Newsletter of Cardiff Communists

Newsletter of Cardiff communists

Distributed free to 6,000 homes

No. 6 | Summer 2011

YES WE CAN STOP THE INCINERATOR! THE CAMPAIGN against Viridor’s plans for a giant incinerator at Trident Park, between Splott and Cardiff Bay, is set to take a big step forward.

Across south Wales, public anger is mounting against plans to burn rubbish instead of using safer, cleaner technologies including more recycling.

Merthyr Tydfil and Caerphilly councils have come out against putting company profits before local people’s health. They believe incinerator plants will drive jobs away.

But in Cardiff, the LibDem-Plaid Cymru council is sticking with a policy that will spew dangerous dioxins into the air, in an area where low air quality already contributes to major health and pollution problems.

If the Viridor scheme goes ahead, it will also mean up to 250 lorries a day driving rubbish and ash to and from the south of the city.

The all-party Cardiff Against the Incinerator group has been waging a vigorous battle. But its efforts to enlighten Cardiff Council, the Environment Agency and the previous Welsh Assembly Government have not stopped the scheme – yet.

Now the campaign is moving up a gear. Newlyelected Assembly AMs

have pledged their active support, including Labour’s Vaughan Gething in Cardiff South & Penarth.

The new Welsh Minister for the Environment, John Griffiths, is already under pressure in his Newport constituency, where his local Labour Party is opposing yet another incinerator scheme.

The Cardiff, Merthyr and Newport campaigns are now in touch with each other, raising the possibilty of building a mass, united movement.

The Cardiff petition against Viridor is currently being considered by the Welsh Assembly’s petition committee. The Local Ombudsman for Wales has been asked to rule against Cardiff Council’s negligence when granting planning permission last year.

The council’s consultation process was a farce, with none of the residents in Splott and

Cardiff Bay tower blocks overlooking Trident Park consulted about the harmful effects of smoke and other emissions. Nor were open-air cafes, restauarants and hotels in nearby Cardiff Bay properly informed or consulted.

Next May, LibDem and Plaid Cymru councillors who supported the incinerator will be seeking re-election. Who will want to vote for councillors who put big business profit before local people’s health and safety?

VIRIDOR FACT FILE ■ PROFITS: up 14 per cent in 2010-11 to £63 million. Shareholder dividends up 9 per cent.

That’s what it’s all about – there’s no crisis for big business!

■ HEALTH & SAFETY: Viridor has a long list of convictions and fines for dangerous practices, pollution, industrial injuries and negligence.

See some of them (up to January 2010) at http://tiny.cc/zstya ■ FIRE: blazes have broken out at nine Viridor waste sites in the last four years, including last year alone in Manchester, Liskeard, Arundel, Edinburgh and Bridgwater. Many were serious and had to be attended by the fire and other emergency services.

Cardiff Against the Incinerator PUBLIC MEETING

STEPPING UP THE FIGHT! Monday, July 11 at 7 pm Come and hear Vaughan Gething AM, Dr Linda Evans (Merthyr campaign) and reports on the latest situation.

The Old Illts RFC, Splott Rd. Bridge >> Everyone welcome <<

INSIDE: Cuts and redundancies p.2 | 100 years ago p.3 | Cardiff Blues p.4

LIB-DEMS

Wanted – 49,703 apologies

CUTS – THE FACTS Council slashes services – 3,000 jobs to go ARE YOU a parent, a car driver, an allotment holder, elderly or a carer?

Are you likely to die sometime in the future? Or do you just care about Cardiff?

Then you need to know about Cardiff Council’s budget plans. To make ‘savings’ of £22 million this year, the council is: ■ SHUTTING the city’s last two residential care homes.

■ CLOSING the Central Youth Club in Ocean Way. ■ CHARGING more for allotments, car parking, school music lessons, burials and cremation.

■ CUTTING library hours.

■ SHEDDING 350 jobs.

That’s just for twelve months. Another £48 million in cuts and charges are planned to 2015.

That’s a running total of £188 million slashed from the council’s budget over four years. Around 1,500 jobs will be lost in the public sector, along with 1,500 private sector jobs that also rely on council spending.

Our LibDem and Plaid Cymru councillors can’t blame

the Welsh Assembly. Cardiff was the only council in Wales whose Assembly grant WENT UP this year!

Does Cardiff Council have any other option? OF COURSE! Councillors could have increased council tax, especially in the higher bands.

Instead, they are keeping it down for next year’s local elections.

THEY HOPE YOU ARE SELFISH AND SHORTSIGHTED. That you don’t care about children, the elderly, the unemployed, carers or the bereaved.

The Council could dig deeper into reserves. After drawing on just £2 million, there is still £22 million left in non-housing and non-school reserve funds.

The main fault lies with the Tory-LibDem government in London. It refuses to tax the rich and big business, or to allow councils to increase local rates for large companies.

BUT THE TORIES MUST BE PLEASED WITH THEIR LITTLE LIB-DEM AND PLAID CYMRU HELPERS IN CARDIFF.

Cuts – what’s the alternative?

The Con-Dems have added £73 billion to New Labour’s £130 billion cuts for 2011-15. The £203 billion total could be raised in ONE YEAR by taxing the rich and big business: ■ A 2 per cent Wealth Tax on the richest 10% of the population = £78 billion in one year.

■ A 20 per cent windfall tax on monopoly profits in banking, energy, retail food, armaments and pharmaceuticals = £16 billion.

■ A ‘Robin Hood’ tax on City financial transactions = £20 billion a year.

■ Clamp down on British-ruled tax havens and rich and big business tax dodgers = £70 billion a year.

■ Repayment of money owed by bailed-out banks = £131 billion.

2 ■ Summer 2011 ■ RED ALERT ■

IN LAST YEAR’S General Election, the Lib Dems won 49,703 votes in Cardiff. They campaigned on the basis that they – and not Labour – were the real radical alternative to the Tories.

Then we woke up a few days after polling day to find ... the LibDems in bed with a Tory government! They formed a coalition to carry out policies TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the ones in the LibDem manifesto. Just look at the record: ■ LibDem promise: gradual, moderate public spending cuts ■ Tory-LibDem policy: immediate, deep cuts in jobs and services ■ LibDem promise: no increase in VAT ■ Tory-LibDem policy: VAT increased to 20 per cent ■ LibDem promise: no increase in National Insurance ■ Tory-LibDem policy: increase for workers, but not for employers ■ LibDem promise: no increase in student tuition fees ■ Tory-LibDem policy: student tutition fees trebled to £9,000 a year ■ LibDem promise: no NHS reorganisation and privatisation ■ Tory-LibDem policy: NHS reorganisation and privatisation in England ■ LibDem promise: no more reckless foreign wars ■ Tory-LibDem policy: war in Libya, more war in Afghanistan Will anyone be stupid enough to believe the LibDems next time?

Cardiff Morning Star public meeting

★

Thursday July 21 7.30 pm

The Middle East after the ‘Arab Spring’ Speaker: NAVID SHOMALI (International Secretary, Tudeh Party of Iran) Everyone welcome Croeso i bawb Read the Morning Star - the daily paper of the left

ABOUT US The Red Alert editorial team is: Robert Griffiths (editor) Fran Rawlings Agharad Khan-Raja Steve Williams Rick Newnham Dan Cole Red Alert was originally produced in the 1980s by the Cardiff East branch of the Communist Party. Today, it is published by the party’s Cardiff branch and distributed free to 6,000 homes in Splott, Adamsdown, Tremorfa, Llanedeyrn and Grangetown.

To contact Red Alert with news or views, phone Robert Griffiths on 07790 884137 or email to redalertcardiff@aol.co.uk If you would like more information about the Communist Party and its policies, contact Cardiff branch secretary Rick Newnham on 07973 857048 or go to our websites below.

www.welshcommunists.org www.communist-party.org.uk

PEOPLE’S HISTORY

FASCISTS

1911 – Cardiff’s angry summer ONE HUNDRED years ago, Cardiff exploded in a summer of strikes and walkouts. Fighting between workers and the police was the most ferocious in the city’s history.

It began when the seafarers joined a national strike. They wanted the shipping employers to discuss wages and conditions with their union.

The Cardiff Shipowners Association refused to recognise the National Sailors and Firemen’s Union.

So the seafarers held a meeting in Neptune Park on Newport Rd. and took action.

They picketed the docks gates opposite the unon office, on the corner of Bute St. and James St. Their leader was the eccentric Captain Tupper. He lied about being a sea captain and winning the Victoria Cross. But he was telling the truth about helping the Secret Service to protect the British Empire!

Although the shipping bosses were happy to collaborate with Tupper in secret, they wouldn’t recognise the union officially.

That hurt his pride, and he whipped up the strikers with fiery speeches from his office balcony.

At the time, Cardiff was the biggest coal port in the world.

All out at the docks!

The seafarers strike soon won solidarity from the dockers, general labourers, the Fitters’ Helpers Society, the Rivet Workers’ Union and the Cooks and Stewards Society.

They were up against W.T. Lewis (later Baron Merthyr), managing director of the Bute Docks Company, Tory, coalowner and unofficial chief constable of the docks police.

An all-union strike committee was formed on July 19. At 10 o’clock that morning, around sixty strikers marched from Tyndall St. to Roath Dock.

They called on the coal tippers and trimmers, the deal-carriers, timber men and the boilermakers to join them.

Hundreds did.

They then seized charabancs of luggage from strikebreakers aboard SS Farley, in Queen Alexandra Dock. The scabs had been brought down from London by the Board of

Tipping tobacco at Freeman's

Trade, on behalf of the shipowners. They were Chinese, which unfortunately led to attacks on Chinese laundries and lodgins in Roath, Cathays, Riverside, Grangetown and Canton.

Women and children also joined in the clashes with more than 400 police brought into Cardiff from London and elsewhere. Troops were called in as the strike was joined by coal washers, foundry workers, wagon builders, Spillers & Bakers mill workers, Taff Vale Railway employees, Pure Ice Company builders, engineers and wire-rope workers.

Women and girls on the potato wharves walked out, demanding higher pay and trade union rights. The South Wales Daily News called it ‘the feminine strike’. They marched to Penarth Rd., bringing out their sisters at Claytons, Basker and Elliotts, Hancocks Brewery, Frank’s Sweets and the White Heather laundry.

Reluctant strikers were dragged out of the factories – and some had their dinners eaten by the marchers!

Singing and dancing The hundreds of women and girls at J.R. Freeman & Son cigar factory in North Clive St. needed no persuading. In a crowd now 2,000 strong, they danced and sang their way down Cornwall St. before being charged by mounted police.

The American roller-skating rink in Westgate St. was turned into a police barracks.

It became the focus of fierce street fighting on Saturday night, July 22.

Trade unions and the Independent Labour Party held mass rallies and marches at Cathays Park and Roath Park.

Police and soldiers guarded major business premises. Over the following week, the strike committee and various

employers hammered out agreements to improve pay, shorten the working week (60 hours was common in those days), reduce or abolish punishment fines, and to recognise trade unions.

But employers on the docks and railways, and at Ely Paper Mills and Freeman’s, preferred dictatorship to collective bargaining. Not even a national railway strike in August could force the railway magnates to talk to trade union officials. The temperature in the city soared to a record 91 degrees (32 centigrade).

The Freeman’s dispute lasted longest of all. It turned violent in Llanmaes St. and Tanyard St. (now Sloper Rd.), where Evangeline Spittall, Kate Geary and William Price attacked strike-breakers and were later fined by Cardiff magistrates.

Gallahar’s – a bastion The 208 cigar workers (more than half of them girls aged 14-17 and only five men) were not all back at work until September 25. But they won big advances in pay and conditions.

The company later changed its name to Gallahar’s and moved to Penarth Rd. It was a bastion of trade unionism until taken over and closed in 2009

by Japan Tobacco.

Cardiff’s angry summer of 1911 hit the headlines. Then as now, big business and its newspapers hated workers taking collective action to improve their lot. But those strikers won lasting gains for future generations to defend.

■ The full version of this article, 1911: Cardiff Cigar Workers and the ‘Feminine Strike’ by Robert Griffiths, is available as a pamphlet, price £2. Phone 07790 884137 for copies.

Look out, there’s a Nazi about!

A NOTORIOUS Cardiff neo-Nazi is about to be released from prison.

Trevor Hannington, 59, was gaoled for two years at Liverpool Crown Court last year. He was convicted of inciting racial hatred and possessing information useful for commiting acts of terrorism.

Hannington had been found in possession of manuals for bombmaking. But he was cleared on a charge of soliciting murder.

The jury heard that Hannington operated a website from his home in Leigh, Greater Manchester. He used it to post messages like ‘Kill the Jew, Kill the Jew, Burn down a synagogue today’, and sent out instructions on how to make a flame-thrower. A range of weapons were also recovered from his house.

Hannington is a member of the so-called Aryan Strike Force (ASF). The group idolises Adolf Hitler and organises military exercises in Cumbria. Its slogan is ‘For blood, faith and honour’.

Other ASF members are currently enjoying Her Majesty’s porridge for terrorist offences, including possession of the deadly poison, ricin.

Before going to prison, Hannington was a keen supporter of the English Defence League.

He must have forgotten where he comes from.

It is not known whether he intends to return to Cardiff after his likely release towards the end of this year.

PALESTINE SOLIDARITY The people of Palestine have suffered illegal Israeli occupation of their land for almost 45 years. If you are interested in helping to form a Cardiff branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, contact John Haylett on john@peoples-press.com. www. palestinecampaign.org

■ RED ALERT ■ Summer 2011 ■ 3

SPORT

A better season for the Blues?

Xavier Rush, who often looked isolated. When he is negated, the Blues are worse for wear.

Furthermore, Gethin Jenkins’ absence left the option of a dominant scrum in disarray. This was highlighted in the two European pool matches in which the Blues were out-scrummaged by finalists Northampton Saints.

Fly-half Dan Parks lacked the spark of confidence that is needed for every recruit to a new club and this affected the Blues’ back play generally.

confidence by playing rather than sitting on the bench.

All the regions in Wales have a duty to bring young players through. Tighter budgets will not stretch to extra foreign recruits but good young players will not develop without game time.

Players to look out for this year include fluent scrum-half Lloyd Williams, recently a Barbarian against Wales, and a possible future captain of the region, South African forward Andries Pretorius.

The possible departure of coach Dai Young could turn out for the best. He has served Cardiff well, but clearly feels stale and wants new challenges. A replacement would bring fresh thinking.

Either way, the matter must be settled before it disrupts preparations for the new season.

BRIGHT SIDE What are the prospects for 2011-12? On the bright side, there have been no significant losses to the Blues’ squad.

There are a host of good young players at the Cardiff Academy and they will only gain

European chances The Blues face three tough teams in Pool Two. Although the Blues managed to beat Edinburgh four times last season, Racing Metro Paris ‘92 finished second in the French Top 14. London Irish

asks Roger Jones THIS TIME last year there were great expectations from the Cardiff Blues squad. Its strength lay in a good player base, with competition for places in almost every position.

But then the Blues failed to realise their massive potential.

Performances in the Celtic League and the European Cup left much to be desired.

REASONS FOR FAILURE Injuries played a huge part in these failures, with several top players out for the greater part of the season. Full-back Ben Blair played virtually no part and other notables such as Leigh Halfpenny and Sam Warburton had significant absences.

Jamie Roberts’ absence lost the team a lot of ‘go forward’ on the gain-line. This left much of the battle to

Jamie Roberts

started last season in fine form, but fell back after Christmas to sixth place in the English Premiership.

However, there is no reason why the Blues cannot win this pool. The European Cup is extremely important for rugby and financial reasons, and adds verve to an often lacklustre fixture list.

After so many losses at home last year, the Cardiff City Stadium must become a fortress again. The fans can make this a better year for the Blues by turning up in bigger numbers.

■ Roger Jones is chief rugby union correspondent for the Morning Star daily newspaper.

YOUR RIGHTS AT WORK

Facing redundancy?

A redundancy occurs when the employer no longer needs or can afford to keep a job, or wants to contract out or transfer it elsewhere.

UNFAIR SELECTION The selection process for redundancy must be ‘objective’ and ‘carried out fairly’. Employers have plenty of leeway to decide what that means. They can take sick leave (although not disability as such) and absenteeism records into account.

In some cases, selecting only or mainly part-time or fixed-term workers may be unfair.

The widely used ‘last in, first out’ rule (LIFO) is open to challenge if it has a much bigger impact on women, black or disabled employees.

AUTOMATICALLY UNFAIR It is ‘automatically unfair’ for an employer to discriminate with redundancy on grounds of gender (including pregnancy), race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion, belief or trade union membership; or because an employee has claimed

employment rights set out in law (eg. parental leave, sick pay, the minimum wage, taking lawful industrial action) or taken time off for statutory duties (eg. jury service).

LACK OF CONSULTATION Employers must consult workers’ representatives about plans to make 20 or more employees in the same unit redundant over a 90-day period. (Different arrangements apply to Crown employees).

Where 100 or more jobs are at stake, consultations must begin at least 90 days beforehand. For more than 20, the minimum period is 30 days. Where fewer than 20 job losses are planned, employees at risk are entitled to be consulted in person.

Consultation must look at avoiding or reducing the number of redundancies and softening the impact.

4 ■ Summer 2011 ■ RED ALERT ■

ALTERNATIVE WORK? Employers should offer similar and suitable work if available elsewhere in the organisation.

Refusing such an offer unreasonably could mean no redundancy pay.

TIME OFF AND REDUNDANCY PAY Employees with at least two years’ service are entitled to (1) reasonable time off with pay, during working hours, to look for work when facing redundancy; and (2) statutory redundancy pay based on level of pay, age and length of service.

WHAT CAN BE DONE? Currently, an employee with at least one year’s service can take a case for unfair redundancy to an Industrial Tribunal (IT). Two years’ service is needed for ‘time off’ and redundancy pay cases.

There is no qualifying period in cases of ‘automatically unfair’ redundancy, or where unions

claim lack of consultation over collective redundancies.

An IT can make financial awards against an employer to employees, and order reinstatement (which employers can defy and incur further costs). But it will not consider whether a redundancy is unfair on general economic or financial grounds.

JOIN A UNION! Going to an IT can be complicated and costly. The best defence against the threat of redundancy is to be in a trade union.

Unions can negotiate better agreements with management, take cases to an IT, or plan industrial action where members are united and determined enough.

To join a union, contact your workplace union representative, or Cardiff Trades Union Council secretary Ramon Corria on 07777 694151 or at cardiffctuc@gmail.com

NEXT ISSUE: People’s history: Cardiff against the Blackshirts!

Rights at work: Joining a union Sport: Up with the Bluebirds?

Printed & published by R.Griffiths, 58 Janet St., Splott, Cardiff CF24 2BE