a lot of pride to see how readers and supporters believe so strongly in the paper, from donating what cash they can to hawking it in the streets on miserable Saturday afternoons. I was proud to represent a “broad paper of the left”, as my editor Richard Bagley always put it: a paper that saw feminism, LGBTQ issues, racial politics and the like as integral to its coverage of class struggle.

'It’s for this reason that I thought I would have my editor’s support in following up domestic violence allegations against the Rail, Maritime and Transport union’s assistant general secretary Steve Hedley. Instead the Morning Star’s management threatened me with the sack, hauled me through a disciplinary hearing and placed me on a final written warning.

'If you want to see my reasons for writing this, skip to the bottom. But I’m a reporter, and in my mind the most important thing is that you all know exactly what’s happened behind closed doors. So let’s get on with it.'

On the 30th, August Private Eye No.1373 published the following report on this matter by 'Blackleg' :

'LAST MONTH the Communist Morning Star gave space and prominence to a demand by Women’s Aid that Tory MP David Ruffley must face “strong disciplinary sanction” for assaulting his ex-partner. Short shrift was given to his claim that because the ex-partner had accepted his apology no more needed to be done. As readers were reminded: "Domestic violence is a criminal, not a private matter."

'Well, if it’s committed by a Tory MP, that is. When the alleged perpetrator is a senior trade union official, the Morning Star will discipline any of its hacks who has the temerity to pursue the story. That is what it did to Rory MacKinnon, its Scotland correspondent, who quit last week after three years on the paper.In March this year MacKinnon was sent to cover a women’s conference in Glasgow organised by the RMT transport union.

'For months, women he knew in the union had been talking about Caroline Leneghan, an RMT member who had written a blog-post about the violence allegedly inflicted on her by Steve Hedley, the RMT’s assistant general secretary, with whom she was in a relationship until last year. On one occasion, she wrote, he “threw me around by my hair and pinned me to the floor repeatedly punching me in the face”. She published photos taken at the time, showing her horrendously bruised and swollen face. Finding himself attending an RMT women’s conference – and one at which the RMT was launching its new policy on, er, domestic violence – MacKinnon thought it a good moment to ask if the union’s refusal to hold a proper investigation into the allegations against its assistant general secretary might affect female members’ perception of the union. He put the question at a Q&A session with the union’s national organising co-ordinator Alan Pottage, who declined to answer. Soon afterwards, however, the hack was forcibly ejected from the conference.

'The next day, Morning Star editor Richard Bagley told MacKinnon he was being suspended while his bosses investigated allegations of “gross misconduct” and “bringing the paper into disrepute”. A month later he was summoned to London for a disciplinary hearing, with the company secretary Tony Briscoe acting as prosecution counsel and Bagley sitting as judge. Briscoe told MacKinnon the question he’d put to the RMT official “feels more like something a Daily Mail reporter would ask than someone from the Morning Star. You should have known better. This indicates a lack of journalistic etiquette and has damaged our relationship with the trade union movement.” The public had “no right to know” about whatever occurred between Hedley and Leneghan...'

On the 26th, July, Rory MacKinnon had handed in his resignation to the Morning Star and went public with his story claiming the public had a right to know.  The two men who had castigated him at the Morning Star, Bagley and Bristoe, were not far behind stepping down days later:  Bagley resigned the editorship for 'family reasons', and Briscoe retired.

Since then Steve Hedley wrote the following letter protesting his innocence in last Thursday's issue of Private Eye No. 1374 (5th, September):
'I was very disappointed that you published  TUC News in Eye 1373 without contacting me to check this story out.  It refers to allegations of domestic violence made against me two years ago, about an incident that happened three years ago, by a lady with whom I was previously in a relationship. 

'I have never been guity of violent behaviour.  These allegations were investigated by the RMT union, which found that I had "no case to answer"; they were also considered by the police, who likewise decided to take no action.

'On the matter of Rory MacKinnon, the Morning Star reporter, he asked his question at a conference to someone who had no knowledge of the investigation and couldn't provide an answer.  Had he contacted me, which he didn't, I would have provided him with the correct information.

'Believe it or not I am a big fan of Private Eye and usually your work is much better researched than this.  I now wish you to publish this reply in the interests of fairness and to clear my name.'

It is unlikely that Comrade Hedley will live this down despite his protestations, and it is understood that he has already resigned from the Socialist Party over this issue.  

Laughter as Militants Mock English Anarchists

'ENGLISH anarchists,' declared blacklisted electrician Colin Trousdale, 'can't organise owt!'  Comrade Trousdale was speaking at a branch meeting of the famous Greater Manchester Contracting Branch 1400/7 in the Town Hall Tavern on Tibb Lane about the attack in October 2012 of a gang of members of the so-called Anarchist Federation (AF or A.fed) on a vendor on the Northern Voices/ NAN stall at the Anarchist Bookfair, and the consequent theft of trade union literature.  To laughter from the rest of those present he suggested that the anarchists ought to invent a salad cream bomb for throwing at their enemies.  The meeting which was mostly discussing important issues such as the blacklist and the behaviour of the Unite union in attempting to negotiate separately from the Blacklist Support Group and other unions, and to engage in talks with the very companies guilty of blacklisting in the construction industry, turned to the bizarre behaviour of Nick Heath and the Anarchist Federation (AF) as a bit of light relief under Any Other Business, when the Secretary of Tameside TUC gave a report likening the behaviour of A.fed. to an organisation on the far-right of English politics.  The meeting was reluctant to give even that degree of political seriousness to an organisation like A.fed. who were likened to clowns incapable of wiping their own arses.

In a year in which Freedom, the anarchist newspaper and perhaps the oldest left-wing paper in England, died of shame having been on the its death-bed for about a decade under a variety of weak editors.  Freedom, it is noted, never reported on any of the attacks on Northern Voices and even allowed itself in its dying moment, to be bullied by the superannuated boss of A.fed the cockney Nick Heath.  The anarchists had been condemn at a another meeting of the Greater Manchester County Association of TUCs (GMCA TUCs) for their behaviour on a May Day march.  It is getting difficult to defend anarchists these days at trade union meetings such among the Manchester blacklisted electricians, simply because they behave badly in a way which lacks an English sense of humour, and there was hearty laughter at the electrician's branch when it was learned that the pretext for the attack on Northern Voices and the theft of the trade union pamphlets was provoke after NV13 carried an obituary on the late Bob Miller describing him as a 'skedaddler':  many of the blacklisted lads read Northern Voices and their branch has been affiliated to Tameside TUC for years.  Yet, few would bother to read much of the other publications on the left.   

At last night's meeting the Socialist Party and Linda Taaffe came under attack when it was suggested that the branch affiliate to the National Shop Steward's Network (NSSN).  This was agreed, but Colin Trousdale pointed out that the NSSN had never had to same clout since the split when the syndicalists and other independent socialists left, and Colin said that the biggest loss had been the departure of Dave Chapple as the Chair of the NSSN.  Dave Chapple, who is a libertarian socialist, would never call himself an 'anarchist' simply because of the kind of corny behaviour already described at the Anarchist Bookfair, where the organisers refused to intervene and challenge A.fed., the electricians expressed disbelief about this.  The Socialist Party was criticised for divisiveness, but Colin claimed that the real culprit who caused the split in the NSSN was Peter Taaffe.  It was said that the split in the NSSN was caused by the Socialist Party who wanted their own 'sovereign' anti-cuts body separate from that of the SWP and others.  The supporters of the NSSN were asked how many cuts had been prevented by the NSSN since it set up its own anti-cuts organisation, and answer came there none.  It was even suggested that Nick Clegg and Vince Cable may have in truth modified more of the cuts than the NSSN and the Socialist Party put together.   

Dave Chapple and the paper Trade Union Solidarity are organising a conference on the 'Future of Working Class Education' in August.   

The electrician's branch discussed the bankrolling of the Labour Party by Unite and Len McClusky.  One member said that the Labour Party could not be saved, and this funding was a waste of the member's money.  What is interesting in all this is how nothing ever changes the unions throw money down the political drain of the Labour Party, the English anarchists live up to their standard barn-pot caricature, and English trotskyists still seek solutions to the problems of the world through eternal point-scoring and splits. 

Tony Benn & Bob Crow!

High Mindedness, and the Fat Fan of Fried Fish    

TWO esteemed titans of the far left died last week; the ex-Labour MP and former Minister, Tony Benn, formerly known as Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, at 88-years, and the RMT trade unionist, Bob Crow, at 52-years, who two years ago enjoyed an F.T. Lunch at an expensive and distinguished fish and chip restaurant in the metropolis; an occasion on which he  proclaimed that the fried halibut was good for building up the brains.  Reviewing their lives is rather like analysing the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the noble tall  high minded thin man and the pleasingly plump trade unionist.  Despite the radical views he espoused in his later life in Labour Party politics, Mr. Benn managed to turn himself into a little public treasure much loved beyond the main stream left.  Mr. Crow represented rougher tackle purveying himself as the quick-witted cheeky cockney on Any Questions on Radio Four, and even cuddling-up to Ukip and Nigel Farage, in his anxiety at displaying his hatred of the European Union and all its works.   

For his part Wedgwood Benn has been a life-long devotee of the parliamentary system, clearly at ease in the chamber of the House of Commons.  It seems that this passion for all things parliamentary has been something of a family tradition with the Wedgwood Benn clan, because in 1932, when the then Minister of Labour referred to parliamentary proceedings as a 'performance' the then Mr. William Wedgwood Benn, the father of the Tony Benn so recently deceased, complained of this slighting representation of the business of the House, and demanded the withdrawal of a remark so offensive in its implications.  Despite the adoration of the Benn family for parliamentary government throughout the generations the institution has certainly fallen on hard times today; yet even then in his book 'The Thirties' Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge was to observed:

'It is not power which Parliament lacks... rather the will to exercise it.  Power without resolution is as vain as desire without virility, and evokes scant respect.  The proportion of voters who care to register their votes has fallen sometimes as low as thirty per cent, and since 1932 has rarely been above fifty per cent.'

Benn, the son of a hereditary peer who renounced his peerage ultimately was to become a bit of a champion of the hard left, after being a middle-of-road moderate as a Minister and serving as postmaster general under Harold Wilson.  Born in 1925 to a privileged childhood that included   Westminster School and New College, Oxford. His father was a Liberal MP who joined the Labour Party and became India secretary, and later a hereditary peer under  Ramsay MacDonald.   

Mr. Benn, who met Ramsay MacDonald when he gave him a chocolate biscuit when he was five-years-old, is in some weird ways in the MacDonald tradition of Labour politics, as Bob Crow was more like MacDonald's adversary Arthur Henderson.  Malcolm Muggeridge expresses the two crucial elements in the Labour Party thus:  'They (MacDonald and Henderson) represented two elements in the Labour Party whose incompatibility had been perhaps its greatest weakness – the urge on the part of prudent, industrious manual workers to improve their conditions, and the romantic discontent of would-be, and sometimes actual aristocrats.  The trade unions and the Co-operative movement are characteristic products of the former; National Labour and the Left Book club,of the later.'  Benn rather like MacDonald is the romantic idealist who could in the 1930s have so easily slipped into the MacDonald role of appeaser of international conflicts and champion of oppressed peoples, while Crow was clearly more parochial bent on setting up National Shop Stewards Networks, tending his allotment, and eating fish and chips in London's east end.  As Muggeridge says of MacDonald:  'The romantic idealist invariably turns his eye abroad...It is so much easier and more exciting to side with the weak and defy the strong in other countries than at home.'   

Despite their high minded similarities, the difference between MacDonald in the 1930s when he was Prime Minister, and Benn in the 1980s at the peak of his influence is that while MacDonald was an electoral asset to his party, Benn made the Labour Party unelectable helping to craft the Labour manifesto in the 1983 election which came to be entitle 'the longest suicide note in history', and he later defended the Militant Tendency, now re-erected as the Socialist Party, which Mr Crow embraced after he fell out with Arthur Scargill and the Socialist Labour Party.   

MacDonald, high minded and believing his time had come, and though he had been unpopular in his stand against the Great War, the historian AJP Taylor wrote that 'most English people [at the time of the second Labour government in 1929]  agreed with MacDonald that nations had the same interests if they did but know it and that all conflicts could be dispelled by “strenuous and good will”.'  Mr Taylor somewhere describes MacDonald as the 'patron saint of appeasement'.  In the 1980s, with Tony Benn, of course,  it was nuclear disarmament with CND.  Both MacDonald and Benn were great orators: MacDonald with his 'rich Highland voice'; Benn with his southern brogue, and both managed to carry their Christianity lightly into their politics.  Bob Crow, for his part, kept the promise I heard him give defiantly on Radio Four the day before he died:  'I was born in a council house and I'll die in a council house!'  Sancho Panza couldn't have forecast at better result.

Another View on Grangemouth from Tony Gosling

Re: Stevie Deans, as Tony I think said, the police investigation came up with nothing. However, after resigning yesturday, the police are now going through his emails that show he was using company time to do Labour Party business - though why that is a police matter seems extraordinary. So what, sackable offence to be doing something other than your actual work you are paid to do, but how is it breaking the law?

Unite are accused of messing up, but they already capitulated some days before the company announced it was closing. They called off the strike over Dean's victimisation, as they described it. The Scottish Socialist Party: 'After talks broke down at [mediation service] Acas, the company said they intended to "go over the heads of the union" straight to the workers to ask them to sign up to new contracts on worse terms by 6pm on Monday 21 October. Unite and the shop stewards called on workers to refuse to sign and over 70% of trade union members at the site supported the union's call. This indicates that pressure from the shop floor and the stewards changed the union's direction at this stage.'

I don't blame Unite here. They were powerless. What happened at Grangemouth was that the employer went on strike, and it looks like they manipulated a situation over Deans (knowing the union would hold a strike-ballot over their dialogue with him which the union intepreted as victimisation, suddenly presenting the workers with a fait-accomplie over the workers pay and conditions having walked away from ACAS mediation and planning for the cold-shot down in an orchestrated way over many months). SSP again: 'There is clear evidence that Ineos, in all likelihood in conjunction with the UK government, had been preparing for a confrontation with the union. The stockpiling and the importation of fuel to mitigate the impact of the strike and the inevitable shutdown of the plant were at an advanced stage, even before the strike was announced. This alongside an attempt to decapitate the union leadership at the plant indicated the lengths the company was prepared to go to.'

'In the run-up to the 48-hour strike Ineos announced they were going to put the plant into a prolonged "cold shutdown" rather than a short hot shutdown. In other words, a signal that they intended to keep the plant closed, effectively a lockout of the workers.'

In the run-up to the strike Ineos was claiming the plant was "in financial distress" and losing £10 million a month. SSP: 'Unite, however, asked Richard Murphy, an accountant and a campaigner against corporate tax-dodging to review Ineos' public accounts, which themselves will not tell the true story. Murphy found Ineos Chemicals Grangemouth Ltd has added one-off measures to make the accounts look bad, including a write-off in the valuation of the petrochemical plant - in other words it was worthless. The same petrochemical plant that is now described as having a bright future of at least 15 to 20 years.  Ineos which is particularly opaque and labyrinthine through the deliberate use of sub companies, including the use of off-shore tax havens to hide profits and avoid tax. Already in 2010 Ineos moved its headquarters from Britain to Switzerland to cut its tax bill.'

'Murphy found that Ineos' accounts imply that they expect to make £500 million from Grangemouth alone by 2017 and that operating profits grew by 56% last year. Murphy says that Grangemouth chemicals made £7 million profit last year and £6 million the year before.'

"Unlike any other company they decided to factor in investment as a loss", said Murphy. "They are using accounting rules I don't recognise. They are using numbers I can't find in any actual published accounts." Ineos internationally also made a profit of over £2 billion in 2012.

As part of the deal Ineos will be bailed out to the tune of £134 million in Scottish and UK government grants and loan guarantees. The company claims it needs this to ensure a £300 million investment at Grangemouth over the next few years.

The reality of a billionaire hedge-fund owner holding a whole country's fuel supply to ransom is thought-provoking in the midst of a situation where there is much talk of nationalisation of the energy market in the UK.

In terms of the workers, perhaps the worst concession Unite have agreed to in backing down has been that they have also signed away an agreement that allowed for full time union representation on site.

Another important issue is the ethics of Ineos' new business strategy for the Grangemouth plant. The new investment is to build a new gas processing factory and tankers to ship shale gas from the States, where the dash for shale-gas without environmental controls has wrought massive impacts on the water-courses and local communities' health, not-to-mention the massive effects of global warming from methane gas released into the air. If this was a nationalised plant, maybe through a campaign of public information disclosing theses facts the utilisation of this gas would not be sanctioned.

The case for nationalisation and how the UK's membership of the EU prevents that, as well as the issue of labour flexibility in the global competitive race to the bottom has been eloquently described by former national president of the RMT Alex Gordon in Tuesday's edition of the Morning Star. I don't agree with everything he says, but do about nationalisation of public utilities (and industries/sectors in national strategic interest) and leaving the EU to have to do so. Read below:

To Fight Austerity we must quit the EU, by Alex Gordon
Tuesday 29th, Morning Star
Ref:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-5d48-To-fight-austerity-we-must-quit-the-EU#.UnFtkFN8oQI

Reciting Reactionary Rhetoric

Socialist Party Scotland Cheer-leading to the Grangemouth Abyss  

 

LEN McCluskey and Unite have delivered us glorious disaster in their handling of the Grangemouth dispute last weekend.  Last Friday on Any Questions on Radio Four Bob Crow of the RMT said that this would not mean the end of trade unionism as we know it.  On the 29^th, October after a long silence the Socialist Party Scotland issued a long-winded rationalisation for the delivery of a serious disaster for the British trade union movement – perhaps the most significant defeat since the collapse of the miners strike in 1985.  

 

Could it have been different?  Will this be a turning point for trade union rights?  Will Len McCluskey become another dishevelled Arthur Scargill figure in the 21^st century – a tired and forlorn politics?  

 

The Grangemouth débâcle beautifully underlines the hopeless reactionary rhetoric of British trade unionism and what has come to called the left in Britain.  Practically the whole of the left in this country and particularly the British trade unions are ruled by a reactionary instinct.  Analysing the Grangemouth failure the Socialist Party Scotland declares [29^th, Oct. 2013]: 

'In the absence of a fighting strategy by Unite to save the plant, including the occupation of the site and the building of a mass campaign across Scotland to demand that the Scottish/ UK governments nationalise Grangemouth, the pressure proved too great for the shop stewards to resist.'  

 

The left in Britain, as represented by the trade unions, protest movements and left parties, has long been a reactionary force in so far as it has always tended to react to an agenda set by the establishment, the government or the employers.  It does not have an agenda or serious strategy of its own.  Thus when the current coalition government enforced cuts the left because it has no plan of its own is forced to go on the defensive and fight the cuts with umpteen fragmented organisations – this Pavlovian Dog reaction by the Socialist Party resulted in the disintegration of the National Shop Stewards Network [NSSN] in 2011.  This automatic and mechanical quality of the British left stems from something special detected in some of the north European organised working class by such writers as Ignazio Silone and George Orwell:  Silone in his book 'School for Dictators' links it to 'Zumarcherien' (a marching together approach to class war) – a kind of mechanical politics of the German and British worker founded in the kind of work in big factories – Silone uses this concept of the north European worker as automaton to explain the better performance of the Spanish and Catalan workers in resisting the imposition of Fascism in 1936:  the Spaniards with their different cultural and political background rooted in the peasant and the artisan were better able to use their initiative and trade unions to challenge authoritarian regimes than those left-wing parties and trade unions with a more Prussian and Germanic mentality in north Europe.  

 

Today, the Socialist Party Scotland explanation to what went wrong at Grangemouth is to blame the Labour Party  and Ed Miliband personally: 

'This shows yet again that today Labour does not support workers in struggle and that Unite should come out clearly in favour of a new mass workers' party, public ownership and a real political alternative to the austerity agenda.'  

 

This statement is an example, yet again, of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the British left and our national trade unions.  The Socialist Party Scotland is reassuring: 

'Socialist Party Scotland completely rejects the idea put about by the crowing capitalist media that the union has been smashed at Grangemouth.  Unite has made a big mistake in singing up to a three-year no-strike deal at Grangemouth... Against the backdrop of a no-strike agreement it is vital that Unite rebuilds its strength and its membership at Grangemouth...'  

 

This is voice of despair, the voice of the politics of the automaton of the unthinking 'mass-party man' steeped in a kind of Prussian totalitarian mind-set to which Orwell and Silone often referred.  These people have yet to learn the lessons of Arthur Scargill and the defeat of the miners in 1985:  Thatcher then had a transformation strategy then in the Ridley plan, and Scargill and the miners were fighting to defend the pits and save the status quo, essentially a conservative position which Scargill fought tactically.  Today the battle at Grangemouth was a tactical from the beginning and it was one that Unite couldn't win.  Wee must wait to see if the Socialist Party continues to back Len McCluskey in future.  Over two years ago Bob Crow the RMT leader and a political crony of the Social Party was treated to a fish and chip lunch by the Financial Times famous 'Lunch with the FT' column and he declared that the flat fish 'haliburt is good for your brains', well the British left is desparately short on brains so perhaps the Socialist Party and McCluskey should stuff themselves with haliburt in future.

Charlie Pottin's Comment on the historic takeover of the NSSN

CHARLIE Pottin's comment below on the Socialist Party coup inside the National Shop Stewards Network [NSSN] in 2011, that resulted in the departure of the syndicalists and independent socialists 19th, February 2011.  It now seems that the results of this historic takeover by the Socialist Party has ultimately led to the folly of the the Grangemouth massacre of trade union rights in which the NSSN has ended up on the losing side and which may have lasting detrimental consequences for the British trade union movement:

Charlie Pottinssaid...

I don't know about all 89 who voted against the SP resolution reconvening at the pub, I was a delegate from Brent TUC and voted against (as mandated) but didn't know about the meeting afterwards so didn't attend.
Remembering how the SP walked out of the Socialist Alliance when the SWP got a majority, I found it ironic that they charged others with wanting to take their ball away when they didn't like a decision. I was also amused to hear an SP member in Unison complain that the SWP and others had backed a "Labour Party supporter" in preference to him in union elections, when exactly the same charge could be levelled at the SP members in my own union, Unite, who voted for Len McCluskey rather than Jerry Hicks. I remarked on this to Jerry when I saw him later in the meeting, I think he too had found it amusing.
Anyway, the SP's move seems to have gone as I anticipated, despite their success in mobilising an overwhelming vote majority, they are left holding a hollow victory. Instead of creating a unified anti-cuts movement under their leadership they have succeeded in splitting the National Shop Stewards Network.
It will be ironic if the SWP who were the main butts of their denunciations are the only ones to stay. And if after such fierce denunciation they can try to erect some facade of unity for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (assuming that's still on).
Meanwhile back on the cuts front I am sure a united movement is emerging in each locality, usually centred on trades councils and community campaigners, and from what I can see, SP members and SWPers alike are like the rest of us, being drawn into working class activity without worrying about the empire-building rivalry which pre-occupies leaders of sects.

Saturday, 19 February 2011 17:08:00 GMT

National Shop Stewards Network:

  Resigning in slow motion!

THE clock is ticking, and with the next steering committee of the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) called by the national committee overwhelmingly dominated by the Socialist Party under secretary, Linda Taaffe, scheduled for next Sunday, some NSSN dissidents are certainly taking their time at formally handing in their resignations. Formal resignations are now into double figures on the steering committee of 60+, but probably less than one would expect at this stage given the level of feeling among the Socialist Party's opponents on the steering committee after the NSSN conference on 22nd January, at which it was generally agreed that the Socialist Party pocketed the ball.  The anarchist fortnightly, FREEDOM last week claimed that 'the majority of NSSN/Shop Steward Network national officers - all of those not in the Socialist Party - resigned their positions.'  The officers may have resigned their posts but as yet not all non-Socialist Party members of the NSSN steering committee have resigned and the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) members have said that they will stay in until at least till next Sunday's meeting before making a final decision.

At the time of this post it may be that not all the syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists have resigned. From those who have resigned, including Dave Chapple (Chair), George Binette (Treasurer), Bob Archer (Publicity), Becca Kilpatrick (NSSN Affiliation's Officer) Pete Firmin, Brian Bamford, Keir Lawson, Stu Melvin, Glyn Harries, Emy Castlelao, Jamie Beamont, Chris Leary, Helen Steel, Gerry Downing, a statement is expected shortly.

Freedom in its report said: '(Those) 89 who voted against the (Socialist Party) walked out of the meeting and reconvened in a nearby pub where discussions were held on the next step, deciding unanimously to continue the work of trade union activists' solidarity on an organised national basis, with syndicalists, rightly, insisting that any new network would never again fall under the leadership of a single political party.' 
In fact, there may have been more than 89 at this post-conference meeting because some at the conference didn't have delegate status and were present as observers. Some of the syndicalists met in Birmingham two weeks ago to consider the position and it is expected that a general meeting of all opponents of the Socialist Party will be pondering the options in the near future.