Unity! Unite-Amicus Conference 2007

unity at amicus

June 2007 Communist Pa rt y Conference special

Welcome to democracy!

The Communist Party welcomes delegates to this conference.

The agenda is a ve ry good one, and we are sure there will be vigorous democratic debate to produce policies in the interests of working people unlike past conferences of some of the the unions which now make up Amicus, where conference delegates were threatened with bans and exclusions if they didn't vote the right way.

We welcome our united union's culture of open debate.

Of course, differences will arise.

But we hope decisions will be accepted regardless of views, and without any bittern e s s .

Use the £millions Motions to revive the Confed campaign for a 35-hour week deserve support .The massive campaign we ran in the late 1980s had the backing of our members, who not only took action but backed up with a massive war-chest.

The money to finance the campaign was ring-fenced so that the Executive couldn't use it for general purposes.

So let’s use those millions for a fresh 35-hour week campaign.

Many of our past gains have been whiottled away.Workers in Britain work the longest hours with the fewest statutory holidays in western Euro p e.

Such a fight would really unite our members and show them the value of the merger.

MOTORS It’s time for government action

he decision by the Fo rd Motor Company to call in the banks and investment giants to investigate the prospects for selling Jaguar and LandRover will have dire consequences for the 19,000 direct and many more indirect wo r ke r s p roducing these top cars.

This comes only three months after selling A s t o n Martin.

The trade unions we re not even consulted. The danger of a sale to private equity asset-strippers and pensionfund raiders are obvious.

N at u r a l l y, unions are angry and are talking about exerting pre s s u re to find good buyers etc. But now is the time for Unite, with the

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majority of members in the Midlands plants, to consider the lessons of British Leyland.

Then, p romises by Japanese companies and others came to nothing, and after a long drawn out period many BL wo r kers are still on the dole or filling in with temporary jobs.

Should we not go down a d i f f e rent road this time? Put pre s s u re on the government to bid for these enterprises – both of which are viable – to take them over and guarantee that work will continue.

The question will be asked: w h e re would the money come from? For a start, it is better than paying out years of

unemployment and other social benefits.

But the government can find the money for industry.

It recently sold shares in British Nuclear Fuels and then gave the £650 million p roceeds back to the semip r i vatised company to help with clear-up costs.

Both sections of Unite backed Gordon Brown to take over from Blair. T h ey claimed t h at this would ensure he would talk to us on friendly terms.

The time to talk has a l ready arrived. Our union should tell him we wa n t financial assistance to stop the rot in manufacturing.

There is no other way.

MASS PARTY RO B E RT GRIFFITHS explains why the fight to reclaim the Labour Party must continue.

HE whole labour movement must take stock of the outcome of the Labour Party leadership contest.

The failure of other than 29 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party to nominate John McDonnell and so ensure a d e m o c ratic contest is indictment enough of the PLP. Almost as damning is the fact that 313 MPs felt the need to nominate Gordon Brown, many of them well after the "win by" date, including about 130 who have rebelled against key new Labour policies championed by the Chancellor.

They know his record better than anyone. Not only has he been complicit in new Labour's erosion of civil liberties and its scapegoating of asylum-seeke rs and Muslims. He promised "whatever it takes" to fund the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

By handing control over interest rates to the Bank of England and cheerleaders for the City, Brown allowed the destruction of more than one million manufacturing jobs through high interest rates. He has propelled the private finance initiative and so-called "public-

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p rivate partnerships" into almost every area of the public sector, including education and health, attacked public-sector wages and pensions, made means testing the basis for subsistence-level state pensions and slashed corp o ration tax on big business profits.

He has resisted all calls fo r taking the railways and public utilities back into public ownership.The private equity firms now buying up Bri t i s h transport, utility and services enterp rises were delibera t e ly lured here by whopping tax incentives introduced by the Chancellor seven years ago.

Brown was the candidate of monopoly capital for the leadership of the Labour Party and he won by a walkover.

Most of his support within Parliament came from those 180 or so nominally "Labour" MPs who have loyally trooped into the lobby in favour of every antiworking class, anti-democra t i c, pro-big business and warmongering measure proposed by the new Labour regime.

Their political obituary could be the memora ble words of the otherwise forgotten US vicepresident John Garner - they were not worth "a bu c ket of w a rm spit."

But it is clear that the malaise in the Labour Party reaches deeper than the parliamentary level.

The reality is that 313 Labour MPs could back Brown safe in the

knowledge that few of them would come under any real pressure to do otherwise.

Labour Party individual membership has fallen by 200,000 - or about half - since 1997. Many constituency parties are mere husks, only raised from the dead at election time. Fewer than twothirds of them are represented at the annual Labour Party conference. Of these, only about one-quarter voted reasonably consistently for left-wing positions last year, with no more than 40 per cent opposing privatisation of the NHS or supporting the right of unions to take solidarity action.

Many other CLPs have been taken over by new Labour zombies who have no roots in the working class.

With an annual conference whose resolutions are routinely ignored by the party leadership and a national executive committee which utterly fails to promote official Labour Party policy, it is questionable whether the Labour Party as such actually exists as an independent, national, political entity.

The historic question facing working people and their families, trade unionists and socialists, therefore, is this. Are we to have a party of labour in Britain which stands for working class and progressive interests, however partially and imperfectly?

We need a mass party rooted in the working class which enjoys

the allegiance of millions of people at the ballot box.

Certainly, the Labour Party does not fulfil that role at present and only the most sectarian leftist will answer that the enormous vacuum that this leaves in the political struggle is - or could be filled by a socialist, Communist or "new worke rs" party of a few thousand activists.

There is also a vital role for a revolutionary Marxist party, one with a capacity to analyse, mobilise and even to participate in elections in the broad interests of the working class and its allies.

But having both a mass party of labour and a powerful Marxist party rooted in the labour movement are mutually r e i n forcing perspectives, not contradictory ones.

The Communist Party has n e ver accepted the notion that there is a only a small, stagnant pool from which the left draws its forces and that an advance fo r one section of the left can only be at the expense of another.

But what is needed now more than ever is for the trade union movement to take on its historic responsibility to ensure the existence of a mass party of labour. For all that socialists and c o m munists can do, the unions alone have the human, financial and organisational resources, as well as the class interest, to take the necessary steps.

Together with the nonsectarian left, they need to work out a political strategy which takes account of current realities. For example, most major unions remain affiliated to the Labour Party and are unlikely to leave it in the near future.

With the continu i n g involvement of thousands of socialists, the fight to reclaim the Labour Party for the labour movement will continu e, however faint the prospect of success.

At the same time, at least one big and seve ral smaller militant unions are not affiliated to Labour but see the need for political representation. Differences over tactics and long-term stra t e g y should not impede the growth of mutual respect - even solidarity and a plan of united action around a minimum left-wing

p r o g ramme of policies.

This would also provide the best context in which to conduct an ongoing discussion about how to ensure the existence of a mass labour party.

It may even be possible to hammer out an electoral strategy for the left which respects different affiliations and perspectives while minimising sectarian disunity.

The first steps in this direction might be for all the major unions to affiliate and participate fully in the Labour Representation Committee. Deals between union leaders in smoke-free rooms to win resolutions at Labour Party conference are not enough.The active involvement of unions and their members in the LRC would be the clearest declaration of political intent.

The LRC could itself go the extra mile and allow full membership status to socialist organisations including the Communist Party, respecting their right to participate independently in elections in return for an agreement not to campaign fo r the dismantling of the Labour Party through further union disaffiliations.

In their relations with the Labour Party, unions should stop all financial, logistical and political support for MPs who consistently vote against key union policies.

Of the 100-plus Labour MPs in the GMB parliamentary group, 53 have not even signed the early day motion in favour of a Tra d e Union Freedom Bill.Thirteen of the backbenchers among them have also voted strongly in favour of foundation hospitals, student top-up fees, the erosion of civil liberties and all the rest.

In the Unite (Amicus section)

group of 112 MPs, 58 have not supported the Bill while, in most cases, backing privatisation of the NHS, war on Iraq and all the other most reactionary new Labour measures.

Of the 61-strong UNISON group, 23 have not backed the Bill to return rights which unions enjoyed back in 1907, 11 of them without even the excuse of being government ministers, whips or, less acceptably, parliamentary p rivate secretari e s . Again, most of these same 23 MPs have voted without fail against UNISON policies on health, education, civil liberties, Iraq and Trident.

Readers of UNISON Labour Link News could be confused by the headline of an article by sponsored MP David Blunkett on page three, "The NHS - safe in our hands," and the report of NHS job losses, ward closures and private contracting-out on page four.

Many members must wonder why their unions are giving credibility to such MPs and money to their constituencies.

Millions of workers and progressive-minded people can be won to the ideas of public ownership, economic planning, social equality and peace. At the moment, they do not find those values or policies in the Labour Party. Many are bewildered by the spectacle of such a disunited left in Britain.

Until we regain a mass party of labour, the main benefi c i a ries will be the Tories, Welsh and Scottish separatists and the BNP fascists.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.

An independent foreign policy for Britain

Why you should join the communists

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hrough much of its history, the British labour movement has sustained two parties – a federal Labour Party uniting tra d e s unions, cooperatives and socialist groups; and a Communist Party.

The Labour Party was fo rmed at the beginning of the 20th century to secure parliamentary representation for organised worke rs. It was followed – as result of the First World War and the Russian revolution – by the establishment of Britain's Communist Party in 1920.

These were not fundamentally separate processes. Indeed, it took years before the right wing was fi n a l ly able to exclude Communists from the Labour Party. And it is worth remembering that at Labour's most triumphant moment – the 1945 election landslide at the end of the Second World War – a motion moved by the AEU, the engineering worke rs union, for the reaffiliation of the Communist Party was only narrowly defeated.

It is a fact of history that when the Communist Party is at its strongest and most influential, so the left and the labour movement in B ritain make real advances.

In all the big battles fought by the working class against mass unemployment and fascism, for decent housing, better wages and conditions, for equal pay for women, against anti-union laws and racism, against imperialist war and in solidarity with oppressed peoples – the Communist Party has been there in the front line.

No wonder the bosses and their mass media have kept up their antiCommunist propaganda for more than 80 years!

Britain’s Communists have fought back in the battle of ideas, through the Daily Worker and then the Morning Star, through many other publications and political education schools, helping to produce g e n e rations of working class activists and leaders.

As the Marxist party of the Britain's labour movement, the communists uphold the principles of working class solidarity, militant struggle and the need to integrate battles for immediate gains into a s t rategy for socialist revolution.

A militant mass movement outside parliament, producing a left government of Labour, socialist and Communist MPs, can open the way to a fundamentally better, fairer and more peaceful society.

In line with that programme defeating the New Labour cuckoos in the Labour Party nest is essential. But that will only come about as the result of unity across the trade union movement and the left, and clarity in support of a left-wing programme.

Strengthening the Communist Party means strengthening the labour movement and the prospects for unity. In all the causes which unite us – for peace and better pensions, for manufacturing and public ownership, for the Charter for Women, for solidarity with Cuba and Palestine – a stronger Communist Party is vital.You can help strengthen the working class movement in the most effective way, by joining the communists. If not you, who? If not now, when?

I want to join Britain’s communists name

Hear CND chair Kate Hudson and others Old Ship Hotel 6pm Wednesday 20 June Chair Anita Halpin Morning Star Management Committee

address post code phone e mail return to Communist Party Ruskin House 23 Coombe Road Croydon CRO 1BD office@communist-party. o rg.uk

No new Trident!

vents surrounding the nomination and coronation of Gordon Brown did not show our union in a good light.The support in our ranks for John McDonnell was based on his record of backing many of our union's policies – most of which were also the policies of the annual Labour Party conference. But our section's Executive failed to back him because he was unlikely to get enough nominations from Labour MPs to put him onto the ballot paper.

That's a bit thin. A self-fulfilling prophecy, as it turned out, with McDonnell eventually receiving only 29 of the 45 signatures needed to ensure an election for the leadership.

Our union's joint Executives could have put pressure on the hundreds of MPs in our parliamentary groups to nominate the only candidate who supported Amicus and T&G policies.

After all, those MPs are happy enough to take our money. And as if that was not bad enough, our Executive then urged support for Gordon Brown, whose axis with Blair and the Bank of England has destroyed 1,300,000 manufacturing jobs in Britain since 1997.

Far from Brown opposing any of New Labour's worst policies such privatisation, PFI and the war against Iraq, he has spent billions of pounds of public money on all of them.

Support for him on the grounds that he will talk to us is nonsense. He talks far more often to employers and financial fat cats in the City of London and New York. Worse, they get much more out of him than we do – and they can't even nominate him for Labour Party leader!

It was even argued in our union that not having a leadership ballot would save money on postage. But there will be a postal ballot for deputy leader anyway, and two ballot forms could have gone into the same envelope.

Our members are being recommended to vote for Jon Cruddas, who is the best of a bad bunch.

When Blair was elected back in 1997, the Communist Party warned the labour movement about his right-wing policies. Many union leaders said we would be proved wrong. We were told that once Tony got his feet under the tabl e, he would show us how good he was.

That line was peddled in 2001 about a 'radical second term ' . Now the same is being claimed fo r Brown.

Well, here's the first test: will prime minister Brown reverse the pay cuts planned for our union's members in health and public services? But then, it was chancellor Brown who first proposed them.

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New research has exploded the myths about the number of jobs which depend on our Trident submarines.

Claims that over 11,000 jobs would be lost are a gross exaggeration.

Renewing Trident will actually cost vital jobs!

The actual number of civilian direct and indirect jobs in Scotland dependent on Trident is only 1259. These jobs would not disappear for at least 15 years.

According to defence minister Des Brow n e thetotal number of direct Scottish civilian jobs which are dependent on Trident is 859 and indirect jobs 25.

The Executive's opposition 'in principle' to a replacement of Trident is welcome.

But the last paragraph of the NEC statement means that unless the gove rnment finds altern a t i ve jobs, our union wo u l d be stuck with supporting replacement at a cost of £76 billion.

Yet this is based on a wrong estimate of 11,000 jobs lost if there is no new generation of nuclear weapons after Trident expires.

The Scottish TUC has commissioned research into the implications of not replacing Trident. By far the biggest impact would be felt in Scotland.

Their research showed that the winding down of Britain's weapons of mass destruction would result in no more than 850 direct and 400 indirect job losses. Altern a t i ve, permanent

and high-paid work could be found for these worke rs for a fraction of £65 billion.

There are many uses for our engineering skills in the energy sector, for example. Developing clean coal and wave and wind power would easily create 1,500 jobs.

For these reasons, the Scottish TUC took the principled decision to oppose any replacement for Trident. With no 'get-out' clause based on progove rnment, pro-NATO and pro-US foreign policy propaganda about job losses.

Delegates should consider supporting the London motion which calls for £65billion to be spent on re-training and sociallyuseful production which would include energy, health, education, h o u s e - building and environemntal services.

This would benefit our members and the people of Britain, instead of threatening other peoples with mass extermination.

Communist University of Britain 2007 'a weekend of discussions, debates, rallies, food, and drink and music with leading national and international speakers from the labour and anti-imperialist movements Friday October 26 7pm 90 years of the October revolution Rally organised by the Co-ordinating Committee of Communist Parties in Britain Saturday October 27 ‘Insatiable, inequitable, inhumane: the crimes of capitalism’ ★ From slavery to neo-colonialism ★ Anti-communism ★ Imperialism and the drive to war ★ Exploitation, boom and slump ★ Fascism yesterday and today ★ C apitalism vs women Global future or globalised disaster? ★ Public ownership or private profit? ★ Environmental security ★ Free capital and flexible labour Saturday evening Celebrating Che Cuban speaker. Film. Music Sunday October 28 Marxism and revolution in the 21st century ★ Women, race and class ★ A Scottish Road to Socialism? ★ Trade unions vs. transnational capital Reforms and revolutions: which way forward? contact the Communist Party Ruskin House 23 Coombe Road Croydon CR0 1BD office@communist-party.org.uk www.communist-party.org.uk 0208 686 1659