Please, not Another Party Invite!

Seldom do I engage in debate about the state of the Left with members of small left-wing groups, for the simple reason that on past experience they tend to take disagreement rather badly and starting throwing insults.

Check out the level of some of the debate on the Socialist Unity blog if you want examples

But because an old friend and comrade edits the journal of The United Socialist Party (TUSP), because this (very) small group was set up by those involved in the Liverpool Dockers strike and because there needs to be more debate about why the anti-war movement failed to live up to its potential, I've written the following response to a TUSP statement from December 2007 on the need for a 'mass workers' party'.

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Please, not Another Party Invite!

Gather together a group of old comrades and soon they’ll be talking with sadness and longing about the triumphs and defeats of the past. Anyone who has been a political activist since their teens and has now turned forty knows this is true; we’ve all done it. The defeats, unfortunately, have been so many that the temptation to mythologize even the smallest of rare victories is hard to resist. But basing an entire political perspective on harking back to a fabled golden age and discounting anything new if it fails to fit in with those fallible memories is a particular talent of large sections of the Left in Britain.

So, having read for the first time a copy of ‘Socialist Studies’ magazine given to me by an old friend and comrade, it was therefore very disappointed to read The United Socialist Party statement setting out its case for the need to create a ‘mass workers party’. Notwithstanding some sound analysis on capitalism’s international crisis, the statement draws some alarmingly simplistic conclusions about the anti-war movement and new movements such as those that embraced horizontalidad in Argentina. And it rather fails to make a convincing case for its central argument – that the setting up of another ‘mass workers party’ is, in the words used in the statement’s title, “the main issue of the day”.

The main issue? I know of no independent socialists and campaigners, the very people who in the past have dropped out in disgust from either the Labour Party or one of the many factional left groups, who would make such a bold assertion. A new party may be the main issue for the increasingly dwindling numbers that make up the Trotskyist Left: indeed party-building has arguably always been their main preoccupation, if not the overriding doctrine of the faithful. Little wonder, then, in the face of yet another lost opportunity, there were five competing events on 17 November 2007, all purporting to launch THE new party of the working class. But why does the Left continually fall back onto setting up a new party as the apparently unavoidable first step to renewing itself?

A cynic might argue that it’s because the Left has frankly had so much practice, given its track record. But at least one possibility is that this is the way things have always been done. Falling back on the old and familiar is tempting even if it has consistently failed in the past: what might be characterised as the ‘reaching for the Bolshevik template’. Each of the five events last year offered their participants the comforting possibility of a new beginning, a clean slate and in most cases, the absence of former comrades who have ‘lost their way’. In most cases this also meant a smaller gathering of activists. Nevertheless, I’m sure all those who gathered last year at one of November’s Left conferences believed it was a purer gathering: one that, against all the evidence of the Left’s continuous mitosis and factionalism over the last forty years, would this time be different.

Starting afresh almost always means avoiding too any recognition or analysis that it is not just the allies we make, or the “downplaying in practice… of the importance of the working class”, or even the soul-destroying sectarianism, that alone have caused a collapse of former attempts at party-building. There is at least a possibility that the top-down, hierarchical and authoritarian models of political organisation that are so prevalent within the Left, that indeed are in my view central to the concept of ‘the party’, have played an equally important role, particularly in alienating those who have walked away. It’s a possibility that is almost always ignored and it’s certainly one that TUSP’s statement, which talks about a ‘mass workers’ party’ without giving any hint of its character or organisation, fails to address.

So let’s look at whether putting the business of party building is itself an obstacle to encouraging ordinary people to embrace socialist ideas, by looking at the anti-war movement. TUSP’s statement is correct in acknowledging the broad popular support for anti-war movements across the world in 2003, culminating in the massive marches worldwide that brought over a million people on the streets on London. It is quite wrong, however, to argue that “the methods of middle class protest were tested in the movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq and were found to be inadequate.” Whilst it is certainly true that ‘the state loves a parade’, one that does nothing to change anything tangible in terms of the functioning of power, attempting to characterise the huge march on 15 February 2003 as “middle class protest” is to enormously downplay its significance.

The prelude to the invasion of Iraq was an exhilarating time. For a brief moment, those who participated in the anti-war movement in Britain genuinely believed that they could do more than simply bear witness. People felt they could actually stop British involvement in the war in Iraq, despite Tony Blair’s messianic belief that he alone knew what was right and wrong. There was ample evidence around the country of optimism, spontaneity and fizzing energy from working class people who had never been involved in campaigning before. As a result, there was also genuine panic in government ranks as it prepared for the vote in Parliament in March 2003; one that led to the biggest Labour rebellion against Blair and that was carried with the support of the Tories.

So why did that energy and enthusiasm dissipate? The invasion itself undoubtedly slowed the momentum of the anti-war movement. The naively optimistic, those who believed the war in Iraq could itself be completely prevented, were bitterly disappointed despite the ample evidence that the drive to war had little to do with events in Baghdad but was driven by neo-conservative ideology in Washington, which had long planned to remake the Middle East for the benefit of international capitalism and the security of Israel.

But the most prominent players in the anti-war movement, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) and the Socialist Workers Party that dominated it, must also bear a large measure of responsibility. Not unlike the Bush administration’s post-invasion occupation, it had no Plan B. There was no apparent recognition that a movement facing a long haul needs roots, that local groups that might be better placed to underpin the spontaneity and energy that brought so many out onto the streets needed support. Instead, time and resources were devoted to organising the same central London protest, over and over again, which quickly amounted to little more than bearing witness and was essentially a parade that the state could comfortably tolerate.

Why did this happen? Largely because the senior figures in the Socialist Workers Party who controlled decision-making in the StWC had come to see themselves as the movement’s ‘leaders’, or perhaps a better word might be ‘vanguard’. They were the generals who believed they could mobilise and direct an army of hundreds of thousands, even when the decline in numbers on each subsequent march made it evident that anti-war movement didn’t want to be led in this way. And to prevent any challenge to their ‘leadership’, spontaneity and energy were actively discouraged: the leaders alone knew what was right and wrong, as is so often the case. Local Stop the War groups contracted and local campaigns that were not SWP dominated were ignored (such as the protests near where I live, against the international arms fair in Canning Town – surely an obvious target for anti-war campaigners). StWC at a local level became little more than an irregular e-mail from a loyal local SWP member, advertising yet another march.

Then, when it was clear that StWC was going nowhere, its ‘leadership’ fell back on the old and familiar and set up the RESPECT party, an uneasy electoral alliance that at best can hardly be described as emerging naturally from debate within the anti-war movement. With the benefit of hindsight, RESPECT was never thought through properly either and its ignominious collapse revealed the same hierarchical and authoritarian approach to leadership and control that so often discredits the Left.

None of this is considered in TUSP’s statement, which instead identifies the failure of the anti-war movement to embrace “the action of the working class and its allies using the weapons of working class struggle, mass strikes and refusal to transport munitions and military stores” as “the best way to fight militarism and war.” This is the kind of demand that sounds good but is meaningless idealism in the context of the current position of the Left and the trade union movement. It also seems to be based on the classic Marxist assumption that working class identities are determined solely by our jobs and occupations, which leads me to the TUSP’s statement’s fundamentally misunderstand the significance of the economic and political crisis in Argentina in 2001-2003.

Criticising writers like Naomi Klein, the “fashionable theoreticians of the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement”, for attempting to draw conclusions from the popular working-class movements that emerged in Argentina, is easy when the only conclusion you are willing to draw is that these movements failed for want of a ‘mass workers’ party’. If success or failure were the only measure of working class resistance to an enemy as powerful as capitalism, we’d all have given up in despair years ago. However, the most important impact of the movements that occupied factories, organised protests and set up neighbourhood assemblies is not what they achieved, but how they responded to the economic collapse created by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The spontaneous demonstrations that began in Argentina in December 2001 were more than simply calling for the “removal of all the corrupt politicians” of the day, although that was the undoubted starting point. This is a misrepresentation of Klein’s analysis. The movements that emerged from these protests were instead both in opposition to the period of neo-liberalism that had begun with the military coup in 1976 and reflected the disillusionment in the 1990s with forms of democracy within all political parties as institutions.

Horizontalidad (horizontalism), the idea that these movements are most closely associated with, is a specific rejection of the idea of political parties, of leaders and representatives, of those who command and those who obey. It is not some form of new ideology but a non-idealised way of people relating to one another in a directly democratic manner and working towards decisions collectively. It was undoubtedly a more difficult and time-consuming means of organisation than having a small group of leaders making all the decisions but the result was the creation of linked movements, some that later folded but many that continue to this day, which responded to the 2001 crisis in practical ways. These ranged from occupied but functioning factories to neighbourhood assemblies, piquetero (picket) groups that blocked roads, popular education centres, the Movement of Unemployed Workers and neighbourhood kitchens. Crucially though, horizontalism helped to define working class identities not simply through people’s jobs and occupations but also through the relationships between each other and through solidarity beyond the workplace. It had a particular impact on the participation of women, who had been largely sidelined from political activism but who made up the majority of the new movements that were created in 2001. I’d recommend reading the oral histories in Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, edited by Marina Sitrin, for a better understanding of the first-hand experiences of this new method of organising.

Whilst the circumstances that led to the growth of horizontalism may be peculiar to Argentina’s history, the methods of organising that developed point to some important lessons for the Left in this country, lessons that the TUSP statement should perhaps not so easily dismiss. Are hierarchical and authoritarian forms of organisation really the only option, especially as they have failed so badly and so often in the past? Why do we need ‘leadership’ and another rigid programme as the starting point, when both have proven so divisive and such an obstacle to collaboration? Do we have to always fall back on the old and familiar, always ‘reaching for the Bolshevik template’ and dismissing anything new that fails to fit within it, simply because it’s easier and less time-consuming? Is solidarity more than just an issue for organised labour in confrontation with capitalism, or also an antidote to individualism and competition for dominance and control, a way of conducting ourselves that should be an integral part of how working class movements operate on a day-to-day basis? And if so, why do we need one ‘mass workers’ party’ when a ‘movement of movements’ is an equally realistic possibility?

Whilst much of the organised Left has continued to repeat its mistakes, stuck rigidly to its favoured means of organisation and, in doing so, too often undermined and demoralised movements such as those against war, it has failed to progress and arguably has shrunk further. Few would deny that increasingly it has become distrusted by many potential allies, which is why so many activists have looked elsewhere for people to work with and ways to organise. Indeed, whilst there are comrades I respect enough to spend time writing a 2000+ word discussion article, there are plenty more that I would probably think twice about ever working with again. Multiply that by the number of independent socialists and campaigners who have quit or drifted away from the mainstream Left and there’s some measure of the problem that Left organisations currently face.

If anything is “the main issue of the day”, that must be pretty near the top.

Teaser for Oliver Stone's George Bush biopic "W"

One Hundred and Eighty Nine Days

Today there are 189 days left before George W Bush leaves office.

A reminder of why it won't be a day too soon, although is it now time to start worrying about the next President?

Forgetting The North West Frontier

There is a grim irony in the fact that the poppy, the symbol of remembrance for those who die on the battlefield, should also be Afghanistan’s major cash crop, one that fuels the continuing war. In May and June, there were 16 deaths of British service personnel in Helmand during fighting with ‘terrorists’, who are in reality a mix of the resurgent Taliban and fighters from the Ishakzai and Alikozai clans that are heavily involved in the province's opium trade.

And already, the public has become inured to these deaths, to the repetition of the solemn but brief announcements on the news: another tragic death, another name, “and now over to Penny for the weather”. It’s as though we have stepped back in time, back to fleeting reports from the 1980s of casualties in the north of Ireland, but with Afghanistan now Britain’s new forgotten war. Like the Irish ‘Troubles’, it seems to much of the public like another conflict that is apparently infused with incomprehensible religious dogma, one where those killing British soldiers are reduced to sweeping single-word stereotypes (for ‘Republican’ we now have ‘Taliban’) that say nothing about the political circumstances that put soldiers in danger in the first place. It certainly seems like there is no end in sight.

But just as arguing that Iraq is America’s new Vietnam is just a rhetorical flourish (Iraq is in many ways far worse), so the similarities between Ireland and Afghanistan end. To begin with there were 1855 civilian deaths in the north of Ireland over nearly 30 years but according to the United Nations, in 2007 alone over 1,500 of the 8,000 conflict-related fatalities in Afghanistan, were of civilians. This week, it was reported that the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan has risen by almost two-thirds in the first half of the year compared with 2007. But if soldiers’ deaths get scant attention, the deaths of ordinary Afghans gets none at all.

Meanwhile, the government that British soldiers are dying for is so corrupt that western governments, still donating billions of dollars to President Harmid Karzai, are apparently “losing patience” with his regime’s dismal record tackling corruption and drug-trafficking. The hypocrisy of this is, it should be said, quite breath-taking, for the same nations were responsible for creating an Afghan government made up of the warlords that are directly responsible for much of the violence, corruption and human rights abuses. But if Afghanistan, like Ireland, seems likely to result in another ‘Long War’, then it is because, like Ireland, the British government seems willing to continue with policies that have already failed. It is evident that Nato’s presence continues to destabilise not only Afghanistan but Pakistan too. Opium production is at a record level, despite the claims from Gordon Brown that more Afghan provinces are now poppy-free, leading his own diplomats to warn that “the drugs trade is fuelling the insurgency” and will extend the war for years. Yet all the British government has to offer is an even larger deployment of British troops.

The war in Afghanistan began as an action of terrible vengeance for the 11 September attack on the US. But it has become Britain’s terrible war. Until British soldiers are withdrawn, they will continue to die unnecessarily, their names all too quickly forgotten by all but their grieving relatives, along with thousands of innocent Afghan citizens whose names we will never know. Western powers may counter by saying that we cannot abandon the country's people, although they have largely done so themselves by handlng over the population to the corrupt administration in Kabul that British forces help to maintain. But those of us who opposed the war mustn't forget about Afghanistan, no matter how bad the situation in Iraq continues to be or however possible it may seem that the US intends to turn next on Iran. Rather, the importance of not forgetting for us means saying that seven years of failure is long enough.

It's really is time for an end to all the needless deaths. It's time to the immediate return of British troops.

BNP votes in London

130,000 BNP votes in London requires a change of tactics

Whilst Facebook abounds with apocalyptic warnings about London’s future following Boris Johnson’s elevation to the post of Mayor, it is the election of the BNP's Richard Barnbrook to the Greater London Assembly that means we need to sit up and think. How did the Left fail to stem the tide of BNP support?

We now know that the anti-BNP campaign leading up to polling day and run by South East Region TUC and Searchlight, with the tacit support of the Labour Party, has failed. The tactic of maximising voter turnout is based on a idea that the BNP have a low base of support but that if the voting turnout is low, their share of the vote might carry disproportionate weight, presenting the risk that they might creep in and take local council seats. It’s a simple formula – BNP voters / high turnout = BNP defeat – and it’s one that I remember Newham Monitoring Project once pushed when we were out every night in the early 1990s, leafleting in Canning Town against the BNP. The problem is, what worked 18 years ago no longer has any basis in reality.

Why? Because we've seen a major jump in the number of people voting in the London-wide elections, up over 8% on 2004, and yet the BNP have still managed to take a GLA seat. The real tragedy is not that the BNP were elected, but that they no longer have a low base of support - 130,000 mainly working-class Londoners went to the polling stations on a wet Thursday and made a positive decision to give their first preference votes in the party lists to a racist political party. This was despite a considerable publicity campaign in favour of other candidates, which included thousands of pounds spend by own union, Unite, so that its regional secretary Steve Hart could write to every member in London warning of the threat of “nazi racists in London’s government” - and then urging a vote for Labour.

However, as the election of a BNP Assembly member has started to sink in, the response from groups like Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) has been worryingly simplistic. LMHR have stated that “Barnbrook has managed to con a small minority of Londoners into voting for him”, whilst UAF have claimed that “a slightly higher turnout of 49% would have stopped the BNP from getting elected.”

A 'small' minority of 130,000? A ‘slightly’ higher turnout of 49%? This isn’t thinking through a change in the political climate, but attempting to ignore it. All we have to do, UAF and LMHR are arguing, is try harder in future to mask growing support for the BNP by trying for an even bigger turnout. Perhaps, then, it will simply go away. At least Searchlight are been a little more thoughtful, although astonishingly they have claimed their campaign as a 'success', with editor Nick Lowles saying, “obviously, the BNP getting anyone elected is bad but we can all be proud that we helped keep them to just that. Indeed, for much of the day we actually thought there was a chance that we were going to stop them altogether.”

The trouble is that all the mainstream anti-fascist groups are still obsessively focused on voter turnout and on campaigning based on two rather naive assumptions: that racism is all the fault of the fascists and that as long as the BNP are kept from office, then we can go on pretending that London is, as Livingstone's campaign tried to argue, a "united diverse city, where all communities and individuals feel they belong". However, as I have argued before, London is in reality a city painfully divided by economic inequality that is closely tied to race. The recent election has only helped to prove this even more.

Pretending that the 130,000 votes really mean nothing as long as we can keep a few racist bigots from claiming GLA expenses might make the Left feel better, may even help it to ignore its own shortcomings, but there's one thing it isn't - it's not effective anti-fascism.

So what should we do instead? There's not an easy answer to this, but engaging in a battle of ideas with the BNP assumes their platform has some credible basis in reason, so that's a non-starter. However, what this election have shown, more than ever, is that overt racism has found a guilt-free, 'respectable' way of expressing itself. There is no opposing pole offering an alternative political vision, just the politicians from the mainstream parties, backed by the unions in the case of the Labour Party, bartering for votes and offering their support for free trade and the market.

If we simply wait for the next election, thinking that an even bigger push to turn out the vote will be enough, then we risk the BNP’s support hardening and growing. Searchlight pledges to “expose the incompetence of their councillors… highlight the extremism of their politics and … work to bring hope instead of hate to communities.” Focusing on the conduct of the BNP's elected representatives has its place, but ignoring the increasingly 'proud' racism of its electoral support, which doesn’t appear to care about the extremism of the BNP's politics (how many BNP voters failed to notice that the part they voted for is racist!), is a recipe for disaster. And with the greatest respect to Searchlight, whom I have known for many years, what does “bringing hope not hate” even mean if the principal ‘hope’ on offer in London is just the chance to cast a vote for the discredited Labour Party?

A new way forward for anti-fascist campaigning must instead be based on principles that many on the Left should be able to support - a rejection of top-down, hierarchical and authoritarian politics and a belief that change can only be achieved through collective, grassroots organisation. I'd be happier going down to wave a placard outside of City Hall if the demonstrations that have been called were the start of campaign along those lines.

But I fear that unless we start to change our tactics, psephology will continue to remain more important than tackling the racism of the BNP’s voters head-on.

Not just Boris, but the BNP too!

Apologies, this is a rather long post, but I guess what follows was inevitable. First, an increasingly desperate Labour Left, apparently unable to comprehend why Ken Livingstone isn’t more popular, has unconvincingly tried to rally support from those who plan to boycott May’s mayoral elections in London by claiming that a defeat for their man would ”represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond". Forget about Livingstone, they say, and be frightened by Johnstone. Now they are arguing that a failure to vote risks handing seats to the British National Party.

Former New Statesman editor Steve Platt has taken the Livingstone campaign’s declaration that the BNP threaten “London's future as a united diverse city, where all communities and individuals feel they belong” and argued on his blog that there is no excuse for his “anarchist friends” not to vote because their abstention will be “considered a vote for the BNP”.

It is of course deeply insulting to put those who actively decide not to vote alongside BNP supporters and call them a threat to London’s diversity, but I suppose is to be expected. Nevertheless, it is an argument that needs thinking through. After all, unlike Zimbabwe, popping down to the local school on 1st May and voting, just to increase the turnout, is hardly a difficult thing to do. On the face of it, it’s not even a very political act.

But there are two parts of the Platt / Livingstone position that need closer examination. The first is the claim that “there’s only one way to stop the BNP, which is by actually going out to vote against them” because “a low voter turnout will help the BNP get elected.” This is an argument that I, along with other activists in Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), used to forcefully present back in the early 1990s, when we spent endless hours trying to mobilise black voters in Canning Town and the Isle of Dogs, back when the BNP was much stronger in these areas. In one election in 1994, the BNP came within 66 votes of taking a Newham council seat – whilst we had encouraged hundreds to vote, even transporting dozens to polling stations. We patted ourselves on the back and said that “we” had defeated the BNP.

But only for one Thursday. Support for the BNP was still there on the Friday and at the next council by-election, we were back using the same campaigning tactic. But in between elections, east London’s Labour councils continued to disregard the causes of working class disenfranchisement from the political process. Turnout at elections remained low but the faceless bureaucracy, the meaningless consultations on policies that had been decided in advance, the racist attacks that were ignored by council staff, the unpopular decisions taken in the teeth of opposition from local people - all continued unabated. It soon became clear that local anti-racist campaigners had become little more than a useful substitute for moribund Labour branches who had no-one to canvass. Many of us had the unpleasant realisation that we were no longer sure whose side we were on.

And it wasn’t as if they were even grateful for our efforts. Mobilising the vote didn’t once open up local councils to new ideas or progressive politics and in 1997, the now thoroughly Blairite Newham council cut its funding for Newham Monitoring Project, for doing what we had always done and providing support to the family of a local Gambian, Ibrahima Sey, who died under brutal restraint by officers from Forest Gate police station. In clumsily attempting to silence a critic, the council was helped in part by a former NMP activist turned councillor who was unable to carry the support of other anti-racists in continuing to act as little more than Labour’s election foot soldiers.

In all honesty, the BNP eventually ceased to be a threat in Newham and Tower Hamlets not as a result of our efforts but because of its incessant internal rivalries and because of changing demographics. The substandard housing in Canning Town, the ‘great white south’ of Newham, became a place to dump refugees, transforming the ethnic mix. One section of the disenchanted working class, those who blamed the new arrivals for how little their vote seemed to count, moved out to ‘whiter’ areas like Barking and Dagenham and it simply became too difficult – and often too dangerous – for the BNP to campaign. The same was true in the Isle of Dogs as the Bengali community in particular became stronger and more confident. In Newham’s southern wards, the most unified organisations amongst new communities were the black churches, with little of the tribal loyalty to Labour of earlier arrivals, which may explain why Canning Town has become the national base for the Christian People’s Alliance.

What years of focusing on elections had achieved, however, was to squander the opportunity to build coalitions in support of a more radical perspective than that offered by religious-based parties, leaving Labour to continue to monopolise local politics on a low voter turnout. What we are left with instead are opposition political parties who are wedded to the idea that democracy begins and ends on election day.

Even before it split, the Respect party as an alternative to Labour in east London was locally ineffectual between elections, which became the eventual trigger for the battles within its ranks. Its councillors in Newham are nice enough people but it has been unclear what all the effort was for. Now the two halves of the party are little more than a populist vanity project for George Galloway and an attempt by the Socialist Workers Party to try and salvage some much-needed dignity. London’s Greens, for all their apparently progressive rhetoric, have so little esteem for their prospective voters that, to try and attain some post-election influence, they have cut a sordid second-preference deal with Livingstone, a man who at the recent Reuters Mayoral hustings posed as a champion of globalisation and free trade. If that wasn’t bad enough, their GLA member Jenny Jones, in an e-mail exchange on the eve of the hugely contentious vote by the Metropolitan Police Authority on Sir Ian Blair’s conduct following the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, seemed offended that I might dare to question whether her decision to support the Met Commissioner was hers alone to make. So much for 'new politics'.

But enough of the minor parties. Let’s turn to the main event. The campaign between the three main rivals has been presented as little more than a personality contest between the individual candidates. In this clash of personalities and rhetoric, all three are competing mainly for sympathetic media attention. Voting in the Mayoral election has become no more empowering than choosing between performers on Pop Idol, with whoever puts on the best show winning.

Yet after years of economic growth, we still have a chronic housing shortage, underfunded transport and a widening gap between the rich and poor. Shouldn’t there be a real choice between the candidates?

This brings me to the second problem with the Livingstone / Platt position. London simply isn’t “a united diverse city, where all communities and individuals feel they belong” but one painfully divided by economic inequality that is closely tied to race. Yet Livingstone’s brand of anti-racism, as I have argued before, offers nothing to address the economic inequality that disproportionately affects working class black people. Instead the ‘candidate of the Left’ is at pains to present himself as business-friendly, backed by a political party that done so much to hand power to major corporations. Is it any wonder, then, that an entirely logical conclusion to reach would be that no matter who we vote for, we will have no greater say in any of the major decisions that affect our lives? Isn’t the reality that, no matter whether Livingstone wins or loses, we will have no say in how our workplaces are run or any control over the distribution of our society's wealth?

Elections are supposed to be how we influence the running of society and yet it seems that somebody else has already made all of the important decisions - without asking us. However, there are ways that people are able to exercise real power. If I had to pick an example, it would naturally be a local one. My compatriots in the campaign to stop the local council from handing over Queens Market in Upton Park to private developers have organised hundreds of local people, prevented the council from steamrollering through their plans and frightened off the mighty Asda supermarket chain – all without ever standing a candidate in an election. And they have brought together white working class market traders from Essex with shoppers from communities that have arrived in Newham from all over the world.

There has always been a political alternative to the lack of choice of the mainstream political parties, the opportunism of the minority parties and the racism of tiny fascist outfits like the BNP. It involves organising in such a way that everybody has a say over the decisions that affect them. It means refusing to accept what politicians tell you to do and taking the power into your own hands, not waiting for somebody else to do it for you.

And that is why I’m not voting in May’s elections - no matter how lurid the claims that the Labour Left might try and make.

The Race Debate 2008 - In Memory of Gilly Mundy

Newham Monitoring Project presents

The Race Debate 2008
Racism and the State of Britain

Wednesday April 23rd
from 7pm to 9pm

The Brunei Gallery
School for Oriental & African Studies
Thornhaugh St,
Russell Square
London WC1N 0XG




Tickets: £5 (free for SOAS students and staff)


A panel discussion with panellists including: Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission Nick Hardwick, civil liberties lawyer Gareth Peirce, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg

Chaired by Asad Rehman, Newham Monitoring Project

Institutional racism, community cohesion, culture, segregation, terrorism, Britishness... the debate over the state of Britain in 2008 is increasingly focused on race.

One of the country's leading community anti-racist organisations, Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), has therefore brought together a distinguished panel to debate the issue of racism in Britain in the first Gilly Mundy Memorial Debate. The event is named in honour of Gilly Mundy, the anti-racist and custody-deaths campaigner who was a management committee member and former worker for NMP and who supported bereaved families as senior caseworker for the campaigning charity INQUEST. Gilly died suddenly in March 2007 aged only 36.

To reserve tickets, call NEWHAM BOOKSHOP on 020 8552 9993

Supported by INQUEST and hosted by SOAS UNISON

Download the flyer from http://www.gigafiles.co.uk/files/4816/PDF_Flyer.pdf and please circulate as widely as possible.

www.nmp.org.uk

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers

Newham Bookshop presents
Misha Glenny discussing

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers
Friday 11 April
Wanstead Library at 7 pm.

For the final event in its March/April season, Newham Bookshop is pleased to welcome Misha Glenny, former BBC central Europe correspondent, talking about his latest book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers.

In this powerful and groundbreaking book, Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime. For three years, he has been recording the stories of gun runners in Ukraine, money launderers in Dubai, drug syndicates in Canada, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan and many more.

During his investigation of the dark side, he has spoken to countless gangsters, policemen and victims of organised crime while also exploring the ferocious consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms across five continents. The journey begins with an appalling and inexplicable murder in England's stockbroker belt and continues with stories that are often horrifying, sometimes inspiring, usually bizarre and occasionally funny. But together they build a breathtaking picture of the shadow economy that may now account for up to 20% of the world's GDP.

Usually the preserve of sensationalist reporting in the tabloid press, organised crime has seeped into our lives in so many ways and often without our knowledge. This consistently riveting account unveils the nature of crime in today's world but it also offers profound insights into the pitfalls of a globalisation where the rules dividing the legal from the illegal are often far from clear. It also argues that conventional policing methods are no longer appropriate to deal with a problem whose roots lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor.

Buy a ticket for £5, get one free.

Telephone
020 8552 9993
to reserve a ticket. Free drinks and nibbles as usual.

Anti-War Movement - Five Years On

Five Years On: what has the anti-war movement achieved?

A recent programme on 18 March on the Iranian news channel Press TV involving two comrades - Cilius from NMP and Nick from RAN - was an interesting start to a debate that needs to be reclaimed by activists before it falls into the hands of the academics and journalists. What has 'Britain's Biggest Mass Movement' (the title of the Stop the War Coalition's 2007 book) managed to achieve? Could it have done more and what lessons can we learn from what it did wrong?

The chair of the television debate, Andrew Gilligan, is a journalist and therefore likes to simplify and personalise everything. This may explain why arguments focused on the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) and the make up of its executive committee. StWC on its own is not the anti-war movement but it has been, of course, the leading organisation for the movement's public protests since the invasion of Iraq and the demonstration on 15 February 2003 remains Britain's largest by a long way. However, whilst the size of the march in London undoubtedly worried the government at the time, it did not stop the invasion. This, claim the movement's critics, is the sign of its failure. However, it would be naive to think that simply turning out on one freezing cold Saturday in February would make the government suddenly change its mind, especially when Blair had staked everything on staying close to the US presidency and its neo-conservative agenda.

Still, if street protests are a tactic rather than an end in itself, it is unfortunate that StWC's strategy since 2003 seems to amount to little more than 'keeping on marching', one that has seen increasingly diminishing returns. The fifth anniversary demonstration was the smallest yet, although the rhetoric from StWC's key speakers continues to emphasise that marches will be the way forward in the future. It is important to remember that at the numerical peak of street protest in 2003, the majority of public opinion was in favour of the invasion, but unfortunately, there seems to be little analysis from StWC about why these protests have grown smaller and smaller at a time when the public has become more and more against the war.

Apart from questioning the apparently dubious value of doing the same thing over and over again, it might therefore be worth asking about a number of other issues that could help to guide the way the anti-war movement decides to act in the future. Covering these in any detail would require a blog posting the length of a book (a book that I hope someone will write one day). But the most obvious question is why Muslim Asian communities no longer mobilize for anti-war protests?

In many ways, the mass involvement of Muslim Asian communities in the demonstrations against war in Afghanistan and Iraq are just as significant as the multitude that formed the largest street protest in Britain’s history. After all, it would have been entirely understandable if, as rising levels of Islamophobia before September 2001 spiralled after the attacks on the United States, communities that felt under siege turned inwards. Writing in the International Socialism Journal in autumn 2003, Salma Yaqoob, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition in Birmingham, said that young Muslim Asians made a decision after September 11 that “isolation and withdrawal from wider political institutions is a dead end”. She argues that the anti-war movement “showed how unity and solidarity offers a more positive avenue for Muslims to engage with these wider institutions.”

Whilst this may be true, it does not fully explain why young Muslim Asians in particular decided to engage with the anti-war movement and become politically active alongside peace campaigners and the traditional Left when they had not done so before. It may be that the pace of events and the chaotic nature of the Stop the War Coalition in its early stages meant that the emerging anti-war movement was particularly open to the involvement of a very broad spectrum of opinion. More importantly, the anti-war movement seemed to provide more than just a focus for opposition to military action, but rather against the ‘injustice’ in a broader sense of the ‘War on Terror’ both at home and abroad. This enabled a range of issues, from racism, anti-terror legislation and the hypocrisy of enforcing UN resolutions on Iraq but not on Israel, to bring together a range of otherwise very different opinions, not just amongst Muslim Asians but amongst everyone who marched.

In turn, this meant that unlike the Rushdie Affair in 1989 or the first Gulf War in 1991, Muslim Asians were not only part of a very wide-ranging ‘moral community’, one that distrusted Blair, doubted the motives for war in Iraq and feared the effects of US imperialism. They were also part of an alliance engaging in the most fundamental expression of citizenship – the right of public dissent – that was a sharp rebuke to the government’s narrow definition of what ‘Britishness’ represents.

A Mass Movement with Few Roots

Since the movement’s peak, however, it has been Asian Muslims who have been markedly absent from each successive demonstration, leaving the latest march a sad return to the 57 varieties of left-wing fringe group that was normal before February 2003. Could this be because the Stop the War Coalition became less broad in its spectrum of opinion with the tightening of central control by its leadership? It does seem that the increasing hold over StWC by its dominant organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, has had a number of consequences. The most notable has been the abandonment of efforts to develop local Stop the War groups. Currently, StWC's website lists 110 local groups, the majority of whom are little more than an e-mail address, controlled by a local SWP member, for a 'group' that is reactivated only when there is a demo to promote. As a result, we now have a 'mass movement' that has few local roots.

The Choice of Conservative Allies

It also seems that the narrowing of opinion within StWC has led to its gradual withdrawal from broader ‘injustice’ issues and the breaking up of the ‘moral community’ against the war. Certainly there seems that, lacking a broad-based local network, StWC has seemed content to simply add the name of a Muslim organisation to the list of sponsors of a demonstration and feel that this is sufficient – even if some of these temporary alliances involve groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, who are effectively the UK branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore part of the Islamic Right.

With little effort to maintain a broad-based coalition and faced with often hysterical criticism of its choice of partners from the pro-war Left, the StWC leadership have responded by simply reaffirming its commitment to ‘standing with Muslim communities’ but has been unable to translate this into anything practical. Others, for example, have taken up opposition to anti-terror legislation and even when new issues emerged that have attracted genuine public disquiet, such as the bombing of Lebanon by Israel in 2006 that only 22% of Britons believed was proportionate, StWC showed considerable nervousness about providing a political critique of some of the actions of its allies. It said nothing about the prominence of the “We Are All Hizbollah” banners on the demonstration it sponsored in London in August 2006 and its most prominent spokesperson, George Galloway, went further in naively (and stupidly, in my view) proclaiming, “I glorify the Hizbollah national resistance movement, and I glorify the leader of Hizbollah, Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.”

The Problem with George

One of the fundamental questions that must be asked is whether it was wise to hand the most public face of the anti-war movement to George Galloway. 'Gorgeous George' has always chosen to be a divisive figure, as his pro-Hizbollah and, more recently, pro-Iranian government statements have shown. However, the main consequence of making him the de facto 'leader' of the movement against war was the siphoning off of considerable focus and energy into the establishment of the Respect party, whose principle task (if we are honest) was the re-election of George Galloway.

There are long arguments to be had about Respect as a political project, but if it was really the best way of providing, in Salma Yaqoob's words, "a more positive avenue for Muslims to engage", then it also involved handing the mantle of leadership back to an older, more conservative generation. In Newham, for example, younger activists who had organised a massive march in protest against the local MP and government minister Stephen Timms when he broke his promise and voted for war without a second UN resolution, were conspicuously absent from the party's election platforms, which were dominated by religious leaders. This conveyed the unfortunate impression that Muslim Asians, probably the most diverse minority population in Britain, were expected to obediently vote for Respect because of their faith and the instruction of their community ‘leadership’, rather than because of the politics of the party, at a time when the anti-war movement had if anything increased the diversity of opinion within Muslim Asian communities.

Can the Anti-War Movement Do More?

So anyway, these are a few observations. As I said earlier, there is a book that could be written about the lessons that should be learnt from the development of the anti-war movement in Britain.

I am sure of one thing, though. February 2003 seems like a long way away, but the war rumbles on. Can pounding the streets of London, in demonstrations that are ignored by even committed activists, be the only reaction we have left?

Newham's Mayor Buys Himself A Group of Charities

Newham's executive Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, today completed a process that we first described back in November 2006. At a meeting at the Town Hall, he addressed a select group of local charities who have been awarded contracts to deliver public services on behalf of the council. Wales told them that they represented the 'best of the voluntary sector', the opposite of those he described as 'corrupt and venal', and that they alone would have access to his office and the opportunity to bring him their ideas- ones that the Mayor said he would fund if he liked them. But, warned the Mayor, if the contracts they are undertaking appear to be failing, they can expect to have their money taken away.

All this was presented as some kind of partnership with the borough's voluntary sector. The reality, however, is that it represents its division, for the lifetime of the council's new contracts, into the favoured few and the excluded majority, most of whom are neither 'corrupt' or 'venal' but quietly making an enormous impact on the local community through their underfunded work with local people. The very idea of a new 'inner circle' of charities with special access makes a mockery of the idea of openness and accountability, of Newham council's pledges to ensure equal access to funding and consultation.

And even for the inner circle, it's hardly a genuine partnership when they have so little power and will have to spend the next three years trying to second-guess the whims of Newham's increasingly messianic Mayor. Once part of the inner circle, how many will risk banishment by speaking their minds, even if it means falling from the favours of the Mayor and his courtiers? Furthermore, it's not even as if most of the most-favoured are getting a particularly fair deal. They had originally been promised that they would be able to recover their full costs on becoming Newham council's subcontractors, but that promise has been quietly dropped. There is no way that private sector businesses would ever agree to the demands that the charities have been asked to meet. No wonder they have been given the promise of 'jam tomorrow' - its a very effective way of buying privatisation on the cheap.

And that is where the Mayor's use of the word 'venal' is so troubling. The dictionary defines it as "capable of being obtained for a price", or "acting for reward", or "capable of betraying honour, duty or scruples."

The excluded majority of Newham's voluntary and community organisations might ask, with some justification, why they are the ones who have been painted as mercenary?