Though Cowards Flinch

I run a nursery, so I read Nursery World.

I was interested to note that the House of Commons’ first ever nursery opened for business on 01 September 2010, especially as that appeared to be just five weeks after the plans appeared to have been put  on hold.

All a bit strange, especially as the Ofsted registration date for the nursery is recorded as 27 July 2010.

Anyway, now the Daily Mail is on the warpath (hat tip to Sunny at LibCon):

[T]he Commons creche, which has a capacity of more than 40, has never been used by more than 14 children at any one time — two of whom are Bercow’s own little darlings.

Mmm. An interesting use of the term ‘never’.  It’s been open three weeks.

Given the apparent uncertainty over its opening, and the need for parents to make plans in advance use by 14 children three weeks into its existence seems pretty good to me.  Certainly it’s in line with the early days of most nursery settings, in which uptake is often guided as much by personal recommendations from other parents about the quality of care/education as by other factors of convenience/cost etc..

Oh, and Ofsted is quite clear about the capacity. It’s not ‘more than 40′. 

The registered person [the person in overall charge of the nursery] may care for no more than 40 children in the early years age group, of these, not more than 9 may be under 2 years at any one time (Early Years Register).

It’s perfectly normal for nursery settings to apply for registration for the maximum number of places that the building can take, in case of future expansion and to save the hassle of varying the conditions later, but that doesn’t mean it’s being staffed to cater for 40 places.

You don’t think the Mail’s got some kind of agenda, do you?

Here’s a quick thought experiment.

As expected, the counter-demo to the English Defence League march in Bradford on August 28th turns ugly as Asian youths and anti-fascist protestors attack police officers trying to kettle them.

Protestors break through police lines and a masked demonstrator shoves a retreating police officer hard. The officer hits the ground heavily and is later pronounced dead in hospital.

This same demonstrator has been caught on film hitting the officer with a wooden banner by a police Forward Intelligence Team moments earlier.

A spokesperson for the protestors then releases a statement blaming undercover police for instigating the violence and attacking the officer in question and also falsely claiming that other demonstrators were hit by tear gas as they tried to resuscitate him.

Careful examination of the footage taken of the build up to the demo quickly reveals the identity of the masked demonstrator.

What do you think the police and the Crown Prosecution Service would have done in this case?

Can you imagine any outcome other than the swift arrest, prosecution and conviction of the demonstrator for murder or manslaughter?

That’s enough of the thought experiment, it’s pretty obvious what I’m getting at. It wasn’t a police officer who was killed, it was just a bloke on his way back from work and apparently no-one was responsible for his death.

The whole shameful episode is documented succinctly here. To add to that, Deborah Coles, Co-Director of INQUEST, says:

The eyes of the world will be looking on with incredulity as yet again a police officer is not facing any criminal charges after what is one of the most clear-cut and graphic examples of police violence that has led to death.

Some people may have been surprised by this outcome but presumably not anyone familiar with the history of such cases in this country. No police officer has ever been convicted of manslaughter committed whilst on duty. However, this case does stand out because the offence committed is so blatant and, if the police had their way, there would have been no investigation of the incident at all.

This outcome is a signal to the police that they can do anything they want while in uniform (unless they harm animals) and there will no consequences.

What’s equally depressing is the lack of response to this anticipated outcome other than resignation.

Ian Bone reports a dismal turnout of 30 people at a demonstration outside Scotland Yard following the announcement that no charges will be brought. There’s a picket of the Department of Public Prosecutions planned for Friday as well.

Beyond poorly attended, easily-ignored demos involving the victims family plus the usual suspects what else will a campaign against them involve? An open letter to The Guardian perhaps (perhaps Tony Benn could sign it?) that’s a certainty, what else?

Paul Stott has some excellent suggestions for a different kind of campaign:

Ian Tomlinson was a Millwall fan – and was wearing a t shirt of the club’s greatest ever play – Neil Harris when was killed. He died trying to leave his place of work to watch the England versus Ukraine match on TV. I have little interest in the usual miscarriage of justice campaign, based on angry letters to the Guardian and small, ever decreasing numbers of the usual suspects protesting about the police’s actions. Such a campaign will lose.

I would like to see a campaign for justice for Ian Tomlinson run by his family and supported staunchly by Millwall supporters, and by England supporters. Lets make it clear to police officers who attend the New Den or Wembley that Ian has not been forgotten, and that they are not welcome in the area because of their past actions. Only when an officer is in court charged with killing Ian should that campaign end.

Is that possible?

Ian Tomlinson’s family aren’t giving up. Details for the Campaigning Fighting Fund can be found here.

‘Sites of resistance’

Before I got waylaid by other pressing matters, I had started on a series of posts trying to set out some ideas on how the left might move past the rhetoric of how important it is to resist the coalition’s cuts, and start preparing actually to resist the cuts.

The first post concerned itself with advising against the kind of action that can be comforting for the left, but which isn’t actually very effective.  This includes the careful organisation of  mass demonstrations, often in London, where everyone turns up on coaches, is carefully controlled by the police, waves some banners, listens to Tony Benn or some other venerable notable, and goes home again. 

All this takes a lot of time, energy and money, and acts as a useful ‘safety valve’ for the government, allowing activists to let off stem/run out of energy, while the tame media either simply ignores the size of the demo, or portrays it as peopled by crazed lefties who are ‘out of touch with economic reality’, or some such.

Quite rightly, I was taken to task by Tim F and Richard B, who argued that the demonstration does have its place in the repertoire of anti-cuts activity, and I accept that I didn’t make myself as clear as I might have done.

I’m not against demonstrations themselves, as long as they are a) have an identifiable target; b) focus on a specific demand made to that target; and c) don’t take too many resources away from other activities.  

As both Tim and Richard suggest, demos focused on specific towns/facilities can be effective.  This is especially so if they can gain local media attention (or be part of a self-generated media effort) in a way that casts activists with a legitimate grievance rather than the ‘usual suspects’ that the national media will portray. 

And as with demonstrations, so it is with all other anti-cuts action, which I’ll categorise broadly below.   To be effective they have to locally appropriate. 

This isn’t to say that nationally orchestrated action cannot also be developed over time, but I believe this will only come because of a groundswell of support for widening the action which is based on success, as measured by the agitants themselves, at more levels.  Look at the oil refinery disputes of 2009 as a case in point. 

The action spread across the country because East Lindsey workers took specifically targeted action, and appeared to be on the road to success.  Success breeds success.

So while I know where Bob Crow is coming from is in his call for a general strike, I think we have to be realistic about our resources and current strength, and fight battles on a realistic scale.   If they spread, they spread.  If they don’t, the battles can stay local.

But what, in the end, does ‘battle’ or ‘struggle’ mean.  What will we do, other than write to the papers and organise demonstrations?

It might be helpful to categorise them, in rough ascending order of ‘militancy’ a)  legal and civic challenge b) civil disobedience c) strike action.  Here’s the kind of thing they might then be.

a) Legal and civic challenge

There has long been a discussion on the left about the validity of recourse to law; there is a feeling amongst some that because the legal system is part of the problem of capitalism in the first place, it is wrong to engage with it on its own terms.  This feeling is likely to be even stronger in the light of recent judgments by the courts on the BA Strike.

My view, however, is that legal challenge on cuts is not just both valid enough in itself – sometimes we win and victories are important, however garnered – but because they can create other ‘sites of resistance’ through which to raise public anger.

There are plenty of examples of this in recent history, including the legal challenge brought by Southall Black Sisters, and the more recent challenges brought in Portsmouth and Barnet over wardens in sheltered accommodation.  Current possibilities include the invocation through the courts of The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in defence of services combatting violence against women, a first ‘cut area’ for the Tories.

Here is not the place to go into what services/funding we might be seeking to defend in this way.  The point is that for the most part the challenge itself will be brought by service user groups and voluntary sector groupings focused on delivering specific services, not leftwing organisations and trade unions. The job of the latter is not to bring the actions, but to work with the sectoral/service organisations to help make them into these ‘site of resistance’ – usually through specific demo, but through sit-ins and other actions as necessary. 

This in turn needs early co-ordination through the kind of overarching ‘cuts coalition’ that is being advocated and organised in London boroughs (see also below on the Labour party’s role in all this).

Other possible areas of action might lie, for example, around legal challenge to reduce public sector terms and conditions and, in time, to private pension funds (proposed rule changes to lower benefits), with the added input of pickets/demos at implicated pension fund offices etc., where trustees/directors will be taking the relevant decisions.

But of course the law is against us for the most part, and it’s also important to look at the way in which legal challenge coming in the other direction – against those resisting cuts/standing up for their jobs – might also be used as a ‘site of resistance’.

There are two main areas where the law might be used against us.   First and foremost, of course, is the already draconian anti-union legislation, which it would appear the government is seeking, behind closed doors for the time being, to tighten further.  

There can be little doubt that there will be a good deal of use of the legislation around balloting, as used recently by BA, to disrupt strike action.  

While this may in time backfire on government as workers turn to more radical wildcat actions – a more spontaneous development that I won’t cover here – we need also to plan the kind of specific targeted response that we might undertake in response to such tactics. 

This might include, for example, picketing (sit ins?) of legal offices used to bring these legal measures before the courts, as well as demonstrations about the specific injustices brought by biased courts using biased legislation (with concomitant pressure on a new Labour leadership to commit to repeal of anti-union legislation).

More obscurely at the moment, but perhaps as important as time goes on, is the plethora of legal issues around resisting cuts in local government, and again the need to use whatever is happening to create ‘sites of resistance’ in public spaces.  These are the opportunities that arise from what I refer to as ‘civic challenge’.  

While the complications of civic challenge and associated public resistance merit a blogpost in their own right, they include:

a) support for measures taken by Labour/left councillors in control of councillors who are prepared (perhaps at the instigation of local parties/labour movements in the first place) to move towards ‘transcation-ceasing’ Section 114 notices from their Chief Finance Officers, in their determination not to cut services and jobs.  Differing levels of reserves within councils will mean this will happen in different years (and in general not in 2011-12), but the popular connections with the local government struggles of the 1980s (especially Liverpool) will mean that these are high-profile issues, for which elected bodies and their supporters must prepare well in advance, seeking to avoid the ‘isolation’ mistakes of Militant, and create broader phalanxes of support for what are, ultimately, personal decision about whether to risk surcharge and, ultimately, prison.

b) the threats and opportunities offered by the Coalition’s planned Powers of General Competence, about which I have written a great deal on this blog.  While I have focused on the threat to (often statutory) services and their jobs brought by this proposed legal change, it also brings with it opportunities for resistance focused on the legal bias inherent in the legislation in addition to the services themselves, and specific targets for action (as above) in this regard.  In addition, thought needs to be given early on how the legislation, which effectively allows councils to override other primary legislation, might be ‘hi-jacked’ for our own purposes, for example by local Labour councils allowing themselves to take on debt in order to keep jobs/services, in a way which lies outwith current powers of local government, but would arguably – and the argument becomes a site of public resistance – would then lie within it.

b) Civil disobedience

Perhaps an example or two of what I mean by civil disobedience (as ‘site of resistance’) might help.

One specific step to resist the draconian cut to welfare services might, for example, might be to identify specifically at what point the computer is ‘asked’ to deduct 10% from housing benefit from people who have been on JobSeekers Allowance for a year, and to ensure that ‘the computer’ does not act in this way, via union instruction that this will simply not be happening.

Similarly, we might want to identify precisely where the examinations for people on Disability Allowance that the government is intent on forcing into jobs that don’t exist, and making our feelings known that these examinations shouldn’t be taking place.

While the rules of civil engagement with workers who may not realise the extent to which they are in cahoots with the coalition’s plans, I personally have no problem with getting very specific and targeted in what might be described as the guerilla tactics of the resistance, but which also need to be brought to public attention (and may be more newsworthy for the fact that they are quite ‘strange’ targets for militancy).

These are just two examples, both focused on welfare cuts.  Other sites of resistance may lie around refusal to sign of the end of ‘outsourced’ contracts where this leads to job loss, for example, and will depend on union understanding of the specific of the sector, as well as a willingness to support the workers involved in actions through whatever measures become necessary. 

The key point though is the development of  links between civic disobedience and other types of resistance action.

c) Strike Action

I’m not going to pretend to know what it takes to organise strike action.  The last one I led was in 1988, when the world was much simpler for unions, and while it’s obviously THE key to successful resistance in the end, I won’t cover it in detail here. 

Unions will need to develop their own strategies for ratcheting up strike action while retaining a sense of possible victory, and for maximising links with support organisations.

The important thing in general, though, is that we should try to use strike action as part of a whole ‘menu’ of resistance actions, as I have sought to set out above, and that we resist the temptation to go too early for ‘all or nothing’ strikes.  As I’ve said above, this is not the 1980s in terms of union capabilities, and we have to be realisitc about resources, while seeking to create an enviornment in which local actions can spread spontaneously and with innovation.

The Labour party in all this?

(Edit: Kate’s comments at #2 below make clear that this section is undercooked and doesn’t do justice to the importance of appropriately humble Labour party involvement. This is my fault for trying to finish the piece too quickly rather than devote a full follow on post to the matter.  Please see Kate’s comment and my response at #3.)

I’m a loyal Labour party member, so it’s appropriate to ask: ‘Where does the Labour party fit into all this, given its failure to fit with any of it for the last thirty years, and its leadership’s betrayal of the labour movement in the early 1980s, the last time we were in this kind of situation.

Well, I think the simple answer is that the Labour party shouldn’t be seeking to lead the resistance against the cuts, whatever our leadership candidates tell us about how important it is that we should do.  For most of them, I suspect, resistance means signing a petition against the cuts (though credit enought to Ed Balls on the BSF parliament demo on the 19th July, at least).

I think Justin Baidoo is absolutely right when he says local Labour parties shoudn’t get above themselves when it comes to being part of a resistance movement.  They should be offering support to more experienced campaigners (recognising of course that there will be many experienced campaigners who also happen to be (frustrated) members of the Labour party).

Many local Labour parties could do worse than start by agreeing the following kind of motion at their next CLP meeting:

That this CLP invite the [local] ‘Coalition Against Cuts’ convenor organiser, or relevant trade union branch officers, to the next meeting to hear what plans are emerging to resists cuts at a grassroots level, and to offer whatever support the CLP is able to provide.

So for the next five posts I am going to discuss the Labour Leadership race, by discussing each candidate in turn. This week I am going to start off with whom I personally believe to be the most controversial candidate of the whole leadership battle.

Prior to the beginning of the Leadership race, I must admit that I had never heard of Diane Abbott. The only candidate that I had heard of was David Miliband, due to the obsessed love for him by an old school friend. I have to admit that I was in support of Miliband, due to my political naivety and the only one I knew about but decided to check out the other candidates and this saga of posts will help me to come to a comprehensive decision before September comes around.

Diane Abbott, the only female and black women to have entered the race, was elected to the House of Commons in 1987 for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington as the first black women to become an MP. Now in 2010, she has been in Parliament for over 23 years and is being called the ‘token’ candidate? As a fellow blogger stated, ‘… tokenism is often the way that otherwise insuperable barriers of discrimination are overcome’, calling Abbott a ‘token’ candidate seems slightly unfair seeing as Diane has been in Parliament and worked her way up the Labour party. Is this not due to her not being a New Labour Minister or does it go deeper to the idea that she is a women and comes from an ethnic background?

Really it comes down to a balance of the two; Abbott has not had as much limelight exposure as say David Miliband; unless you are an avid fan of This Week then of course you will know about Diane and her antics on the sofa with Michael Portillo. She was an avid challenger of the New Labour movement, and was a figure of the left of the party but this has all been undermined by her decision to send her son, James, to City of London School, where the fee is £10,000 a term.  As she has admitted, calling her son’s education ‘intellectually indefensible’, this goes against her socialist and left leaning politics. For someone who targeted members of her own party (Harriet Harman and Tony Blair) for sending their children to selective schools, it seems a bit hypocritical.

What made the issue worse for many right-wingers was her comment trying to defend her actions, that ‘West Indian mothers would go to the wall for their children.’

This has caused a ripple effect within the Labour party and the right, especially those from white communities who are aggrieved at the suggestion that they wouldn’t do whatever was good for their children, whatever the personal cost. Such sentiments miss the point. I don’t think this was what Diane was trying to get at; she was just making a statement about a particular cultural view of motherhood, though it may give an opportunity to attack her.

I wonder how this would have gone down had Andy Burnham said something similar about his kids?

Tensions always arise when someone mentions the race card. I am not a fan of the race card, but I do take a guilty pleasure and use the ‘mixed race bombshell’ every once in awhile when around a racist, but shouldn’t we flip it on its head and think about how everyone else who calls her a token candidate is also using the race card in some way?

Next Week: David Miliband

Well now. Half the blogosphere has been discussing the latest outing of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Having concluded a Right to Work conference, SWP members decided to take advantage of what providence offered: an open door into the ACAS building, where BA managers and Unite union negotiators were sitting down for a cosy chat.

This throws up a few questions on the role of direct action in struggle. Was it right to occupy this building? What is the relationship between the Right to Work activists and the BA Cabin Crew? With what group of people should initiative lie?

In this instance, I don’t think occupying the building will have achieved much. Though we can only judge the negotiations as outsiders, it seems that the leaders of Unite already appreciate the depths of their members feelings. They have acquired some measure of a deal on the reasons for the strike, and are now holding out for Walsh to recant on perks and suspensions.

If this happens, it will be a personal defeat for Walsh and a psychological victory for the union, bearing in mind Walsh’s public determination that there shall be no concessions in this regard. If it doesn’t happen, and the union looks solid on defending the interests of members – as they did in this instance – then there’s no harm in negotiations.

Either way, the intervention of groups unrelated to the strike – despite their inclusion of some Unite members and other trades unionists who were at the Right to Work Conference – won’t really help matters.

Moreover, upsetting the negotiations gives the opposition an opportunity to blame the collapse on the intervention of a group that is external to the dispute, and thus blame the strike on those outsiders. Add this to Willie Walsh’s usual verbal diarrhoea when it comes to ‘militants’ and who knows what propaganda will be rained on BA workers.

That such blame is false is not the point. Willie Walsh is clearly out to break the union by any means necessary, as evidenced by his pretence at outrage over a union leader twittering on the progress of the talks, and by the cycle of suspensions and withholding of benefits from those members of BASSA who went on strike.

This is a point that can be made, along with all arguments for direct action, on the picket lines this morning. The final decision would then be with the BA workers themselves.

Socialists might suggest what could be achieved by such action – but the final decision should be taken through the democracy of union branches, or at least by the picket as a whole. It’s no use a committed and unrepresentative core turning up alone.

It is, as the Socialist Party article on the issue states, the responsibility of already-convinced socialists to raise the confidence of the rest our class to engage in struggle.

This cannot be done by activists alone. The key thing is to convince others and then act in solidarity – by taking part in an agreed-upon action. A good analogy is the action of socialists regarding strikes; we can argue that our workplaces should go on strike and then go on strike with them, and man the pickets, but it makes no sense for a socialist to go on strike on their own, and to hope that their colleagues will follow.

Judging by the interview above, the purpose of the occupation was to show solidarity – and again, the place to do that would be the picket lines during this week, to turn up and support pickets, make them lively and, crucially, make a political argument about the significance of this strike.

Some people have said they thought Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson were capitulating to Walsh, thus justifying intervention to stop the negotiations. But it is the political arguments made on the picket lines that are the best defence against the surrender of union bureaucrats – and in this regard, with each strike resulting in the cancellation of higher percentages of BA flights, the BA cabin crews have given every impression of being solidly behind the strike, despite Walsh’s campaign of victimisation.

I was quite happy when to read this article by Alex over on Labourlist yesterday, outlining rumours of which policies might make it into the General Election Manifesto. After browsing through these initial proposals, most of which have been doing the round in political circles for some time, I’m feeling fairly optimistic about the finished document.

Votes at 16, public involvement in the administration of local services, an elected House of Lords, universal free school meals and a “substantial” increase in the minimum wage, whats not to like about that?! This seems to uphold my belief in a trend of a more left of centre approach to certain issues under Brown’s leadership, which is no doubt receiving a boost from Ed Miliband’s close involvement in the manifesto process.

Though I’ve been campaigning with many other Comrades, for a more substantial move to the left on key issues for quite some time, I really can’t complain about the vast majority of policies being put forward so far. However, there are still things in there (mainly in relation to deficit reduction) that will receive my negative attention, election or no election. I suppose that’s just the nature of politics though, needless to say I think it may still be some time before I’m completely satisfied with any collated assortment of Labour Party policy.

Seen as talk of the manifesto is starting to take place in more detail amongst politicos around the land, I feel I should offer up my contributions for the purpose of the written record, I know Paul has also touched on this in recent months. I wont drone on about every single thing I’d like to see included, because quite frankly, that would take me days! As opposed to a detailed political rant I’m just going to throw in a few points that I think would actually stand a chance in the current political climate of the Labour Party.

Nor am I going to indulge in my trademark Government bashing on this one, I genuinely think the Labour leadership are floating some well thought out and worthwhile policies at the moment, hopefully we can keep it that way in the times ahead. Anyway, here’s what I think needs to make it into the final draft;

• Serious action to tighten regulation of the Financial Services Industry, including limitations on futures contracts and other risk prone financial derivatives. The nation is still reeling from the effects of a financial crisis caused mainly by the reckless behaviour of a financial sector that has flourished under the irresponsible de-regulation supported by the last couple of Labour and Tory governments.
• With the plans to launch a “Peoples Bank”, to be administered through the Post Office, lets cease the moment and take another step towards making a fairer, more sustainable banking sector in Britain by committing to Government support for Mutualised financial services, as laid out by the Co-op with the Feelings Mutual Campaign.
• A detailed plan of how investment in Green technologies can benefit the British manufacturing industry, and create well paid, skilled employment opportunities for workers all around the country.
• A commitment to trial a shorter working work in the Public Sector, along the lines of the Utah State Governments highly successful experiment in America, to determine (and showcase) the viability and benefits of a shorter working week in Britain.
• A guarantee to provide necessary funds during the next Parliament, to deal with the atrocious shortage of Social Housing in Britain, in line with the proposals made by the Defend Council Housing campaign which were supported by Labour Party conference.

• A promise that attempts to reduce the deficit will focus primarily on collecting missed Tax revenue. Now I know that The Chancellor last week revealed plans to clampdown on Tax evasion through co-operation with offshore Tax havens, but more work needs to be done in closing legal loopholes regularly used to the advantage of wealthy individuals and organisations. Extra investment in HMRC could be of assistance here, perhaps avoiding a repeat of last years catastrophe when £11billion of Tax Revenue went uncollected due to a lack of staff! The TUC produced a paper here which highlights the potential benefits of such a plan.
• A pledge to return the bottom band of income tax to 10% over the next Parliament, increasing the top band for the highest earners (perhaps the top 5% if necessary). The abandoning of the 10p rate is something a lot of core Labour voters feel very strongly about, as I have repeatedly been told whilst out campaigning.
• A windfall tax on the profits of Utilities companies, with the money raised helping to finance assistance to low earners struggling to pay their energy bills. This could be used to start widespread debate about the operation of the Utilities sector in this country, and what is the best way to protect vulnerable consumers from the prolific profiteering of Private Utility firms.

Hardly the Revolution I know, but certainly a set of decent progressive policies that would make necessary changes to British society and no doubt, be received very well by the voters. In the spirit of ongoing debate, I’m curious to hear what our readers would like to see added..

Alright, this really is the last one.  I promise to stop now.  Honest

Pavement politics

Payment politics

Today at TCF we will mostly be exposing attempts of authorities to justify odious policy choices with the aid of completely ridiculous arguments.

First, there was Dave setting out how the US policy on gay people in service is ‘justified’ by the argument that the end of the cold war meant the Dutch army allowed gays into their ranks, and this meant they became no good at fighting. 

Problem is, as Dave points out, he’s factually wrong as well as stupid.

And now here’s Home Office Minister Meg Hillier justifying her decision to imprison children on the basis that she’s really protecting them:

[W]ith children being detained I’m faced with a number of options.

One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying say if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported and I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route

(Daily Politics, BBC 19 March 2010.)

I can’t improve on the End Child Detention Now blog’s caustic commentary on this nonsense:

Hillier’s comment was clearly intended to create the impression that either:

a) destitute single asylum seekers would place orders for small children to be trafficked half way across the world by criminal gangs with forged identity papers (and no doubt matching the false ‘parents’ DNA and blood group;

or

b) they would somehow borrow or adopt children who had already been trafficked into the country (with neatly forged ID documents etc) for, as Meg said, a ‘high price’, the minute some empty-headed government decided to follow the soft-hearted Swedes, Australians and Canadians in not locking up children in detention centres.

Because of course these governments foolishly gave into the pro-children/pro-human rights lobby, and we all know there are containers full of trafficked children just waiting to be delivered to failed asylum seekers for large sums of money in Toronto, Sydney and Stockholm!

Quite simply, this is a ridiculous statement from Meg Hillier. 

It’s so far from a being a sensible justification that you almost have to admire the gall in coming up with it.  

When I set out in a previous post how wrong the government was to lock up children, I assumed any defence she might make of it might be on the grounds that the care afforded to children outside prison was even worse than in prison.

That would have been wrong-headed enough, but this justification defies belief.

(The above piece was written before I saw this similar piece at Open Democracy by Clare Sambrook of  End Child Detention Now.)

I was approached yesterday on twitter and asked whether or not I had heard of the Give Your Vote campaign. I hadn’t. So I looked into it, and apparently both Time and our own Liberal Conspiracy have covered it. The concept is fairly simple: people in the UK should sign up to pass their vote to someone in one of thee third world countries. They then get texted on election day as to how they should vote and vote accordingly.

As a result of nation-states not having an equal say in global affairs, the democracies of America, Britain, etc are infinitely more powerful than the countries that GYV is attempting to pass our vote to: Ghana, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, symbolic, I suppose, of poverty, climate change and war. One on level, it’s a fair point; our elected officials make decisions that affect people who don’t vote for them – no taxation without representation and all that.

I don’t buy it though, and the reasons for this are as complex and multifarious as the reasons people have got involved with the project. Below, as an attempt to contribute to and publicise a debate I didn’t even know was ongoing, I’ve detailed why I’m not convinced – though I remain open to argument.

If the idea is that we surrender our votes to others, regardless of how they vote, then that contradicts a mission statement of Give Your Vote, which is supposed to be a way of ‘taking action against…global political inequality’, even if they acknowledge that their method of engagement won’t solve such problems. Except that people voting for the Conservatives, Lib-Dems or Labour isn’t necessarily taking action against global political inequality.

In their own ways, these three main parties have furthered that inequality. Moreover, they’re all paid up members of the capitalist club, so regardless of how nice their manifestos sound, they’re actively contributing to that inequality. In order for me to believe that, by surrendering my vote to someone in a foreign country, who will vote for one of these parties, I’m taking action against global political inequality, I have to suspend my own political views.

Obviously I’m not willing to do that, and GYV quite rightly say people who feel they want to vote for their own idea should do so. But the point is, it’s only from the point of view of people who think the three parties represent solutions to global poverty, climate change and war rather than support for the status quo that the whole GYV initiative makes sense. The organisation has political bias built into its method.

This isn’t corrected by including more than three parties either. If anyone votes Tory, for example, it’s still doesn’t count as taking action against global political inequality.

Second, there’s the question of who this sort of politics appeals to, who it is inclusive of.

As the Time article puts it,

“For residents of the U.K., dealing with climate change means accepting a higher price on everything from gasoline to electricity. In crowded, low-lying Bangladesh, it means trying to avoid catastrophic flooding.”

There are two nations; they have divergent interests. By surrendering our vote, we graciously acknowledge the interests of the other nation by sacrificing our own. I contend that this will appeal to well-off liberals who can afford to sacrifice their own interest but not to those of us who can’t.

Just because Brits aren’t facing catastrophic flooding doesn’t mean we have no immediate concerns that are important to our survival and well-being. Most of us have to pay attention to such material concerns.

Most of us will vote on the basis of who is likely to tax us less, or who is more trusted to provide the sort of public services we rely on and so forth. This is a stronger set of motivations than sympathy with the Third World – but the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, if the correct (anti-capitalist) political interpretations are drawn.

Absent from the GYV set-up is the realisation that the problem goes deeper than a democratic deficit between nations; it goes to the heart of the global economic system and the distribution of wealth within and between nations. Instead GYV permits the ambiguity and potential contradiction between the interests of ‘people’ in the West and people elsewhere, which should actually be aligned by socialist ideas.

In any case, a national election will not fix matters, regardless of what sporadic engagement or attention can be garnered on the part of third world populations or the western media.

It’s also concerning that large swathes of people in the chosen nations will inevitably be excluded. The least enfranchised in Ghana, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are excluded because they are unlikely to own mobile phones. On the other hand, the most apathetic and disengaged in the UK are also not going to be brought into the fold because they’ll never hear about GYV and, if they do, won’t really care.

It might influence some who are disposed to sympathy with the Third World, but who aren’t ‘political’ enough to have made up their own minds or are young enough to be caught up in an idealistic enthusiasm about empowering others. The sort of people who wear Make Poverty History bracelets and think Bono is a hero, worthy of emulation, and that our leaders aren’t just bastards but really did have the interests of the world at heart in their G8 announcements.

I’m sure this is a caricature – and probably an unfair one at that – but on the other hand, having spent time on knocking on doors for a political party, people who when asked say they don’t vote are either very cynical or just don’t care, for whatever reason. It’s a different world to university campuses and coffee shops full of young professionals – and it’s a world that Give Your Vote is unlikely to reach.

Say it did, however. Say it reached as many people as the Make Poverty History campaign. What then? What’s the next step? There isn’t one – and that’s objection number three.

A lot of political commentators from the last fifteen years like to see the era of party politics as being over. Parties can be influenced from outwith by campaign groups that combine the maximum of visibility in the press with a ‘mass’ support – demonstrated by petitions, one-off marches and concerts. It would be easy to see Give Your Vote as part of this trend, since it does not pin its colours to any particular mast.

This is more a commentary on the sad and emaciated state of formerly mass parties than on the potential for pressure groups and single issue politics. My contention is that we’ll get no satisfactory solutions to problems like global inequality until we reverse the decline of mass politics and the consistent engagement of millions of people with organisations that have their hands directly on the levers of power: the trade unions and a workers’ party.

Laurie Penny, in her write up at Liberal Conspiracy, dismisses this objection in the following manner:

Give Your Vote’s impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Suffragettes are an excellent example to compare Give Your Vote to: based on stunts with no consistent form of political engagement, the suffragettes were a spectacular political failure. They didn’t exist in a vacuum and there were achievements for women whilst suffragettes campaigned on the issue, but the period was also one in which the entire political order was being contested. So attributing the right to vote to the suffragettes is a bit disingenuous.

In fact, the Labour Party had already gone further in demands for universal suffrage than the WSPU by 1908. By 1917, through the very madness inspired by being a tiny pressure group, controlled by an unelected clique with bright ideas and no accountability, the WSPU destroyed themselves and what meaningfully survived were groups advocating mass engagement through the Labour Party and the Communist Party.

Civil rights activists, on the other hand, were part of a mass organisation that in many instances acted like a political party – regular and mass meetings, a clear political programme from a definite point of view, with well-known legislative demands. They may have started out as isolated kooks, but their relationship to the mass organisations of labour, to the Democratic Party mechanisms and their attitude to organising made them much more than that.

That they didn’t take this to its conclusion is part of the reason the movement fell apart.

These are attitudes nowhere evident in Give Your Vote, nor in many of the other pressure groups that have crossed our paths. For my part, I don’t see a future for this beyond the odd newspaper headline from a gushing columnist or two, infatuated with the thought of a vote beind had by a tiny proportion of the starving millions and reassured that they themselves aren’t being called on to do or advocate anything terribly radical.

So, International Women’s Day has been and gone.

At the weekend, the Observer asked whether it’s needed.

Good question. The brief answers from an Anastasia de Waal, a Barbara Gunnell and a certain Sunder Katwala are perfunctory, to the extent of not really saying much at all, although credit goes to Gunnell for remembering the day’s socialist roots:

It is far better being a woman in 2010 than it would have been in 1909 when American socialists celebrated the first such day.

The day before, in what I assume was an article to mark International Women’s Day though it never actually said so, Charlotte Raven had a long review article in the Guardian which I suggest provides a better answer to the question.

Throughout the meandering reflections, the same theme plays itself out to its somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion:

There was a moment in the 90s – I wince to recall it – when women themselves fell in with the view that feminism was unglamorous and inhibiting. It was cramping our style and even worse, stopping us from shopping! Middle-class commentators encouraged their readers to embrace their “inner bimbos”.

For Raven, the core of the ‘feminist question’ is about whether it’s ok to use sexuality as a knowing tool of self-empowerment (a la Madonna), or whether to do is in fact simply to fall prey to the commodification of sex.  The three books she reviews in the article are reviewed through this prism.

And therein lies my central concern about what International Women’s Day has become.

From the outside, it appears to have become a celebration of the fact of being a woman in capitalist society – commodified sexuality and all -  as opposed to a celebration of what the solidarity of women might achieve.  The day, I fear, has turned its back on its radical socialist roots, and is the worse for it.

Look at two quick examples of this.

First, there’s one of the main international website for International Women’s Day, run on what looks at first sight like a philanthropic basis by Aurora GCM Ltd.  In its historical overview of the day, it pays brief attention to its socialist roots in 1908:

15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights

and then to what happened in 1917:

On the last Sunday of February, Russian women began a strike for “bread and peace” in response to the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. Opposed by political leaders the women continued to strike until four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. The date the women’s strike commenced was Sunday 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.

But then the socialism is gone.  It’s done its job, and the link between ideals of solidarity and feminism are no longer needed:

Since its birth in the socialist movement, International Women’s Day has grown to become a global day of recognition and celebration across developed and developing countries alike.

Such a stance is hardly surprising, when you look a little more closely at what Aurora stands for:

Aurora is a niche marketing company founded in 2000 by Glenda Stone. Aurora is based in the City of London, serving over 100 corporate clients globally across sectors. The majority of Aurora’s clients are from the professional services, finance and technology sectors, however Aurora also has many clients in energy & utilities, pharmaceutical, FMCG, property, engineering, retail and travel sectors as well as many public sector clients in government and academia.

In fact, nowhere on this whole publicity webpage is there any mention of women, never mind feminism.

This is not to be critical of Aurora Ltd itself.  Within its own value system, it’s doing nothing wrong.  It’s seen a marketing opportunity in the sponsorship/hosting of a major website about International Women’s Day, and it’s gone for it;  I’m sure there’s even a genuine commitment by Aurora to Ms Stone’s and her colleagues’  understanding of feminism in there.  Ms Stone may even admire Madonna.

But it does make you wonder what International Women’s Day has become, when it is so clearly tied to the capitalist dream for its infrastructural support

As a second example of how I think International Women’s Day has lost what once made it tick - and I appreciate I’m courting controversy here - there’s the Million Women Rise rally held yesterday, perhaps THE major event in the UK marking International Women’s Day.

Here’s what the blog says about the reason for the rally:

The women organising the march say that “enough is enough”.  Never has the rape of a woman’s right and dignity been so systematic and coordinated, the health and lives of women have never faced such peril.

The women’s march has been organised by ordinary women fed up with violence against women in all its forms.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am in no way trying to suggest that challenging sexual violence, or any violence, against women is anything other than of huge importance, and it is great that so many women should come together to confront it in all its forms and to take solidarity with each other.

But in the end, is that all that International Women’s Day is for?  Is it solely to remain a recognition of women’s position in an overwhelmingly patriarchal world?

Does it solely seek to define women’s position in relation to men, but stop short of confronting other issues that confront women, but also men?

Does it simply define women as they are, or should it seek to celebrate and agitate for what they might achieve together – just as the Russian women of 1917 did?

Over the last few days, Though Cowards Flinch has hosted  some great contributions from socialist feminists, and I particularly enjoyed what Louise and Kat had to say on the relationship between socialism and feminsim in the 2010s, when the female form has been commodified in a way it has never been before, and in a way which, it might be argued, makes women complicit in their own victimhood.

For Louise and Kat though, IWD (and feminism more generally) is more than the plaint of victimhood; it’s about strength in solidarity.

Here’s Kat:

But, then I feel more positive. Every day there is another young person waking up, taking a look around and seeing the injustices the capitalist system perpetuates.

And even if they do not all become die-hard Trots, it’s good that there are young people who are conscious of injustice and will only become more so. Whether they choose to stand against capitalism as a whole, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism or sexism, the future is looking fine for the left and the fight for women’s rights. Socialism hasn’t got old, and neither has feminism.

And here’s Louise:

Though not officially related to the [PCS] strike today [Monday] and Tuesday, you can bet that these frustrations will be part of the angry mood amongst workers whose pensions, pay, terms and conditions and future employment are all under dire threat.  And women will continue to fight for equal pay and recognition.

That’s one reason why I will be on a picket on the 8th March to show solidarity and support, as a trade unionist, to the civil servants on strike. International Women’s Day is about global sisterhood and solidarity with working class women across the world fighting for recognition, visibility, rights and against oppression.

But I’ll leave the (near) last word to another socialist feminist, Laurie Penny, who I think was bang on when she said, just a week ago:

‘I am asking for an analysis that is more rigorous, more grounded in an understanding of the gendered basis of capital, an analysis that is less focused on recalcitrant sexual morality……….Today’s young women are neither soulless slags nor tragic victims: we are real people with real desires and real agency, trying to negotiate our personal and sexual identities in a culture whose socio-economic misogyny runs far deeper than conservative commentators would have us believe.’

Women as active agents, and struggling to determine a destiny in which they are equal partners.  That’s more like it.