ISSN 1758-5708 Corresponden SSooThcce iialist Autumnt 2017 · nor for his general “alt-right”...

Grenfell Tower tragedy

Issue Number 29

www.thesocialistcorrespondent.org.uk

ISSN 1758-5708

SocialistTheTheSocialistCorrespondentCorrespondentIssue Number 29

Autumn 2017

£2.00

Autumn 2017

nDemonisation as USprepares for war - page 4

nQatar - Yemen - SyriaIraq - Palestine pages 7 to 14

nUS sanctions:trade war orworse? - page 5

nLatin Americapage 28

nCuba’s resilient working class - page 31

n Ten Days that Shook the World - page 34

n Grenfell Tower tragedy page 15

nMay miscalculates.Corbyn succeeds.Election analysis pages 18 to 27

ContentsISSUE NO. 29 AUTUMN 2017

2 The Socialist Correspondent Autumn 2017

May miscalculatesCorbyn succeedsSCOTT McDONALD

Page 18

Labour catches the mood in LondonBRIAN DURRANS

Page 19

Why Labour lost 5 seats in N. EnglandSCOTT McDONALD

2

Mansfield and NE Derbyshire analysisANNIE PARKIN

Page 23

In Scotland Labour begins to recoverFRIEDA PARK

Page 25

How Corbyn cut throughJAMES STEWART

Page 27

Letter from troubled Latin AmericaDAN MORGAN

Page 28

Cuba’s resilient working classBook Review by GINA NICHOLSON

Page 31

Ten Days that Shook the WorldBook Review by FRIEDA PARK

Page 34

Discussion, debate and authors’ opinions: To encourage the broadest possible discussion and debate around the aims of exposing capitalism and promoting socialism, we hope our readers appreciate that not all the opinions expressed by individual authors are necessarily those of The Socialist Correspondent.

Demonisation as US prepares for warALEX DAVIDSON

Page 4

US sanctions: trade war or much worse?ALEX DAVIDSON

Page 5

Qatar exposes limit of Saudi powerSIMON KORNER

Page 7

Yemen devastation backed by US & UKJOHN MOORE

Page 9

Syria success has forced US to retreatSIMON KORNER

Page 10

Fragmenting Iraq is the US strategyJOHN MOORE

Page 11

Palestinian hunger strike victoryBRIAN DURRANS

Page 13

Grenfell Towerresidents ignoredPAT TURNBULL

Page 15Pictures: Unless otherwise stated all pictures are courtesy of Commons Wikimedia. Some of these will be attributed to an individualphotographer. This does not mean that these individuals agree with theopinions expressed by individual authors or The Socialist Correspondent.Further information: http://commons.wikimedia.org

Autumn 2017 The Socialist Correspondent 3

SocialistCorrespondent

has continuously inflicted war fordecades on peaceable countries in everycontinent. .

Former NatoSupreme Allied Com-mander Europe, Ad-miral James Stavridis,stated that “There isnothing irrationalabout Kim Jong-un’s(pictured) behaviouras he has seen whathappened to Saddamand Gadaffi.”

The North Koreans have good rea-son to feel threatened, after all theircountry and people suffered abom-inably from the US military during theKorean War, as the US prolonged thatwar in an attempt to take more ground.

Sanctions against RussiaThe US has increased its sanctionsagainst Russia and in so doing hasupset its allies in western Europe, no-tably Germany, as is outlined in the ar-ticle, “US sanctions: trade war or muchworse?”

Inter-capitalist rivalries have come tothe fore in the aftermath of the ColdWar. The US is now supplying lique-fied natural gas to countries in easternEurope in an effort to supplant Russiangas and undermine Germany’s controlof the EU.

The US sanctions against Russia willaffect European companies involved inthe Nord Stream pipeline projectbringing Russian gas to Europe.

This has upset the Germans, Austri-ans and others with the Foreign Minis-ters of these countries arguing that it“impacts European-American relationsin a new and very negative way.”

British General ElectionThe recent British General Election isanalysed in some depth by a variety ofarticles covering different parts of thecountry.

Theresa May thought she could calla snap General Election, while Labour

The To contact The Socialist Correspondent

email the editor: editor@thesocialistcorrespondent.org.ukwww.thesocialistcorrespondent.org.uk

CommentaryWarIt was once argued by supporters ofthe West that with the end of theCold War and the defeat of the SovietUnion, the world would be a saferplace. It doesn’t look that way now.

There are numerous wars in theMiddle East, led or supported by theUnited States with Britain participat-ing.

Yemen, Syria, Iraq are some of thecountries devastated by war, coveredin articles in this issue by SimonKorner and John Moore.

John Moore describes the SaudiArabian war in Yemen as a “humani-tarian disaster” with famine and anenormous cholera epidemic.

The Saudis military hardware caus-ing much of the devastation is British.

Iraq is being fragmented followingthe US-led war in that country and

Libya is accepted asa “failed state” afterthe disastrous Bush-Blair war.

The West contin-ues its support foranybody who isfighting PresidentAssad (pictured) inSyria although so farthey have failed toremove him as

Simon Korner explains in his article“Syria success forces US to retreat”.

Israel and Saudi Arabia continue topress for the US to take militaryaction against Iran.

KoreaThe Korean peninsula is anotherpowder keg and in the article,“Demonisation as US prepares forwar”, Alex Davidson outlines theUnited States aggressive joint militaryexercises with South Korea, its manymilitary bases in the region, and itsinstallation of the Thaad missile first-strike system.

Trump’s belligerence against NorthKorea has ratcheted up the prospectsof war in that part of the world.

While North Korea is criticised andsanctioned for testing ballistic missilesas self-defence against the hostile mil-itary presence in an arc around it,there is a need to point out thatNorth Korea has never attacked any-one, unlike the United States, which

was on the back foot,and return to Down-ing Street with alandslide.

However, she mis-calculated and is nowa lame duck PrimeMinister with JeremyCorbyn (pictured) in

his strongest position since hebecame Leader of the Labour Party.

Grenfell TowerThe tragedy of the Grenfell Towerfire was the culmination of years ofde-regulation, privatisation, cuts andthe criminal neglect of housing forthe majority of people in Britain.

Pat Turnbull writes about how theGrenfell Tower residents’ concernsabout safety were ignored for years.

She illustrates how de-regulation,privatisation and the pursuit of profitled to this and previous tragedies.

The Socialist Correspondent’snew websiteWe are delighted to announce thelaunch of our new website. It con-tains all the back issues in PDFformat, and individual articles fromeach edition. You can pay your sub-scription, search the site and sharearticles on social media.

The archive of political analysisover the last 10 years is impressive:www.thesocialistcorrespondent.org.uk


Demonisation as US prepares for war

Demonisation as USprepares for war

Korea is what makes the North Koreansunderstandably anxious.

The US-South Korea joint militarymanoeuvres, called Ulichi-FreedomGuardian, involve some 80,000 troops;include the Michigan, a submarine withTomahawk cruise missiles docked inSouth Korea’s port of Busan; and work

began on Thaad.(3)

Thaad is a first-strike weapon that canreach China. As well as Chinese andRussian opposition there is considerableopposition in South Korea to thedeployment of Thaad as it is seen as anoffensive weapon, despite its name, andratches up the possibility of war.

The North Koreans also see whathappened to Saddam Hussein andColonel Gadaafi. As former NatoSupreme Allied Commander in Europe(2009-2013), Admiral James Stavridis,commented, “There is nothing irrationalabout Kim Jong-un’s behaviour as hehas seen what happened to Saddam andGadaffi.”

Saddam and Gadaffi were also de-monised before the US wars werelaunched to effect regime-change. TheNorth Koreans have similarly been de-

Some 64 years ago during the KoreanWar the United States, using the fig leafof the United Nations, considered theuse of nuclear weapons against NorthKorea and General McArthur wanted toturn it into full-scale war against China.

During the lengthy Panmunjom“peace” talks the American side keptchanging their negotiating posi-tions because they wanted togain more ground before com-ing to a settlement.

For two years they lied abouttheir intentions and kept thewestern mainstream media in thedark. It was only through the re-portage of journalists, Alan Win-nington of the Daily Worker andCe Soir’s Wilfred Burchett, thatthe truth eventually became known.(1)

In his study of war correspondents,The First Casualty, Philip Knightley,wrote that "in Korea, the truth was thatBurchett and Winnington were a bettersource of news than the UN informa-tion officers, and if the allied reportersdid not see them they risked beingbeaten on stories".(2)

One result of this was that the BritishCabinet discussed what they regarded astreasonous behaviour by Winnington andhe may well have faced the gallows.Eventually the British authorities decidedto withdraw his passport and he couldn’treturn to Britain.

North Korea emerged from the warinto a living nightmare after three yearsof “rain and ruin” by the US Air Force.Pyongyang had been razed to theground with the US Air Force stating inofficial documents that the North’s citiessuffered greater damage than Germanand Japanese cities firebombed duringWorld War 11.

The historical and duplicitous behav-iour of the Americans along with theircurrent aggressive war manoeuvres andhuge arc of armaments around North

monised over many years, by selectivenews coverage and vilification, to pre-pare the people of the west for war onKorea.

When China and Russia did not vetothe UN Security Council resolution onsanctions against North Korea presum-ably it was because they thought itwould help to keep the peace. Instead ofwhich, before the ink was dry on thepaper, and increased sanctions had timeto take effect, Trump ramped up therhetoric with his “fire and fury”. How-ever, it may well be more than rhetoric.

When German Chancellor AngelaMerkel called for a temperingof language she expressed whatmany people know: you cantalk yourself into war.

White House Chief Strategist,Steve Bannon, was relieved ofhis post by Trump in a furtherexample of the Trump’s admin-istration’s blood-letting. Bannonwasn’t dismissed for his viewson Charlotteville because on

that he supported Trump’s statementsnor for his general “alt-right” views.

However, he did say that there was“no military solution” for North Korea’snuclear threats and dubbed the tensionswith Pyongyang as a “sideshow” com-pared to the importance of what hecalled the “economic war with China”.

Bannon’s view was rebuffed by Sec-retary of State Rex Tillerson and De-fense Secretary Jim Mattis and next dayBannon was out.

United States President, Donald Trump’s belligerent rhetoricand his threat of nuclear war on North Korea cannot bedismissed as just another crazy tweet.

By ALEX DAVIDSON

FOOTNOTES1. See Winnington A., Breakfast withMao: Memoirs of a Foreign Corre-spondent, Lawrence and Wishart, Lon-don, 1986; and Winnington A., I Sawthe Truth in Korea, 1950; Burchett W.,At the Barricades: the Memoirs of aRebel Journalist.2. Knightly P., The First Casualty: theWar Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from Crimea to Kosovo, p 388,Prion, London, 2000. 3. Thaad stands for Terminal HighAltitude Defence System but is widelyregarded as an offensive system.

nUS soldiers capture SaddamHussein who was executed in 2006.

nMuammar Gaddafi was murdered by US-supported

rebels in 2011.nKim Jong-un. Is he the

USA’s next demonised target?


US Sanctions: trade war or much worse?

and further divided the EU.The bill steps up sanctions against

Russia over its involvement in the warsin Ukraine and Syria as well as allega-tions it interfered in the 2016 US Pres-idential election.

However, the EU has warned that thismay cause upheaval in Europe’s energymarket as the new sanctions target anycompany that contributes to the devel-opment, maintenance or modernisationof Russia’s export gas pipeline, knownas Nord Stream.

The day after the Senate voted over-whelmingly(2) to impose new sanctionsagainst Russia, Germany and Austria -two of Russia's biggest energy clients inEurope - strongly criticised the latestU.S. sanctions, saying they could affectEuropean businesses involved in pipingRussian natural gas via the Nord Streampipeline.

He did so grudgingly over the Russiansanctions, indicating the deep divisionsbetween the White House and Con-gress.

In his signing statement to the bill hewrote, “I have expressed my concernsto Congress about the many ways it im-properly encroaches on Executivepower, disadvantages American compa-nies, and hurts the interests of ourEuropean allies…the bill remains seri-ously flawed - particularly because itencroaches on the executive branch’sauthority to negotiate.

“Congress could not even negotiate ahealthcare bill after seven years of talk-ing. By limiting the Executive’s flexibil-ity, this bill makes it harder for theUnited States to strike good deals for theAmerican people, and will drive China,Russia, and North Korea much closertogether.”(1)

The Russian PrimeMinister, DmitryMedvedev, called the sanc-tions tantamount to a“full-scale trade war”. Headded, “The hope that ourrelations with the newAmerican administrationwould improve is fin-ished.”

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’sForeign Minister said in astatement that while Rus-sia has been doing “every-thing possible” to improvethe relationship with theUS, “recent events showedthat US policy was in thehands of Russophobicforces, pushing Washing-ton to the path of con-frontation.”

The United States uni-lateral increase in sanctionsagainst Russia has put itinto serious conflict withGermany as well as Russia

The Nord Stream pipeline carries nat-ural gas from Vyborg in Russia to Grief-swald in Germany under the Baltic Sea.The first pipeline was officially inaugu-rated on 8 November 2011 by GermanChancellor Merkel, Russian PresidentMedvedev, French Prime MinisterFrancois Fillon and Dutch Prime Min-ister, Mark Rutte.

The pipeline, 759 miles in length isthe longest sub-sea pipeline in the worldand has a capacity to carry 55 billioncubic metres of natural gas.

Nord Stream AG shareholders are theRussian company Gazprom (51%), theGerman companies E.ON (15.5%) andWintershall (15.5%), the Dutch com-pany Gasunie (9%) and the Frenchcompany Engie (9%).

The Chair of Nord Stream’s Board isGerhard Schroder, former GermanChancellor (1998-2005).

Nord Stream 2 will double the capac-ity to 110 billion cubic metres and isscheduled to come into operation in late2019.

Nord Stream AG signed a financingagreement for the Nord Stream 2

pipeline project with theGerman companyUNIPER, the Austriancompany OMV, RoyalDutch Shell, the Germancompany Wintershall andthe French companyEngie.

Germany and Austriacondemn US sanctionsIn a joint statement (15June 2017) Austria'sChancellor, ChristianKern and Germany's For-eign Minister, SigmarGabriel said: “It is in thecommon interest of theEU and the US to takeresolute and unified actionwith a view to resolvingthe conflict in Ukraine.

“We cannot, however,accept the threat of illegalextraterritorial sanctionsbeing imposed on Euro-pean companies that are

Donald Trump signed into law new sanctions against Russia,Iran and North Korea on 2 August 2017.

By ALEX DAVIDSON

US sanctions: tradewar or much worse?

Nov. 2011: Nord Stream opening ceremony (left to right, handson table) France’s Francois Fillon; Germany’s Angela Merkel;

Holland’s Mark Rutte and Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev.


US sanctions: trade war or much worse?

participating in efforts toexpand Europe’s energysupply network!

“The draft bill of theUS is surprisingly can-did about what is actu-ally at stake, namelyselling American lique-fied natural gas andending the supply ofRussian natural gas tothe European market.

“The bill aims to pro-tect US jobs in the nat-ural gas and petroleumindustries. Political sanc-tions should not in anyway be tied to economicinterests. Threatening to impose penal-ties on companies in Germany, Austriaand other European countries with re-gard to their business in the UnitedStates if they participate in, or fund, nat-ural gas projects involving Russia, suchas Nord Stream 2, impacts European-American relations in a new and verynegative way.

“This is about the competitiveness ofour energy-intensive industries, andabout thousands of jobs. Europe’s energysupply network is Europe’s affair, notthat of the United States of America!

“We decide who supplies us with en-ergy, and how they do it, and we do sobased on transparency and on free mar-ket principles.

“It would not only be highly regret-table, but would also diminish the effec-tiveness of our stance on the conflict inUkraine, if we were to no longer takejoint action, and if completely separateinterests were to prevail, such as theUS’s economic pursuits in the field ofgas exports.

“Foreign policy interests must in noway be linked to economic interests! Thereis still enough time, and opportunity, toprevent this!” (3)

In the joint statement there are nofewer than four exclamation points un-derlining the sharpness of the Ger-man/Austrian opposition. Three of themare worth repeating:

1. “We cannot accept the threat of il-legal extraterritorial sanctions being im-posed on European companies that areparticipating in efforts to expand Eu-rope’s energy supply network!”

2. “Europe’s energy supply network isEurope’s affair, not that of the UnitedStates of America!”

3. “Foreign policy interests must in noway be linked to economic interests!There is still enough time, and opportu-nity, to prevent this!”

German Chancellor Angela Merkelbacked up the joint statement and Jean-

Claude Juncker, President of the Euro-pean Commission, said “We will respondwith counter-measures if need be, hop-ing that this is not actually necessary. Weare willing to take up arms if need be.”

Cecilia Malmstrom, EU Trade Com-missioner, warned of a challenge in theWorld Trade Organisation (WTO), say-ing, “if global trade rules are not upheldthe EU will retaliate.” A similar challengeled to the roll-back of tariffs imposed byUS President George W Bush in 2002.

The aim of the US sanctions is toblock Russian gas supplies to Europe inorder to sell shale gas from the UnitedStates.

Ukraine The Nord Stream pipeline bypassescountries like Ukraine, Poland and theBaltic States. 9 EU countries signed aletter criticising the project.(4)

Ukraine, in particular, fears the loss oftransit revenue if Russian gas suppliesdon't pass through their territory any-more once the new pipeline is built.

Lithuania’s state-owned gas traderLietuvos DUJU Tiekimas (LDT)signed a deal in May 2017 to buy lique-fied natural gas (LNG) directly from theUnited States for the first time and ex-pects to receive a delivery in the secondhalf of August.

The deal is with a unit of CheniereEnergy and is part of Lithuania's effortsto diversify its gas suppliers and reduceits reliance on Russia's Gazprom.

LDT, part of state-owned energygroup Lietuvos Energija, signed a deallast year with Koch Supply & Tradingfor LNG supplies throughout 2017.

The LNG terminal at the Klaipedaport broke Russia's Gazprom gas supplymonopoly in the Baltic States when itcame online in 2014 and now providesLithuania with roughly half of its gas.Gazprom supplies the rest.

State-run Polish gas firm PGNiG re-ceived its first U.S. spot delivery of LNG

from Cheniere Energyin June 2017.

Croatia is planning tocomplete the buildingof an LNG terminal in2019.Three Seas Summit12 countries(5) border-ing the Baltic, Blackand Adriatic seasformed a consortium,dubbed the “ThreeSeas Initiative”, in 2016to develop regional in-frastructure, trade andenergy projects.

On 6 July 2017 asummit of the presi-

dents of the countries involved gatheredin Warsaw, hosted jointly by Poland andCroatia.

The Three Seas Initiative is seen as aPolish bid to carve out influence outsidethe European Union with which the na-tionalist government has repeatedlyclashed.

US President Trump visited Polandfor one day - en route to the G20 sum-mit in Hamburg, Germany - to take partin the “Three Seas Summit” of leadersfrom central Europe, Baltic states andthe Balkans. The summit was movedfrom its original location in south west-ern Poland to Warsaw to accommodateTrump’s attendance.

At the “Three Seas Summit” Trumppromoted U.S. natural gas exports to theleaders from central and eastern Europe,a region currently heavily reliant onRussian supplies.

The following is an extract from Pres-ident Trump’s address to the summit:“We're here at this historic gathering tolaunch a new future for open, fair, andaffordable energy markets that bringgreater security and prosperity to all ofour citizens. We are sitting on massiveenergy and we are now exporters of en-ergy. So, if one of you need energy, justgive us a call.

“On behalf of the American people, letme say that we stand with the ThreeSeas nations. Beautiful nations, by theway. Beautiful country. We support yourdrive for greater prosperity and security.We applaud your initiative to expand in-frastructure. We welcome this historicopportunity to deepen our economicpartnership with your region.

“I congratulate your nations foralready beginning the critical projectsthat open us up to greater access, andyou'll be totally open and have access toenergy markets and remove barriers toenergy trade, such as the floating LNG

Ukraine

Continued on page 8


Qatar exposes limit of Saudi power

ful regional player directly into the con-flict, with Turkish troops stationed inQatar posing a further obstacle to Saudidomination.

The Saudi demand that Qatar stopfunding terrorists is widely regarded ashypocritical. Both countries fund IS, alQaeda and the Taliban.

Qatar’s foreign minister admitted in2012 that he was ‘very much against ex-cluding anyone’ among the Islamist ter-rorist groups from funding by hiscountry.

Saudi Arabia has spent £3.1 billion forthe promulgation of Wahabist ideologyin the UK and elsewhere, according torightwing British think-tank the HenryJackson Society.

Historian Mark Curtis comments:“The British elite is perfectly aware ofthe insidious role that Saudi Arabia playsin fomenting terrorism.”

Indeed, leaked documents published inthe Egyptian Al-Badil newspaper re-cently revealed direct Saudi (and UAE)ruling family support for terroristgroups.

A report into Saudi terror links wasblocked in mid-July by Theresa May forreasons of ‘national security’ - in otherwords, protecting the huge arms tradewith Saudi Arabia which takes 83% oftotal UK arms exports.

Saudi anger with Qatar arises, then,not from Qatari support for terrorgroups as such, but for backing thewrong kind - the Muslim Brotherhood,as well as Shia militants in eastern SaudiArabia and Bahrain, and Hizbollah inLebanon.

Trump’s roleThe trigger for the crisis came duringTrump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May, inwhich he wholeheartedly endorsed theregime and branded Iran a threat topeace.

His aim is to create an ‘Arab Nato’ ledby Riyadh, based on the GCC’s armedentity, the Peninsula Shield Force. ASaudi-led Arab military alliance wouldcrush all non-compliance with imperial-ism in the region: Iran, Hamas, Hizbol-lah, the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, andany signs of democratic struggle.

At issue are Qatar’s growing economicand military ties with Iran - a countrythat stands in the way of Saudi, Israeliand thus US, hegemony in the Gulf.

The Saudi demands were for Qatar tofollow Saudi policy in every sphere.This meant cutting diplomatic ties withIran and expelling the RevolutionaryGuards with whom it co-operates, aswell as stopping Qatari-Iranian co-oper-ation in the shared North Dome/SouthPars energy fields.

Other demands sought the shuttingdown of the Turkish military base inQatar, an end to support for the MuslimBrotherhood and terrorist groups suchas IS and al Qaeda, and the closure ofAl Jazeera, which is a disproportionatelypowerful mouthpiece for Qatari foreignpolicy.

Most commentators regarded thesedemands as unrealistic and a provoca-tion. The air, land and sea blockade ofQatar’s food imports, half of which nor-mally come through Saudi Arabia, hasbeen circumvented by flights throughIranian airspace.

More difficult for Qatar have been theeconomic sanctions causing damage toits banks, airlines and media, such as AlJazeera.

By late July, after US attempts to de-fuse the crisis had failed, a spate of USmedia stories embarrassing the Saudisforced them to reduce their demands tosix watered down ‘principles’. The clo-sure of Al Jazeera is no longer on the listbut the blockade remains in force.

BackgroundQatar’s discussions with Iran overenergy began after Russia’s militaryintervention in Syria, which changed thebalance of forces in the war.

The negotiations were for a new gas


pipeline to run from Qatar’s massiveGulf Pars energy fields through Iran,Iraq and Syria to Europe – known as the‘Friendship pipeline’.

This pipeline would replace an earlierSaudi plan for piping Qatari natural gasthrough Saudi Arabia and a fragmentedSyria to Turkey. Qatar, which had ear-lier made a $3 billion contribution to the

war against the Syrian government,adapted its foreign policy when itbecame clear that western-backed forceswould be unable to topple Assad.

The success of the ‘Friendshippipeline’ would represent a significantweakening of Saudi power, as well as awider threat to western energy control.Hence the Saudi attempt to disrupt it.

The Saudis are also concerned at thereach of Qatari power through its sup-port for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Despite the Muslim Brotherhood’sreactionary politics, its youthful massbase in Egypt and Gaza poses a threatto both the absolute monarchies of theGulf and Sisi.

The Muslim Brotherhood connectionextends to Turkey, bringing that power-

The summer 2017 blockade against Qatar - led by SaudiArabia, and backed by United Arab Emirates, Bahrain andEgypt - has exposed the limits of Saudi power to control therivalrous Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) after weeks ofwarlike rhetoric.

By SIMON KORNER

May 2017: Qatar Emir, Tamin binHamad Al Thani with Donald Trump.



Though Trump appears to have en-couraged the Saudi aggression againstQatar, White House policy is being di-luted by the US state department.

Qatar has the second-largest US mili-tary presence in the Gulf, including itscommand center for Syrian action.Many US air raids leave from the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and the US hasrecently sold Qatar $12 billion worth ofF-15 fighters.

At the same time, US arms sales to theSaudis worth $100bn show its clearintention to promote a major regionalgendarme. But Qatar’s refusal to cave into Saudi threats has led to a messy stale-mate. Hence Rex Tillerson’s visit toQatar again in July - ostensibly to agreecollective counter-terrorism measures,but really to try to restore order.

However, Qatar’s upstart foreign pol-icy against Saudi Arabia’s bullying can-not easily be negotiated away. And theousting of the CIA’s preferred Saudileader Mohamed bin Nayef - who op-posed the Qatar blockade - by hotheadcrown prince Mohamed bin Salman sug-gests increased instability ahead. Wider causes of the conflictThere is a wider aspect to the crisis, ac-cording to commentator Pepe Escobar,who points to Qatar’s natural gas exportsto China and the fact that these will soonbe paid for in Remnimbi not dollars,threatening US petrodollar domination.

The US takes dollar dominance veryseriously. Part of its animosity towardsGadaffi, according to a Wikileaks emailfrom Hillary Clinton’s adviser Sid Blu-mental to his boss in April 2011, derived

from the fact that Gadaffi was initiatinga Pan-Arab bank with Tunisia’s Ben Aliand Egypt’s Mubarak, with the aim ofestablishing an Arab gold dinar andbeing paid for oil exports in it ratherthan dollars.

This, along with France’s push to con-trol Libyan oil, became a threat to USinfluence. In the same way, the Qatarconflict can be seen as part of large-power rivalries.

With 35% of all shipped oil passingthrough the Straits of Hormuz to Chinaand the Far East, if the US can controlQatar and the chokepoints of Suez andthe Straits of Hormuz, it can squeezeChina - and by extension other Gulf en-ergy users like Russia and Europe too.

This explains the recent naval exer-cises in the Straits by the Chinese andIranian navies, part of the growing close-ness between Iran and China - with Iransoon to become a full member of theShanghai Co-operation Organisation (arival to US economic supremacy) and astrategic participant in China’s New SilkRoad project.

The outlookSaudi threats against Qatar have failed,in the face of Qatari intransigence andUS state department disquiet.

A Saudi war with Qatar was neververy likely, given the presence of US andTurkish troops on Qatari soil, andQatar’s own massive arms stocks, in-cluding British weapons worth £120million in a deal signed two years ago -as well as Qatar’s growing ties with Iran,Turkey and Iraq.

Overall, Saudi regional leadership hasbeen weakened by the blockade, withKuwait and Oman breaking ranks tourge restraint and refusing to expel Qatarfrom the GCC.

The new Saudi crown prince, thehawk in charge of its failing war inYemen and probably behind the terroristbombing of Teheran, represents an un-reliable partner for US policy, which it-self is strategically unclear.

Given this Saudi incompetence, thewider threat of a Saudi war on Iran isalso currently unlikely - with the Saudimilitary bogged down in Yemen. Notthat this precludes such a war breakingout through an accident or mistake.

As for Trump’s election pledge to tearup Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,he has so far not done so. His equivo-cation reveals US isolation.

Europe is seeking rapprochement withIran - France’s Total, for instance, has justsigned a $4.8 billion deal with Iran for nat-ural gas. China and Russia support Irantoo. Thus, US options are limited.

By encouraging the Saudis to threatenQatar, Trump hoped at least to rein inthe latter and limit its autonomouspolicy. But his bid to strengthen Saudileadership of the region has backfired,pushing Qatar closer to Iran.

The GCC, formed in 1981 as acounter to Iran, is unlikely to recover.As the individual GCC powers increas-ingly seek advantage for themselves, co-operation will turn to antagonism. Withno choice but to continue dividing andruling the Middle East, the US is creat-ing problems it cannot control.

terminal on the Croatian island of Krk. “Did you ever hear of that? Right?

Huh? You know all about that. I bet youknow all about it. And the Greece-Bul-garia Interconnector.

“These projects and many others arecrucial to ensuring that your nationscontinue to diversify your energysources, suppliers, and routes. I also ap-plaud Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, andAustria for pursuing a pipeline from theBlack Sea. The United States is proud tosee that our abundant energy resourcesare already helping the Three Seas Na-tions achieve much needed energy di-versification. In fact, I want to take thisopportunity to congratulate the govern-ment and people of Poland for receivingtheir first shipment of U.S. liquefied nat-

ural gas last month. And you made avery good deal, I understand.

“America will be a faithful and de-pendable partner in the export and saleof our high-quality and low-cost energyresources and technologies. We make thebest technology and we make the best,best technology for fighter jets and shipsand equipment, military weapons.

“There's nobody even close, and that'sacknowledged. All over the world theytalk about the greatness of our militaryequipment. Nobody comes close. Sowhen you buy and as you buy militaryequipment, hopefully you'll be thinkingonly of the United States.”(6)

US sanctions: trade war or much worse?Continued from page 6

FOOTNOTES1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/08/02/statement-president-donald-j-trump-signing-count

ering-americas2. The vote in the Senate was 98-2.Democrat Bernie Sanders and Repub-lican Rand Paul were the two senatorsvoting against. 3. https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoser vice/Presse/Meldun-gen/2017/170615_Kern_Russ-land.html4. The EU countries are the Czech Re-public, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuaniaand Ukraine.5. The 12 countries are Poland, Hun-gary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Roma-nia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia,Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria..6. http://time.com/4846780/read-donald-trump-speech-warsaw-poland-transcript/


Yemen devastation backed by US & UK

The Saudi war on Yemen has beenraging for almost two and a half years.The mainly Shia Houthis still controlmost of the north of the country andhold the capital San’a – in spite of thekilling of many of their military leaders.

Supported by ex-president Saleh andby Iran, they are fighting several Saudi-backed forces grouped around the fig-urehead of another ex-president, Hadi,who is in exile in Riyadh. In broadterms, they represent part of the bloc –Iran, Hezbollah, Syria – standing in theway of imperialist control of the MiddleEast.

Meanwhile, the Saudi war coalition isin danger of breaking up. With the warhaving reached stalemate, the invadingcountries are pulling in different direc-tions. The UAE has used the conflict toinstall itself permanently in southernYemen, with plans to partition and ruleHadramaut province.

It has also switched support from Hadito Saleh, according to Intelligence On-line, putting itself at odds with theSaudis and Qatar, despite the latter hav-ing been excluded from the war coalitionin June. Oman, which has stayed out ofthe war, also opposes the UAE’s over-weening approach.

Meanwhile, Qatari support for theMuslim Brotherhood Islah party inYemen, as well as for the thriving AlQaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP),has fed into the wider Gulf quarrel be-tween Qatar and the Saudis (as well asthe UAE). Overall, the war has intensi-fied the splits within the GCC, whichmay never heal.

The lack of progress in the long andexpensive war represents a failure for theSaudis. The conflict is costing them$700 million a month. With the de-pressed price for oil, the effect on theSaudi economy is severe and recessionlooms.

The failure to win has also damagedSaudi credibility as a military power, andits war crimes, though under-reported,are nevertheless damaging its reputation.

The Saudi bid for dominance over theGulf is faltering. Its Yemen disaster - ontop of its failed blockade of Qatar - couldprove a turning point.

The conflict – which widened into a re-gional war when Saudi Arabia beganbombing Yemen in a reckless bid forhegemony in the Gulf – has left 18.8million out of Yemen's 28 million popu-lation in need of humanitarian assistance– in a country which is already the poor-est in the Arab world.

Millions of Yemenis face food andwater shortages. On July 12, UN fig-ures for those going hungry stood at 7million people, including 2.3 millionchildren “on the cusp of famine, vul-nerable to disease and ultimately at riskof a slow and painful death.” 500,000severely malnourished children areunder the age of five.

The main cause of the famine is theUS navy-led blockade of Yemeni ports,a war crime in which the British gov-ernment is complicit.

Famine, water shortages and poorsanitation have led to a cholera epidemic– over 332,600 cases to date, accordingto the World Health Organisation, with1,800 dead.

The International Committee of theRed Cross reports 7,000 new cases aday, making this the worst cholera out-break in the world. Predictions are thatthe disease will infect 600,000 by theend of the year.

Meanwhile, due to the war only 45%of Yemen’s hospitals are functioning,

So far the British government deniesany culpability for the destruction ofYemen, apart from an admission that “alimited number” of the British clusterbombs have been used in the war.

Yet British military personnel operatein the Saudi command centre, alongwith the CIA, for the purpose of select-ing bombing targets. Britain also selectstargets for the US-led drone pro-gramme.

This targeting is deliberately aimed athitting civilian centres – to the extent

Yemen devastationbacked by US & UK

that the British Ministry of Defence hastried to provide cover by running work-shops for the Saudis on “targeting guid-ance.”

Theresa May has defended the closelink between Britain and Saudi Arabia.On her visit to Riyadh this April, shesaid: “It is in our national interest to en-sure that the values that underpin us asBritons are values that we promotearound the world.”

The High Court supported the gov-ernment’s line. In July, it rejected aCampaign Against the Arms Trade casearguing that British-Saudi arms salesused against civilians are illegal.

But opposition to the Saudi war, andBritain’s role in it, is growing. Shadowinternational trade secretary Barry Gar-diner told parliament in July that indis-criminate bombing of civilians and thetargeting of food production amount towar crimes. 62% of British people nowoppose arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

And in the US, the Senate only nar-rowly agreed a sale of $510 millionguided weapons to the Saudis, against al-most unanimous Democrat opposition.

The Saudi war in Yemen is causing a humanitarian disaster.The Saudi bombardment of Yemen, with the support ofBritain and the US, has so far killed at least 10,000 civiliansand made 3 million homeless.

By JOHN MOORE

The main cause of the famineis the US navy-led blockade ofYemeni ports, a war crime inwhich the British governmentis complicit.

... British military personnel operate in the Saudi commandcentre, along with the CIA, forthe purpose of selecting bomb-ing targets. Britain also selects targets for the US-leddrone programme.


Syria success has forced US to retreat

cording to Andrew Tabler of the Wash-ington Institute for Near East Policy.

Commenting on the US switch awayfrom the Free Syrian Army, Russian for-eign minister, Lavrov, said: “I under-stand that the US supports many moregroups than the ones announced asbeing left without American weapons.”

The US is expanding its control of theoil and gas-rich desert in Syria’s south-east close to the Syrian border with Iraqand Jordan.

From its Special Forces base nearby,it has been directing its proxy militias –Maghawir al Tahwra and Shohada alQaratayn – to attack the Syrians advanc-ing on the border town of Tanf.

While these two terrorist groups havenow supposedly been instructed to fightIS only – as part of the shift in US ter-rorist policy – the latter group is never-theless continuing to attack governmentforces.

The US aim here has been to unite itssouthern terrorist fighters with the Kur-

dish fighters it controls to the north, soas to prevent a road link being estab-lished between Syria and Iraq, whichwould facilitate co-operation between thetwo countries, as well as with Iran.

Further north and west, the US isbombing IS in Raqqa to support its Kur-dish proxies in the YPG, the Syrian sis-ter organization of the Turkish PKK.Fighting under the US-imposed name

The war has cost over 450,000 lives andcreated 5 million refugees.

Advances made by the Syrian forcesand their allies have now liberated everymajor city and town in the country.The recapture of Aleppo proved a turn-ing point, forcing the US to reassess itsuse of Sunni militias under the guise ofthe Free Syria Army, which had failedto deliver.

The US has also failed to achieve its‘Salafist principality’ strategy, revealedin a leaked memorandum in 2012 – tocreate an Islamist statelet stretchingfrom Saudi Arabia, through part of Iraqand into eastern Syria.

As a sign of itschange of direction,the US agreed to aRussian deal in July,setting up Russian-supervised de-esca-lated safe zones invarious areas - thefirst in south-westSyria near the Jor-danian border - withUS and Jordaniansoldiers in control ofthe territory closestto the Israeli-occu-pied Golan Heights.

Other safe zoneswill be in Idlib, inthe north, under Turkish supervision,and in Ghouta, near Damascus, pa-trolled by Russian military police battal-ions and Iranian peacekeepers.

As part of the deal, Trump an-nounced plans to stop the huge CIAprogramme training Free Syrian Armyfighters - indistinguishable from alQaeda groups such as Ahrah al-Shamand Levant Conquest Front, who havekilled 100,000 Syrians according tosome estimates.

Syria success hasforced US to retreat

The training operation, known asTimber Sycamore, was carried out bythe Green Berets in Jordan and Turkey,with the CIA paying the fighters’ salaries.

Ilan Oldenburg of the Centre for aNew American Security describedTrump’s change of policy in Syria as a“nod to reality”. With US allies, such asTurkey and France, also softening theirstances, only the Saudis are still insistingno negotiations can begin until Assad isremoved.

But hawks in Washington have de-nounced Trump’s policy change as a USclimbdown.

John McCain, who has loudly sup-

ported the arming of anti-Assad terror-ists, said the US is playing into Putin’shands by agreeing to a deal.

Charles Lister of the Middle East In-stitute thinktank said: “We are fallinginto a Russian trap.” The ceasefire dealhas also been condemned by Israel.

The US has not given up on its over-all strategy of fracturing Syria, but isshifting ground to “areas outside gov-ernment control in Syria where the USwill want to maintain influence,” ac-

Syrian successes are producing a new reality with which theUS has to deal. Six years after the US-fomented demonstra-tions in southern Syria were quickly fanned into full-scalewar against the government, Syrian resilience has forced theUS to retreat from its regime-change strategy.

By SIMON KORNER

Continued on page 12

Donald Trump plansto stop CIA trainingFree Syrian Army

fighters.

Former US airforce pilot, Vietnam veteran andPoW, Republican Senator John McCain (right) in

Baghdad in 2007 with US Army Chief, General David Petraeus.

Syrian President

Bashar al-Assad


Fragmenting Iraq is the US strategy

as part of Operation Inherent Resolvewhich co-ordinated the battle for Mosul.

The US presence will seek to disruptthe influence of Iran - through thoseIraqi shi’ite militias which it arms andtrains - and the growing co-operation be-tween the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian gov-ernments, as well as feeding sectarianismacross Iraq.

Its presence in Iraq will also feed intoits Syria campaign, where its strategy ischanging due to Syrian army advances.

To this end it is moving troops to-wards al Anbar province on the Syriaborder, close to its proxy terrorist groupsand to IS – to block any future land-bridge between Syria and Iraq.

A third danger to Iraqi unity is Kur-dish secession. The referendum in IraqiKurdistan this September is likely to re-sult in a Yes vote, though it is unclearwhether the Kurdish leadership will usethe result to declare independence im-

mediately. A similar referendum in 2005 de-

livered a near unanimous Yes vote,and the results were then used toforce a change in the Iraqi constitu-tion to enshrine federalism.

The Baghdad government is notraising objections to the referendum,though prime minister Abadi criti-cized its timing and method.

Anxious to dispel rumours of anIraqi attack on the Kurdish RegionalGoverment (KRG) should it secede,defence minister al Hayali praisedthe KRG’s Peshmerga for co-oper-

ating with the Iraqis at the start of the at-tack on Mosul.

On the other hand, hardliners in Bagh-dad have threatened the expulsion ofKurds from Baghdad should Iraqi Kur-distan vote to separate.

The Kurdish side has made variousconcessions, hinting that they mayexclude Kirkuk from the referendum - acity within the Kurdish region but with amainly Turkmen population whichobjects to Kurdish domination.

Other concessions are a declarationthat a future Kurdistan would not bedefined by ethnicity following the Israelimodel.

Nevertheless, the dangers of a violent

In many ways, the challenges facing theIraqi government echo those faced bythe Syrians – the same western strategyof violent occupation stoking sectariantensions, with the result of a fragmentednation.

The victory in Mosul came at a hugecost in lives. 40,000 people were killedin the 9-month siege of Iraq’s second-largest city, according to Patrick Cock-burn in the Independent, citing figuresfrom Iraqi Kurdish intelligence.

UK-based monitoring group Airwarsestimate 5,805 civilians killed inairstrikes by the US-led coalition be-tween February 19 and June 19alone.

Russian foreign minister Lavrovsaid that “no conditions were createdto allow civilians to leave in an or-ganized way.”

An Amnesty International reportalso criticized the failure to protectcivilians and described the indiscrim-inate air strikes and artillery bom-bardment as “violations ofinternational law, some of which mayamount to war crimes.”

The media outcry over Aleppo wasnot matched when it came to Mosul-part of a concerted cover-up. Onlynow is the scale of the destruction be-coming clear. Lise Grande, UN Hu-manitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq,estimates emergency reconstructioncosts of over $1 billion.

The pressures on Iraq to fragment aremany. Small Wars journal, with links tothe US marines but with a maverickreputation, believes that the victory inMosul will lead to state failure on thescale of Libya. There are reasons totake the analysis seriously.

First, IS still holds large pockets ofterritory, in spite of the loss of its ‘capi-tal’ Mosul.

Many IS fighters were allowed by the

Fragmenting Iraq isthe US strategy

US to leave Mosul before the siege, withthe aim of reinforcing IS strongholds onthe border with Syria in al Anbarprovince, close to Syrian IS centres - inRaqqa and around Deir ez Zor.

By holding these strongholds, IS ispreventing Syrian government forcesfrom retaking Syrian territory up to theIraqi border.

This could explain the US rejection ofan Iraqi army plan - backed by the pro-government Iraqi shi’ite militias, thePopular Mobilisation Units (PMU) - toattack IS in this area before liberatingMosul.

IS also remains strong in a string oftowns along the Tigris river south ofMosul, and it also controls the city ofHawija, which is ruled by the new IS‘caliph’, al Obadi. Another IS strong-hold remains Tal Afar, to the west ofMosul, with about 1000 fighters.

Though IS has clearly been weakened,with a fall in new recruits, it will defendthe areas it holds fiercely, while turningincreasingly to guerilla tactics.

A second, and greater, danger to Iraqiterritorial integrity is the US presence it-self. The US plans to keep at least 5,200officially acknowledged soldiers in Iraq,

Iraq faces fragmentation based on sectarian divisions. Therecapture of Mosul from IS represents a major victory forthe Iraqi government, but major challenges stand in the wayof achieving a unitary Iraq.

By JOHN MOORE

November 2016 - Mosul


Fragmenting Iraq is the US strategy

Syria success has forced US to retreatContinued from page 10

rupture remain. And an independentIraqi Kurdistan could destabilize thewider region. Turkey, in spite of its co-operation with the KRG over oil pro-duction, has raised concerns. Iran, too,with a Kurdish minority could object,though so far it has refrained.

A fourth threat to unity is the scale ofsectarian divisions in the rest of Iraq.

After the US killed Saddam Hussein,the Sunni minority suffered discrimina-tion during the sectarian de-Baathifica-tion process conducted by then primeminister al Maliki, in favour of the Shi’itemajority.

Many Sunni Baathists turned to rebelgroups, including IS, hence the ease withwhich IS established its ‘caliphate’ in2014. Because minorities are still beingmarginalized, Small Wars believes that“different groups will eventually seekmilitary solutions to secure their per-ceived interests … mobiliz[ing] on sec-tarian grounds within highly fragmentedpatronage networks.”

The danger is of warlords ruling theirown fiefdoms.

Integrating the Popular MobilizationUnits (PMU), which now number over120,000 men, will also prove hard. ThePMU are mainly Shi’ite but also containSunni and Christian militias.

Prime minister Abadi has declaredsupport for the PMU, which saved theIraqi capital from being overrun by IS in2014, and which will be needed againstfuture IS insurgency.

But Abadi’s desire for US supportputs him at odds with some PMU lead-ers, who “consider themselves an impor-tant part of the Iran-led Axis ofResistance alongside… Hezbollah andthe Syrian regime,” according to Al-Monitor.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Shia leaders, such asnationalist clerics like al Sadr and al Bi-dayri have called on the PMU to dis-band, fearing Iranian influence in Iraq.

But some PMU leaders such as alMuhandis and al Ameri are resisting

such calls and will seek political office innext year’s national elections.

But rumours of sectarian killings bysome PMU militias mean that they willhave to ensure a clear non-sectarian ap-proach, if they hope to gain wider polit-ical purchase.

The root cause of Iraq’s fragility is theUS strategy, outlined by Joe Biden adecade ago, to give “each ethno-religiousgroup - Kurd, Sunni Arab and ShiiteArab - room to run its affairs.”

A weak central government in Bagh-dad would then be easily controlled bythe US, and western companies wouldmore easily exploit Iraq’s energyresources - with fewer checks from cen-tral government.

Trump appears to be pushing towardssuch an outcome. Meanwhile, low oilprices and water scarcity are both mak-ing it easier for him and more difficultfor the Iraqi government to provideessential goods and services to itspopulation.

the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) –to mask the fact that so few Arabs be-long to it – the YPG are sustaining heavylosses and progress is slow.

Earlier, the US allowed IS fighters toleave Raqqa and head eastwards to Deirez Zor, a Syrian-held city besieged by ISsince 2014 and key to Syrian oil pro-duction. It has also pushed YPG sol-diers in the same direction – to preventSyria from breaking the siege of Deir ezZor.

But Syria is making advances towardsDeir ez Zor, supported by Iraqi planeswhich are bombing the besieging IStroops. And the ceasefire deal in thesouth-west is freeing up more Syriantroops to rescue the city. The TurkishCommunist paper Sol sees this cam-paign as the “final phase of the war.”

And while IS remains strong in thispart of Syria, it is confined to a limitedarea – operating from its base in the Iraqiborder town of al Qaem further downthe Euphrates, where it has about 1,000fighters.

To the north, the US could decide tocreate a Kurdish statelet in Syria underthe YPG, once Raqqa has fallen.

The problem with such a plan -backed by Israel - is that Turkey objectsto the US arming of the YPG.

Ultimately, the US would probablychoose good relations with its NATO

ally Turkey than a new Kurdish statelet,but meanwhile it has a stick with whichto keep Turkey on side and a bargainingchip against Russia in any future negoti-ations.

To this end, ten illegal US bases havealready been established in northernSyria, as reported by the official Turkishnews agency. This shows the US inten-tion of remaining in Syria in some form,to prevent a unitary and secular statefrom re-emerging.

Meanwhile, parts of Idlib in the north,one of the last Syrian provinces still out-side government control, are currently inthe hands of al Qaeda-linked HayatTahrir al Sham (HTS), after Turkey’s‘moderate’ proxy militia gave way to itfollowing fighting between the twogroups.

Turkey will ensure that the provinceremains in its sphere of its influence,however, if necessary fighting HTS to doso. Turkey’s role in policing the pro-jected ceasefire in Idlib could present afurther impediment to Syrian unity infuture.

Only three months ago, the US carriedout a massive missile strike on a Syrianairforce base on April 6, as punishmentfor an alleged chemical weapons attackby the Syrian government. No evidencewas found against Assad’s military, anddoubts have arisen as to the reality of theattack itself.

A further escalation took place on June18, when the US shot down a Syrianplane near Raqqa. The Russians thenwarned the US not to fly west of the Eu-phrates. The US have so far compliedwith the Russian warning.

Although government control of Syr-ian territory is gaining pace, it willnonetheless be extremely hard to expelall the occupying forces.

These successes, while aided by theirallies Russia, Iran and Hizbollah, wouldnot have been possible without backingfrom the majority of the population forthe government’s defence of the Syrianstate.

One sign of this popular support is thefact that, according to the UN, nearly500,000 refugees have returned to Syria,and chosen areas under Syrian govern-ment control.

... the US carried out a massivemissile strike on a Syrian airforce base on April 6, aspunishment for an allegedchemical weapons attack bythe Syrian government.

No evidence was found againstAssad’s military, and doubtshave arisen as to the reality ofthe attack itself.


Palestinian hunger strike victory

portance, despite the distraction, for UKmedia, of the General Election cam-paign.(4)

We could bemoan the influence of theopponents of Palestinian rights in this re-spect, but their efforts are a given.

More productively, the solidaritymovement needs to help supply newschannels with authoritative and well-pre-pared commentators and to help jour-nalists and editors overcome theirtimidity and bias.

Whatever level of publicity is achieved,however, none would be possible with-out the courage, determination, unityand clear focus of the prisoners them-selves, which at the same time has a di-rect effect in Israel-Palestine.

Solidarity withinAs in the past, this hunger strike inspiredtremendous support across the entirePalestinian community not just becauseof the love and solidarity shown by theirfamilies to the 1,500 strikers themselves,but precisely because Israel’s long-termsystematic use of imprisonment as a toolof intimidation has given almost everyfamily a similar and therefore unifyingexperience.

Just as the prisoners’ movement tran-scends factions, so such solidarity bringstogether Palestinians regardless of polit-ical affiliation, and is an expression ofshared purpose across the three mainterritorial divisions of the Palestinianpeople, the diaspora in the refugeecamps and beyond, those of the Occu-

pied Territories and thePalestinian citizens of1948 Israel itself.

Adept as it is at foment-ing and exploiting inter-Palestinian divisions, andat feigning indifference tointernational criticism, Is-rael is actually more vul-nerable both tointernational criticism(5)

and to internal resistancethan its supporters care toadmit.

The prisoners’ hungerstrike is one example ofinternal resistance, and it

The previous article itself, and the ac-companying letter from the hungerstrike’s leader, Marwan Barghouti,which had been published in the NewYork Times the day before the strikebegan, made clear how the prisoners’cause dovetails with the wider Palestin-ian struggle for freedom, justice andequality.(1)

What does a hunger strike meanfor Palestinians?Past hunger strikes(2) have proved thatthe Israeli authorities are vulnerable tothis form of pressure, which impactsboth inside and outside Israel-Palestine.

Such an action is never entered intolightly and always carries a risk to thehealth, especially the long-term health,of those taking part.

It puts additional strain on the familiesand communities of the hunger strikers,from whom they are already cruelly sep-arated not merely by imprisonment butby Israel’s contravention of internationalhumanitarian law in transferring prison-ers from their homes in the illegally Oc-cupied Territories to prisons in Israel.

How does the world react?This intolerable situationinvites widespread outrageand is one of the manyways in which, by its ownactions and policies, Israelexposes the cynicism of itspublic claim to ‘civilizedvalues’.

Even organisations notknown for their unequivo-cal support of anti-colo-nial struggle find Israel’shypocrisy hard to stom-ach. For example, in astatement issued ahead ofthe latest hunger strike,Amnesty International de-

Palestinian hungerstrike victory

clared: “Israel’s ruthless policy of holdingPalestinian prisoners arrested in the Oc-cupied Palestinian Territories in prisonsinside Israel is a flagrant violation of theFourth Geneva Convention. It is unlaw-ful and cruel and the consequences forthe imprisoned person and their lovedones, who are often deprived from see-ing them for months, and at times foryears on end, can be devastating.

“Instead of unlawfully transferringprisoners outside the occupied territories,Israel must ensure all Palestinians ar-rested there are held in prisons and de-tention centres in the OccupiedPalestinian Territories.

“Until then, the Israeli authorities muststop imposing excessive restrictions onvisitation rights as a means of punishingprisoners and their families, and ensurethat conditions fully meet internationalstandards.”(3)

The New York Times, by publishingMarwan Barghouti’s letter, and AmnestyInternational, by issuing the above state-ment, show that this particular actioncan reach well beyond the usual dis-course on Israel-Palestine.

That said, mainstream media coverageof the hunger strike did not reflect its im-

The previous issue of The Socialist Correspondent reportedthat since the start of the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strikein prisons across Israel, which began on 17 April (‘Prisoners’Day’), the number of strikers had risen to 1,500.

By BRIAN DURRANS

Israeli troops in the West Bank Palestinian town of Kafr ad-Dik.The yellow banner being waved at them in protest is a portrait of

Marwan Barghouti (pictured) the hunger strike leader


Palestinian hunger strike victory

is one to which Israel is even more vul-nerable because of its capacity to mo-bilise international opposition to Israelibreaches of humanitarian law.

Although undertaking and maintaininga hunger strike takes deep personal com-mitment, it is not at all a desperate ges-ture but an astute political action donein unity with others.

It is designed not to sacrifice lives butto win concessions and, through winningthose concessions, to develop unitythrough the prison walls, garner supportfrom further afield, narrate the Palestin-ian cause as widely as possible, andexploit weaknesses on the Israeli side.

VindicationIn almost every respect, the hunger strikethat began on Prisoners’ Day was a sub-stantial success. By the united decisionof the prisoners themselves, the strikewas suspended on 27 May, after anamazing duration of 41 days.

The prison authorities agreed to startnegotiating with the strikers’ leaders. TheIsraeli side were coerced by the courageof their inmates and by the knowledge (afurther tribute to the organiser’s politi-cally astute timing) that 5 June markedthe 50th anniversary of the start of the‘Six Day War’ which led to the presentOccupation of Palestinian territories out-side Israel’s 1948 borders.(6)

The Director of the Palestinian Pris-oners Affairs Commission, Issa Qaraqe,hailed the hunger strike as “an importantachievement to build on in the future onthe basis of the protection of the prison-ers’ rights and dignity” and reported that80% of the strikers’ demands had beenconceded.

The prisoners’ demands themselveswere not widely publicised, yet the veryfact that they need to be demanded at allunderlines the politics of Israeli attemptsto demoralise and dehumanise its Pales-tinian prisoners by restricting their socialinteraction and wellbeing.

The prisoners’ demandsHere is a selection of most of thedemands of people who should not be inprison at all:

First, social demands: n end solitary confinement and admin-

istrative detention; n kitchens to be under prisoners’ su-

pervision; n access to books and newspapers; n landline phones for communication

with family members; n permitted visits from family to be re-

sumed at twice per month and not to berestricted as punishment;

n visits to be allowed from other rela-tives;

n duration of family visits to be dou-bled to an hour and a half;

n permission to have photo of prisonerwith family every three months;

n facilities for comfort of visitors andtheir families at prison gates;

n allow children and grandchildrenunder age 16 to visit prisoners;

n especially for female prisoners, im-prove transfer conditions and revise useof physical barriers between prisonersand visiting family members;

n treat prisoners in a humane waywhen transferring them by specially se-cure van.

Second, medical demands: n allow regular and specialist medical

checks and surgery as needed;

n release sick detainees, especiallythose with special needs and chronic ill-nesses; and

n exempt prisoners from having to payfor their medication.(7)

ConclusionAlthough it remains to be seen how farIsrael meets its commitment to the Pales-tinian prisoners, it is already clear thatthe hunger strike and demonstrations ofsupport in the Occupied Territories, inIsrael itself, in the wider solidarity move-ment and beyond - while there is stillroom for improvement in UK main-stream media coverage - rattled not justthe prison bars but the apartheid stateitself.

FOOTNOTES1. Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, writing for Al-Jazeera, points to the paral-lel between Palestinians ‘imprisoned’ in the Occupied territories and those keptin Israeli prisons. He also argues that the hunger strike draws further political sig-nificance from its leader’s greater popularity inside and outside the Fatah partythan the Palestinian Authority’s largely discredited President Mahmoud Abbas:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/palestinian-prisoners-hunger-strike-170509121104077.html.2. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2017/05/timeline-palestinian-mass-hunger-strikes-israel-170510130007023.html.3. The words are those of Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s DeputyRegional Director for the Middle East and North Africa:https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2017/04/israel-must-end-unlawful-and-cruel-policies-towards-palestinian-prisoners/.4. Despite media silence or bias on this issue in Israel itself, there were also ex-pressions of solidarity there: https://972mag.com/fighting-media-silence-on-the-palestinian-hunger-strike/127518/.5. Earlier this year, for example, the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based think tankclose to the Israeli government, issued a report in which it admits that after Is-rael spent tens of millions of dollars to combat the rise of pro-Palestine solidar-ity, “results remain elusive”. It also concedes that the solidarity movement hascreated an “unfavorable zeitgeist around Israel” in many parts of the world; ex-panded from Europe to the US and elsewhere; deepened its alliances with majorminority groups and social justice coalitions; migrated into mainstream left-wingparties in Europe and may be gaining traction in the US: https://electronicin-tifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/leaked-report-highlights-israel-lobbys-failures. Thissource is cited here in preference to the Reut Institute’s own website not only be-cause it offers insightful comments on the report, but also because it includes alink to the original version of the report before its authors amended it in responseto hostile criticism. 6. Interestingly, Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s correspondent in Jerusalem andnot first choice for even-handed reporting on Israel-Palestine, suggested on 27May that the deal was a ‘rare recent success’ for Palestinians and a climb-downfor the Israeli authorities despite their insistence that they hadn’t accepted anyof the prisoners’ demands nor even negotiated with their representatives. Notwith-standing uncorroborated notions that the hunger strike was brought to an endthrough interventions by Presidents Trump or Abbas, most of the article effec-tively vindicates the prisoners’ action by including contextual information on thestrike with quotes from some of its supporters and, in passing, even calls Hamasan ‘Islamic militant group’ rather than a ‘terrorist’ one: https://www.the-guardian.com/world/2017/may/27/mass-palestinian-hunger-strike-israel-ends. 7. E.g. http://alternativenews.org/index.php/headlines/394-the-demands-of-1-600-palestinian-political-prisoners-on-hunger-strike.

Grenfell Tower residents ignored


to see another tower block on fire, tohear the same dreadful stories, but manytimes multiplied?

Grenfell Tower, a 129-flat, 24-storeyblock in the London borough of Kens-ington and Chelsea – the whole buildingin flames. There are recordings of themoment the shocked firefightersglimpsed Grenfell Tower for the firsttime: “How is that even possible?”“Mate, is that .. that’s not a real blockwith people in it?” “Oh my God, there’skids in there.” “Right, how are we gonnado that?” “It’s a towering inferno here.”

Because this wasn’t supposed to hap-pen. As Dave Green, national officer ofthe Fire Brigades Union, says: “1970sbuildings like Grenfell Tower were de-signed so each flat was a box that con-tained fire within itself, with anon-flammable concrete exterior.”

Firefighters say that there have beenmany fires in tower blocks, but they havebeen contained in one flat.

This fire itself had started in one flat,and firefighters even thought they hadput it out - until they realised fire wasspreading over the outside of the build-ing. Grenfell Tower’s fire safety hadbeen compromised.

Over 600 firefighters fought the blaze.The fire on the outside of the buildinghindered rescue - firefighters withbreathing apparatus had to force theirway through choking black smoke, indarkness, up the single staircase as far asthey could up the building, in a desper-ate attempt to save lives.

The people who lived in Grenfell hadto brave their way through that samesmoke and down that same nowcrowded staircase. People died trying toescape. Survivors tell of stepping onbodies as they struggled to safety.

80+ deadThe police have declared 80 people deador missing presumed dead – local resi-dents suspect the figure is much higher.

Police say there are survivors from 106flats in the tower but that 18 people fromthose flats are also dead or missing pre-sumed dead. There are 23 flats wherethey have not been able to trace anyonealive. Around 255 survivors escaped

Mr Cervi had rushed home from workwhen his wife phoned him and wasstanding helpless outside the flats,speaking to his wife on the phone.

The Daily Mail reported at the time:‘He told how [his wife] said: “I can’tbreathe very well. I’m struggling tobreathe and Felipe’s really scared.”They were the last words he heard fromher. When he tried to ring her again,there was no answer.

‘Mbet Udoaka, 37, also had to watchhelplessly as his wife, Helen, and babydied in the fire. Helen called him to sayshe was trapped in their flat and heraced home from work. He stayed onthe phone until she lost consciousness,but was not allowed to enter the burningbuilding.’

Catherine Hickman, the other victim,was repeatedly urged by emergencyservices to stay in her flat rather thanescape.

A ‘Super-Inquest’ was convened toinvestigate the deaths. The Guardianreported in March 2013: ‘..the inquest[into the fire] heard the Lakanal Houseblaze moved unusually quickly and inunexpected ways. Within half an hourof the first 999 call it had spread to sev-eral other floors, moving downwards aswell as up, something so unusual thattranscripts show emergency operatorsinitially refused to believe this was hap-pening. The jury heard that a changein the law in 2006 meant Southwark wasresponsible for fire safety checks at itsflats, but by July 2009 the council hadcarried out no such checks at Lakanal orany other residential blocks…

‘Mbet Udoaka, whose wife anddaughter died, read a statement wel-coming the verdict. Standing next toRafael Cervi, Dayana Francisquini’shusband, he said: “Nearly four yearslater and after a long inquest, no au-thority, organisation or body has said


sorry to us or accepted the blame. Wefear very much that lessons have notbeen learned and that it could happenagain.” ’

How must he and Rafael Cervi havefelt eight years later, on 14 June this year,

In July 2009 six people died in a fire at the 14-storey LakanalHouse tower block in the London borough of Southwark.Rafael Cervi, a hotel porter from Brazil, lost his wife DayanaFrancisquini and two children, Thais, six, and Felipe, three.

By PAT TURNBULL



Grenfell Tower. An inquiry into the Grenfell fire has

been set up, and the police are consider-ing criminal prosecutions, currentlyagainst Kensington and Chelsea Coun-cil and the Kensington and Chelsea Ten-ant Management Organisation which thecouncil set up in the 1990s to takecharge of all 10,000 of its council prop-erties, and which has little connectionwith tenants themselves despite its name.

Among the issues residents have askedthe inquiry to look at are:

n building regulations, n cladding and insulation, n piped gas in the tower block, and n the role of supervision of works.Fire regulations were mentioned in the

Lakanal House inquest findings. In1971 the Fire Precaution Act was cre-ated, partly in response to a large nightclub fire in Bristol.

The Act gave fire services the legalright to enter any building and declare itfit for purpose and safe from fire.

In the 1990s after some heavy lobby-ing of MPs by landlords, the Act wasscrapped and replaced by a RegulatoryReform Bill, the power to act after atragedy rather than to prevent one fromhappening in the first place.

So where fire officers once haddetailed knowledge of a building, nowthey rely on the information available tothem. Builders can also now deviatefrom plans and specifications at will. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, RobertA. Graham put it like this: “As a formerassistant chief fire officer of the GreaterManchester Fire Service, it seems to methat the most significant change was totake the responsibility for certifying thefire safety of high risk buildings from theFire Service, which had trained and ex-perienced officers, and to place this re-sponsibility on the employer orresponsible person, who had neither ofthese qualities … Means of escape incase of fire and related provisions shouldbe the responsibility of the Fire Service.Inspection of high-risk occupanciesshould be a statutory duty for fire au-thorities.”

Of course, to implement such achange, the cuts in the fire service wouldhave to be reversed. In the post-Gren-fell situation, the fire service has alreadysaid they are not in a position to makethe checks on other public buildings thatthey are now being asked to do.

The Independent has reported on theBuilding Regulations Advisory Commit-tee, which advises Sajid Javid, the Com-munities and Local GovernmentSecretary, on making building regula-tions and setting standards for the designand construction of buildings: ‘Fire

safety experts have reportedly com-plained that the committee is “heavilyweighted towards the building industry”and has proved “difficult to engagewith”.

There is concern that regulations havefailed to keep pace with changes in con-struction techniques and development ofnew types of materials, including thekind of external cladding used in the£8.6m Grenfell refit.’

The weaknesses of the current safetyregime are obvious in a fire risk assess-ment for Grenfell Tower submitted bythe fire consultant employed by theKensington and Chelsea Tenant Man-agement Organisation (an ex-firefighteras many such consultants are) in No-vember 2012.

He noted a number of safety failings:a failure to test emergency escape light-ing, to inspect escape staircases and tomaintain fire extinguishers.

But under the heading ‘Legal State-ment’ he wrote: ‘You do not have to givea copy of your fire risk assessment toanybody, not even the fire authority, ifyou do give them a copy this could beused against you at a later date’. Littleincentive, then, for the safety failings re-ported to be rectified.

Grenfell Tower was recently refur-bished. At the end of June it wasreported that detectives conducting thecriminal investigation had identified 60firms involved in the refurbishment.

Part of the refurbishment was theaddition of cladding to the outside of thebuilding. It is claimed this was toimprove insulation.

Residents suspect that it was for cos-metic reasons. Concrete Grenfell was notconsidered pretty enough for a rich bor-ough like Kensington and Chelsea, espe-cially if the council want to bring thearea upmarket.

It didn’t match the look of the newacademy built right beside Grenfell,against the wishes of the residents, block-ing off one exit from the tower and de-priving local people of a little bit of green

space.It is hard to understand how a product

can be manufactured and sold to coverbuildings which says in its specificationsthat it is highly flammable - but that iswhat happened in the case of GrenfellTower and, we now discover, in hun-dreds of buildings up and down thecountry.

Reuters reported on 24 June: ‘Arconic… manufactures three main types ofReynobond panel: one with a polyethyl-ene (PE) core, one with a fire retardantcore and another with a non-combustiblecore, according to its web site. Dia-grams in a 2016 Arconic brochure for itsReynobond panels describe how PEpanels are suitable up to 10 metres inheight.

Panels with a fire resistant core - theFR model - can be used up to 30 me-tres, while above that height, panels withthe non-combustible core - the A2model - should be used, the brochuresays. Grenfell Tower is more than 60meters tall.’

Reynobond PE is £2 cheaper persquare metre than Reynobond FR.

The Arconic brochure says: “Whenconceiving a building, it is crucial tochoose the adapted products in order toavoid the fire to spread to the wholebuilding. Especially when it comes tofacades and roofs, the fire can spreadextremely rapidly. As soon as the build-ing is higher than the fire fighters’ lad-ders, it has to be conceived with anincombustible material.”

Emails from 2014, seen by Reuters,between Arconic’s UK sales managerand executives at the contractors in-volved in the bidding process for the re-furbishment contract at Grenfell Towerraise questions about why PE claddingwas therefore supplied.

Reuters continues: ‘When asked aboutthe emails, Arconic said in a statementthat it had known the panels would beused at Grenfell Tower but that it wasnot its role to decide what was or wasnot compliant with local building regula-tions.’

Life is cheap when you have a productto sell, and when the buyer will overlookthe dangers to save a few pounds.

When burning, these products give offtoxic gases, which when inhaled are thecause of most deaths and injuries in fires;yet the UK and most of Europe have noregulations on the toxicity of fire smokefrom construction products even though,as Grenfell Tower has shown, escapefrom a high-rise building may be impos-sible.

Omar Belkadi, 32, his wife, FarahHamdan, 31, Malak Belkadi, eight, andLeena Belkadi, six months, who lived on

When burning, these productsgive off toxic gases, whichwhen inhaled are the cause ofmost deaths and injuries infires; yet the UK and most ofEurope have no regulations onthe toxicity of fire smoke fromconstruction products eventhough, as Grenfell Tower hasshown, escape from a high-risebuilding may be impossible.



the 20th floor, are just one of the Gren-fell Tower families who died of inhalingfire fumes and smoke. Leena was foundin her mother’s arms, Westminster coro-ner’s court was told. Six-year-oldTazmin was later found alive in hospital.What must it be like to be Tazmin?

Residents ignoredOne of the saddest aspects of the Gren-fell tragedy is that residents had beendrawing attention to problems at Gren-fell for years and being ignored.

Minutes from an emergency residents’meeting held on 17 March 2015 showthat more than 100 people living in theblock produced a long list of issues aboutthe refurbishment.

The minutes detail anxieties about theway the firm Rydon was doing the workand mention the “concern that the Ten-ant Management Organisation (TMO) /Rydon are using cheap materials” and“cutting corners” on workmanship.Other problems included“grave concerns at thestandard of works inside anumber of residents’ prop-erties”.

A Grenfell Action Grouppost stated: “It is a trulyterrifying thought but theGrenfell Action Groupfirmly believe that only acatastrophic event willexpose the ineptitude andincompetence of our land-lord.”

Concerns about theTMO go back at least to2007 and 2008 when ten-ant members of the TMOtried in vain many times tohave extraordinary general meetingscalled to hold the board to account overfears over safety and other issues of fi-nance and governance.

The housing situation of the Grenfellsurvivors, who lost everything in the fire,is not being resolved.

On 17 July the Independent reported:‘Of the 220 households affected [this fig-ure included displaced families fromround the tower] just nine are in tempo-rary accommodation with the rest stillin hotels or staying with friends andfamily’.

Jeremy Corbyn suggested early on thatempty homes round about should berequisitioned for the homeless families.

Another suggestion has been thatKensington and Chelsea should usesome of its £274 million reserves to buyhomes.

A young father told the council, “Me,my wife and three kids are in a hotelroom, one bedroom and a double bed

brokered by the government’s Homesand Communities Agency.

It was reported that developer Berke-ley Homes, who are building the devel-opment under the St Edward brand, hadgenerously offered to sell the homes atcost price of around £10 million and hadspeeded up their construction so thatthey would be available by the end ofJuly.

But Berkeley Homes is no benefactor;owner Tony Pidgley took home over£20 million in 2015. The selling priceof homes in the luxury part of the de-velopment starts at £1.5 million. Pent-houses are expected to go for £13million.

After the Grenfell Tower fire, SophieKhan, a lawyer representing a relative ofthe victims in the Lakanal House fire,wrote on 26 June in the Independent: ‘Atthe time the Lakanal House Fire was theUK’s worst ever tower block fire and a‘Super-Inquest’ was convened to investi-

gate the deaths … theCoroner recommended anumber of actions thatneeded to be taken by theGovernment to safeguardthe lives of residents livingin tower blocks.

‘Sadly, the Governmentdid not act upon the rec-ommendations, apart fromcommencing a ‘pro-gramme of simplification’of the Approved Docu-ment B, in relation toBuilding Regulations.

‘This meant that 4,000tower blocks across thecountry were not retrofit-ted with sprinkler systems

and a lax regulatory framework aroundfire safety assessments remained inplace….This sent a clear message to thelocal councils that the safety of residentsin tower blocks was not a Governmentpriority and the recommendations couldbe ignored.’

This is the climate in which a GrenfellTower can happen: a climate whereBoris Johnson could claim “health andsafety fears are making Britain a safeplace for extremely stupid people” –where David Cameron, when primeminister, could write off legal protectionsas “an albatross around the neck ofBritish business”.

What will be the result of the inquiryand the police investigations into theGrenfell Tower fire? Will we see the firstconvictions for corporate manslaughter?What will be the recommendations? Willthey be implemented?

What is the real value of human life incapitalist Britain today?

for five of us. I was forgotten about.” The longer the Grenfell families do

not have permanent and secure housing,the longer families with young childrenhave to share a room and a bed in ahotel, the longer it will take for them torecover from their nightmare experience.

The government has said that everyGrenfell survivor will have the right to apermanent home in their borough withthe same rent and security of tenure thatthey previously had; but survivors areunderstandably suspicious.

Will these promises be kept whenGrenfell Tower is no longer in the news?

The inability of Kensington andChelsea Council to respond meaning-fully to the crisis is a reflection of therun-down of council services over manyyears.

Since 2011 alone many councils inLondon have lost 40 per cent of theirgovernment funding. This has led themto embrace an agenda which is fully in

tune with that of the government -spending less on public services, favour-ing luxury house building over councilhouse building, and in general replacingtheir working class residents with wealth-ier ones, or with absentee owners whoregard their purchase in London as aninvestment or at best as a ‘pied a terre’.

One such luxury housing developmentnear Grenfell Tower, Kensington Row,could become home to some formerTower residents.

Not the luxury part – the ‘affordable’adjunct that is sometimes constructed offto the side. If Grenfell families are re-housed there, they will not have accessto the swimming pool, 24 hourconcierge, and other add-ons in the lux-ury section.

The 68 flats have been bought by theCity of London Corporation in a deal

Volunteers sort the donations fromthe public to the victims of the fire


May miscalculates Corbyn succeeds

These miscalculations included:nThe huge Tory lead in the polls andJeremy Corbyn’s poor ratings suggestedthat she could win by a landslide. Thiswas encouraged by the mainstreammedia and believed by many. nThe Parliamentary Labour Party withno confidence in their Leader, often pre-sented as unelectable, even by his ownside would mean a poor, weak and di-vided Labour campaign. A dividedparty with a weak and embattled leaderis usually regarded as not popular withthe public.nTarring Corbyn as a friend of terror-ists would work with the public. nMay thought the election would all beabout Brexit with her being presented asthe only one strong enough toproperly negotiate a good dealfor Britain. nShe would stand above thepetty fray of electoral campaign-ing and debate, and act PrimeMinisterial. Hence the decision toavoid television debates andspeak only to audiences of invitedsupporters. nA snap election meant thatmanifestos had to be produced hurriedlyand on this occasion, did not need to besubstantial. Her calculation must havebeen that this didn’t really matter in ashort campaign all about Brexit.

However, it all began to unravel veryquickly.

Jeremy Corbyn had an excellent elec-tion campaign, touring the country andspeaking to large crowds in public placesunlike Theresa May, who spoke to smallprivate groups often in warehouses.

The underestimation of Jeremy Cor-byn began to be revealed as the cam-paign developed and the broadcastmedia, due to electoral rules, had to givehim more exposure. Jeremy Corbyn’spersonality and politics contradicted themedia’s characterisation of him.

May miscalculatesCorbyn succeeds

And, then there were the gaffes: whenthe thin Tory manifesto announced,what became known as, the “dementiatax” and the Tories were forced to re-treat on the policy, May’s pathetic at-tempts to deny any change in policyundermined her slogan “strong and sta-ble” and led to the charge of “weak andwobbly”.

On the other hand, the Labour mani-festo, usefully leaked, and so giving twobites of the cherry, proved to be ex-tremely popular with its commitments toend austerity, nationalise the railways,build council homes, stop aggressive for-eign wars, end student fees, and to payfor it by taxing the rich.

The election debate became about

other issues concerning people ratherthan simply Brexit. However, one calcu-lation that May would have made andgot generally right was that UKIP voterswould mainly desert to the Tories.

Theresa May’s refusal to take part intelevision debates turned into anotherown goal as she increasingly lookedscared of appearing before the publicrather than Prime Ministerial. Corbyngrew in stature as May’s credibility di-minished. Running a presidential-typecampaign had become counter-produc-tive for the Tories.

Corbyn’s response to the Manchesterbombing in linking the cause of terroristattacks to that of wars in the Middle Eastresonated with the public. In his speechfollowing the terrorist attack, he saidthat, “We must be brave enough toadmit the ‘War on Terror’ is simply notworking.”

Incensed Tory and right-wing Labourcandidates, egged on by the Tory media,branded the speech “appalling” and “of-fensive” and claimed that it was out oftouch with the mood of the country.How wrong they were!

Rather than running away from theissue, given the attack on him as a“friend of terrorists”, Corbyn had takena calculated risk and it worked.

People are not stupid and can see thatthese appalling wars of destruction, withtens of thousands of innocent peoplekilled like those in Manchester, does notmake us safer.

Ironically, the Tories, usually pre-sented as the defenders of law and order,

were exposed as the cost-cuttersof the police under May whenshe was Home Secretary.

The London terrorist attackfurther exposed the Tory cutson public services. The re-sponse of the Emergency serv-ices, including firefighters,paramedics, doctors, nurses andpolice to the Manchester andLondon terror attacks made the

case all the more powerful for an end tothe Tory cuts.

As Home Secretary, May’s abysmalrecord of failure on the Tory promise tobring down immigration numbers alsoworked against her.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successThe Tories may have won the largestnumber of seats in the House of Com-mons but the election result was re-garded by everyone as a victory forLabour and Jeremy Corbyn in parti-cular.

The Tories who had gone into theGeneral Election with a small majoritynow found themselves without an over-all majority. Theresa May, in order tostay in power, chose to do a deal with the

Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May’s decision to calla snap General Election on 8 June 2017 was based on anumber of political miscalculations.

By SCOTT McDONALD

2017 GENERAL ELECTION ANALYSIS

Washington January 2017:Britain’s new and delighted PrimeMinister, Theresa May meets theUSA’s new President Trump


Labour catches the mood in London

had gone, except that Labour’s princi-pled UK-wide campaign benefited bothRemain and Leave constituencies andMPs/candidates almost equally well.(2)

Theresa May had claimed that the elec-tion was about Brexit, on which basis shehoped to win a hundred-seat majority. Itwas not and her hopes were dashed. Vote shareThe swing to Labour in London wasmore than twice the increased turnoutand cannot therefore be explained by thesupport of new voters or previous ab-stainers alone.

Conservative and Lib Dem sharesbarely changed (Conservatives down1.7%, Lib Dem up 1.1%). Although itseems clear that many Green and someLib Dem votes came Labour’s way, andthat the Conservatives were better at col-lecting former UKIP votes, there are toomany exceptions and uncertainties tocover in a short article.

The new political map of London fea-tures a fat and rather wonky central redcross of Labour constituencies against

In London as elsewhere, there was aclear sense that this election mattered.

London’s ‘Brexit’ factor?In last year’s referendum, Londonersvoted largely to remain in the EU. Byrespecting the Brexit vote and buildingunity across it, Jeremy Corbyn has evi-dently caught the popular mood andoutmanoeuvred Labour’s ‘Remoaner’MPs, mainly critics of the leadership,who are now increasingly out of touchwith the party’s expanded membershipand reduced to sterile gestures.

Nothing better illustrates the maturityof London’s electorate compared withsome pro-Remain MPs than the Laboursurge that re-elected prominent Labour

Labour catches themood in London

Leave MP Kate Hoey in Vauxhall, eventhough Lambeth, where her constituencyis located, returned London’s highestRemain vote in the referendum.

Many Corbyn-sceptic Remain MPs inconstituencies that voted that way lastyear told their voters this year how pas-sionately they cared about local issuesand the EU cause, and said as little as

possible about Labour’s manifesto orleader, at least until, on June 9th, itbecame expedient to do so.(1)

In retrospect, there was no clear wayof accounting for which way the votes

Nearly 5% more Londoners cast their votes on 8 June thandid so in 2015: a bigger increase than anywhere else inEngland and nearly twice the percentage increase thatbrought the UK turnout to the highest level since 1997.

By BRIAN DURRANS

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Hermuch weakened authority was furtherundermined.

Following the General Election theGrenfell Tower fire tragedy happenedand in the immediate days following thefire the different approaches of TheresaMay and Jeremy Corbyn were stark.

May didn’t meet the victims of the fireon her visit to the borough and she stoodcharged with a lack of compassion.Under pressure she consented to a meet-ing with residents, not at the scene of thetragedy, but at 10 Downing Street.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand,visited and met victims and residents,showing compassion and understandingof their plight.

His statement about the acquisition ofempty properties in the borough tohouse the victims, who had lost every-thing, was met with applause whilst theTory media and their apologists deridedthe idea as illegal. Many of the victimsof the fire have still to be properly ac-commodated.

It was a humiliating few weeks for a

Prime Minister, who had expected to re-turn to Downing Street with a landslide.

The slogan “a strong and stable lead-ership with Theresa May”, had been themantra posed against a ParliamentaryLabour Party in which the majority hadno confidence in their Leader.

Seven weeks later, after May’s callingof the General Election, at the first PrimeMinister’s Question Time, Jeremy Cor-byn entered the Chamber to the unimag-inable sight of a standing ovation fromthe Labour benches, and was able tostate that the Labour Party stood readyto form a “strong and stable” govern-ment with him as Prime Minister

Lame Duck Prime MinisterTheresa May is not only regarded as alame duck Prime Minister but a prisoner,as the Tory Party have yet to sort outwho might replace her and do not wantan early election.

Mrs May must have welcomed theParliamentary summer recess like noother MP. She could stay out of the pub-lic glare for a few weeks and avoid any

more embarrassing incidents, furthergaffes and humiliations.

On her summer walking trip inSwitzerland Theresa May would lamenther decision to call a snap General Elec-tion. She had presented it as being nec-essary because of the small Toryparliamentary majority and the need fora clear and strong mandate to enter theBrexit negotiations.

Her miscalculations had ended in hu-miliation. Theresa May is in the wordsof George Osborne, “a dead womanwalking”.

Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn took onceagain to the campaign trail visiting mar-ginal constituencies, largely unreportedby the media no longer constrained byelection rules.

Despite those who did all they couldto oust him and continue to plot againsthim and his policies within the Parlia-mentary Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn’sposition as Leader has been strength-ened. No one, including the Tories andtheir media, can now say that he isunelectable.




four blue quadrants of less crowdedTory strongholds out towards the cor-ners. This corresponds to a tally of 49seats (4 gains) to Labour, 21 (1 gain, 6losses) to the Conservatives and 3 (2

gains) to the Lib Dems.(3)

What this map doesn’t show is that in-creased support for London Labour notonly gained new seats and raised majori-ties where it retained those already held,but also, with only two exceptions, theLabour surge improved the party’s voteshare even where another candidate won,especially when it was a Conservative:(See Table below.)Southwest LondonIn the two exceptions, Labour camethird in constituencies it had little chanceof winning, where the Conservative-Lib-eral Democrat contest involved at leastone controversial personality and conse-quent high-profile attention.

In Richmond Park, where the Conser-vative and unsuccessful mayoral candi-date Zac Goldsmith scraped home,Labour’s first-time parliamentary candi-date, who had no local base, dropped3.2% of Labour’s previous vote.

In nearby Twickenham, where LiberalDemocrat and former Cameron-Cleggcoalition minister Vince Cable beat theConservative, the Labour candidate -another first-time contestant who wasalso a local councillor - scored 2.3%fewer votes than the previous Labourcandidate managed two years ago.

As averages often do, the average per-centage increases in the Labour votebetween 2015-June 2017, shown inTable 1, mask some interesting varia-tions. The actual increases per con-stituency are by no means evenly spreadbetween the highest and lowest, butinstead cluster into two groups.

Labour candidates did well in almostall London constituencies where therewas a Conservative winner, but they didespecially well in 17 of them where theaverage vote swing to Labour was10.75% - less than 1% short of the aver-age swing where Labour actually won.

Northwest LondonLeaving aside Richmond Park andTwickenham, already discussed, and twoother Liberal Democrat wins, the two

worst results for London Labour were inthe northwest constituencies of Finchleyand Golders Green (+4.1%) and Hen-don (+4.5%). These modest swings wereless than half those of the average up-

swing in the top 17 constituencies whereLabour lost, although in both cases theConservative majorities were much re-duced.

If Labour’s poor showing in Rich-mond and Twickenham can be ex-plained as the result of unusual localfactors, this also seems to be the case inFinchley and Golders Green, and inHendon.

At over 20%, Finchley and GoldersGreen has the largest proportion of Jew-ish residents of any constituency in theUK; in Hendon, the proportion is only alittle lower at 17%.(4)

Several commentators, apparently ac-cepting the mainstream media allegation

that ‘Labour has a problem with anti-Semitism’, concluded that it would bevery surprising if Labour had won inFinchley and Golders Green or in Har-row, despite the clear refutation of thisallegation by the Chakrabarti Report(5)

and reiteration of the party’s clear andprincipled position on this and all otherforms of racism by Jeremy Corbyn andothers in the Labour leadership.

Although there was still criticism ofCorbyn for having shared a platform inthe past with supporters of Palestinianrights whom those advocating for Israelcall ‘terrorists’ (a charge ably rebutted bythe Chakrabarti Report and by JeremyCorbyn himself), it is notable that in crit-icism of the Labour leader during the2017 election campaign, by the main-stream media and by his political oppo-nents inside and outside the LabourParty, the issue of Israel/Palestine tooksecond place to (and was conflated with)‘anti-Semitism’.

For example, in its election night blogas the results came in, the Jewish Chron-icle consistently referred to ‘anti-Semi-tism’ rather than to criticism of Israel.(6)

It is therefore worth recollecting anarticle in the Spectator on 18 April 2015- a month before the previous generalelection - in which political journalistRobert Philpot declared that Labour had

PARTY Labour Conservative Liberal Democrat

Total seats (won/held) 49 (4/45) 21 (1/20) 3 (2/1)

Average swing to Labour 11.6% 9.2% 0.47%

Table - June 2017: Average vote swing to Labour in London by % over 2015.


Labour Party campaigners in Chipping Barnet, London.

Liberal Democrat

6 seats lost



already lost the ‘Jewish vote’ be-cause its (Jewish) leader, EdMiliband (pictured), showedsympathy for Palestinians andespecially because he criticisedIsrael’s attack on Gaza in ‘Op-eration Protective Edge’.(7)

At that time, there were no‘useful idiots’ making off-the-cuff remarks that could be citedas evidence of anti-Semiticprejudice for which Milibandcould then be criticised for fail-ing to condemn or punish: theproblem was simply criticism ofIsrael by someone who mightconceivably become the UK’s next primeminister.

And that, from the point of view ofIsrael’s supporters, is still the problem,only now in 2017, the tactic has beenfirst to conflate criticism of Israel orsupport for Palestine with anti-Semitismand then to demand action against‘anti-Semitism’ in this new, distorted,definition.(8)

Jeremy Newmark, Labour’s June 2017candidate for Finchley and GoldersGreen, and Mike Katz, its candidate forHendon, are respectively NationalMovement Chair and Vice-Chair of the‘Jewish Labour Movement’ (JLM).

The JLM not only promotes Israel’s in-terests in the Labour Party and supportsthe pro-apartheid Israeli Labor Party,(9)

but its relationship to dubious activitiesby the Israeli Embassy in London wasthe subject of an investigative reportbroadcast in four gripping episodes byAl-Jazeera in January 2017. (10)

Given their own criticism of Labour’sleadership as (at best) ‘soft on anti-Semi-tism’, it is scarcely surprising that theircandidacies were opposed by some intheir constituencies’ Jewish communitieswho preferred unambiguously pro-IsraelConservatives; but it is not hard to seethat a main incentive in standing was tokeep attention focused on alleged ‘anti-Semitism’.

Two conclusionsLabour’s generally strong performancegives a context in which to understandthese two sets of anomalies.

First, the two failures in RichmondPark and Twickenham were rare excep-tions to the ‘two-horse race’ of Labourversus Conservative, a clarification of thepolitical stakes in which Labour can re-trieve the trust of the working class andits allies as they exist in contemporaryBritain.

A better result in both constituenciescould have been secured if the Labourcandidate had had strong local supportand a track-record of campaigning on

issues that affect key sections ofthe community, as reflected inthe manifesto.

Second, the lessons of the twolow swings in Finchley andGolders Green and Hendon areabout attempts to delegitimiseLabour. Israel’s cheerleaders inthe JLM seem to be running outof options.

When, with massive pro-Torymedia help, Jeremy Corbyn’sopponents blast him as a wimpor terrorist sympathiser, or findhim guilty by association withpeople they don’t like, he refutes

the charges with clear arguments andquiet dignity, and his approval ratingsimprove.

Given that the Conservative party andits candidates in these two constituenciesagreed with the ‘JLM’ on Israel and onthe idea that Labour has an ‘anti-Semi-tism’ problem, and given that it wouldbe impossible to say which Labour voteswere cast for the party and which for thecandidate, we might charitably assumethat the two ‘JLM’ candidates wereabove all committed to Labour’s mani-festo offers of anti-austerity and socialrenewal.

But criticism of the party (that is, itsleadership) is seldom far behind. Afterthe count when Conservative Mike Freerwas returned as MP for Finchley andGolders Green, Newmark spuriously

claimed electoral support for his positionwithin Labour.

Newmark said, “To reduce Freer’smajority by such a margin is a signal thatkey messages of my campaign that peo-ple in Finchley and Golders Green areworried about the politics of resentmentand intolerance that comes as part andparcel of the Brexit debate. That peoplehere want to protect local schools andinvest in world-class education.

“I will continue to fight racism andanti-Semitism in society, in Parliamentand, if necessary, in my own party; theresults across Barnet indicate that manypeople think it is.”(11)

There are two strange things in thatlast paragraph. One is that caveat “ifnecessary”. If there really is an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party,how could he not find it necessary tofight it?

On the other hand, he does not saywhy people apparently critical ofLabour’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ shouldbother to vote for the party at all in pref-erence to the Conservatives.

At any rate, whatever the local elec-torate made of all this, in all their varietyof views and religious affiliation, mostLabour voters across London and acrossthe UK, who can scarcely not have heardcriticism that Labour and its leader areanti-Semitic or spineless or terrorist sym-pathisers, or all three, do not appearconvinced.

FOOTNOTES1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-voters-reasons-jeremy-corbyn-manifesto-local-mp-mandatory-reselection-a7840856.html.2. Opinion surveyors YouGov judge that, in the UK as a whole, voting patterns inthe EU referendum didn’t much affect those in the general election:https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/22/how-did-2015-voters-cast-their-ballot-2017-general/. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assume here that thesame also applies to London. 3. http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7979,p.32. The main sources for these figures and those set out in Table 1 below arethe cartogram and list of constituencies given in the Sunday Times on 11 June2017 (p.17) and www.bbc.com/news/politics/constituencies.4. http://ukpollingrepor t.co.uk/2015guide/finchleyandgoldersgreen/;http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2015guide/hendon/.5. http://www.labour.org.uk/page/-/party-documents/ChakrabartiInquiry.pdf.6. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/election-live-blog-1.439696.7. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/how-ed-miliband-lost-the-jewish-vote/.8. https://ijv.org.uk/2017/03/27/legal-opinion-finds-major-fault-with-government-antisemitism-definition/.9. http://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/who-are-jewish-labour-movement/.10. http://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby/. The programmes alsoprompted a call for an independent enquiry in the UK: http://www.indepen-dent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/israeli-embassy-alan-duncan-palestine-spying-sub-version-labour-a7515956.html.11. http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/mike-freer-and-matthew-offord-retain-two-seats-with-largest-jewish-communities/. Emphasis added. Barnet is the localborough in which this constituency is located. For more tendentious claims, andalso some revealing admissions of uncertainty, about what votes ‘mean’ andwhose votes they are, see the Jewish Chronicle blog referenced at Note 6, espe-cially (you have to scroll down for these) the ramshackle musings of Lee Harpin.



Why Labour lost 5 seats in N. England

the Tories. In Middlesborough andCleveland East it was Labour’s highestvote since 2001 and its best share of thevote since 2005.

In Stoke-on-Trent South, Labour’sshare of the vote was up 8.3% over 2015.

In Walsall North, Labour gained itsmost votes since 2001 and its highestshare since 2005.

In Mansfield this was Labour’s best votesince 1997 and its highest share of the votesince 2005.

In North East Derbyshire it wasLabour’s best result since 2005. In thefollowing article we analyse in moredepth Labour’s electoral fortunes inMansfield and NE Derbyshire.

During the New Labour Blair-Brownyears, some five million Labour voteswere lost across the country.

The June 2017 General Election sawLabour reverse this trend with anincrease in Labour’s vote and anincrease in the party’s share of the vote.

This trend was also evident in thenorth of England yet the five seats

Why Labour lost 5seats in N.England

which the Labour Party lost in theGeneral Election were all in the north.

An analysis of these results (see tablebelow) shows that the losses were largelydue to UKIP standing down in two ofthe seats with the majority of their votesgoing to the Tories.

And in the seats where UKIP didstand most of their votes were shed to

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour’s election manifesto andthe party’s vigorous campaign went some way to winningback previously lost Labour votes and inspiring many youngvoters to vote for the first time.

By SCOTT McDONALD

CONSTITUENCY

Mansfield

Middlesborough S. and Cleveland E.

North East Derbyshire

Stoke-on-Trent

Walsall North

PARTY

ToryLabourUKIP

ToryLabourUKIP

ToryLabourUKIP

ToryLabourUKIP

ToryLabourUKIP

Votes Share of Vote

13288 28.2%

18603 39.4%

11850 25.1%

2015

Votes Share of Vote

23392 46.8%

22335 44.5%

2654 5.3%

2017 Change over 2015

+18.5%

+ 5.1%

- 19.8%

16925 37.1%

19193 42.0%

6935 15.2%

23643 49.6%

22623 47.5%

DID NOT STAND

+12.6%

+5.5%

17605 36.7%

19488 40.6%

7631 15.9%

24784 49.2%

21923 43.5%

1565 3.1%

+12.5%

+2.9%

- 12.8%

12780 32.7%

15319 40.6%

8298 21.2%

20451 49.1%

19788 47.5%

DID NOT STAND

+16.4%

+8.3%

12455 33.8%

14392 39.0%

8122 22.0%

18919 49.6%

16318 42.8%

2295 6.0%

+15.9%

+3.8%

-16.0%


Labour’s 5 lost seats in 2017 General Election


Mansfield and NE Derbyshire analysis

It was thought that he had intended tostand down at the next General Election,but Theresa May’s sudden election callthrew the intentions of a number of MPsinto confusion.

Alan Meale had done plenty of workto support former miners in variouscampaigns including the Mineworkers’Pension Scheme, which had been un-derwritten by the Government after pri-vatisation of the industry.

In order to compensate itself for the“risk” this presented, the governmentchose to cream off vast amounts ofmoney that should have been paid toformer mineworkers in pensions.

Despite his hard work, Alan Mealehad not been publicising his efforts ef-fectively, so they went largely unnoticed.Previously he had passed up opportuni-ties to write in the widely-read localnewspaper.

When he finally began to write a col-umn he failed to tell people about thevaluable work he was doing, so he wasoften thought to be inactive.

In the 2015 General Election theLabour majority in Mansfield was 5315,with Conservatives second. The 2017vote was 23,392 for the Tories and22,335 for Labour, giving the Conserva-tives a majority of 1057.

Although Mansfield had been a min-ing and manufacturing town, the old in-dustries were closed down, leaving manyformer manual workers unemployed,with very little money and in poor health.

This is the sort of environment identi-fied by the Joseph Rowntree Trust asleading to Brexit majorities in the EUReferendum, where low levels of formaleducation or a depressed local economyand environment seemed to lead to dis-affection or despair.

In Mansfield the Brexit vote was one

of the highest in the country at 70.9%,while Alan Meale was known as a Re-mainer.

In the 2015 General Election theUKIP vote in Mansfield had been only1438 less than the Conservative vote.When the UKIP vote, in line with thenational trend, collapsed in this year’sGeneral Election, UKIP lost more than9000 votes there. It is believed that manyformer UKIP voters voted Conservativein Mansfield this time.

This pattern differed from events inthe neighbouring Ashfield seat, wherethe Referendum Leave vote was almostas high, but Labour MP Gloria de Pierohung on by a whisker in this year’s Gen-eral Election.

A former Remainer, she seemed toshift position once the size of the Leavevote in her seat was known. The mostimportant factor, though, in enabling

Labour to hold Ashfield was probablythe existence of a very right-wing Inde-pendent candidate in Ashfield.

As a local councillor, already known tothe electorate, she seemed to split theright-wing vote, while in Mansfield right-wing voters had only one choice: Con-servative.

The Conservative national leadershipchose Mansfield as one of their targetseats in this year’s General Election,pouring resources into the constituency.

Mansfield District Council has beencontrolled by Independents since 2015while two Independent elected executivemayors have been in power during thelast 14 years.

During the 1984-5 Miners’ Strikesome leaders within the NottinghamshireNUM, colluding with the Government,had fatally undermined the strike.

Afterwards, when they formed thebreakaway Union of Democratic Miners,our judicial system gifted them the for-mer NUM Offices in Mansfield. Follow-ing the extinction of Britain’s miningindustry these offices have now beensold by the UDM to developers who,after demolishing the Miners Offices, arebuilding large and very expensive houseson the site.

This of course is helping to change thesocial and class make-up of the town, at-tracting affluent commuter residents whomay be more likely to vote Conservative.

There are still many areas of high so-cial deprivation in Mansfield whose res-idents may be less likely to vote at all,given the dramatic decline of the organ-ised working class since the mid 1980’s.

North East Derbyshire Last held by Labour’s Natascha Engel,this too had been a Labour seat for manyyears, with many previous MPs havinghad close links with the National Unionof Mineworkers, as there had been manycollieries within the constituency.

In this year’s General ElectionNatascha Engel increased her share ofthe vote by 2.9%, to 43.5% of the vote,but the Conservative Lee Rowley in-creased his share by 12.5%, winning49.2% of the vote. He gained 24,784votes, while Ms Engel’s vote was 21,923.


During the 1984-5 Miners’ Strikesome leaders within the Notting-hamshire NUM, colluding with theGovernment, had fatally under-mined the strike.

Afterwards, when they formed thebreakaway Union of DemocraticMiners, our judicial system giftedthem the former NUM Offices inMansfield.

Following the extinction ofBritain’s mining industry these of-fices have now been sold by theUDM to developers who, after de-molishing the Miners Offices, arebuilding large and very expensivehouses on the site.

Mansfield and NEDerbyshire analysisMansfield had been a Labour seat for ninety four years untilthis year when it was lost by Sir Alan Meale. After scraping-in at the 1987 election, Meale increased his majority at eachelection. Now, after 30 years as an MP, he lost his seatdespite gaining a higher vote and increasing his share of thevote.

By ANNIE PARKIN


Mansfield and NE Derbyshire analysis

Rowley had stood previously in 2015,coming less than 2000 votes behindNatascha Engel. In this constituency too,in line with the national trend, the UKIPvote collapsed.

In North East Derbyshire, Conserva-tive was the only voting option for right-wing voters. Again in line with thenational picture, Conservative andLabour dominated the voting pattern.

The constituency is very mixed in sev-eral ways. Geographically It curls aroundthe Chesterfield constituency, with itsnorthern parts bordering Rotherham andSheffield, while also stretching south-wards down towards the very differentenvironment of mid Derbyshire.

The social make-up of the con-stituency is also very mixed, so it is hardto generalise about what happened, apoint Natascha Engel herself made afterthe election.

There are affluent villages such asAshover, Holmesfield and surroundingareas; larger affluent commuter settle-ments in Dronfield and Wingerworth,but also impoverished former mining vil-lages. where morale is at rock-bottom.The former mining town of Clay Crossalso belongs to this constituency.

In former mining areas jobs are oftenin short supply, while those that areavailable are usually low-paid. Residentshere are less likely to register as electors,or less likely to turn out on the day.

Over time, though, North East Der-byshire is becoming more middle-class,with new housing developments, even informer mining areas suchas Clay Cross and Ren-ishaw, attracting com-muters.

The traditional working-class is in decline here, asin many other areas. Manyof these people, whowould once have beensolid Labour voters, havebecome disillusioned.

Many voted UKIP in2015 and Leave in theReferendum. Someseemed to vote Tory in the2017 General Election, while othersseemed not to vote at all.

However, the Labour vote in the localelections held up in the north of thecounty this year. Labour lost control ofDerbyshire County Council to the To-ries only because the middle and southof the county went Tory.

In the General Election there weresome particular circumstances and localissues that seemed to influence the out-come in North East Derbyshire.

A significant and vigorous anti-frack-ing campaign is being waged in the

northern part of the constituency be-cause INEOS intends to begin opera-tions in the Marsh Lane area ofEckington.

For a while before the General Elec-tion, Ms Engels’ office displayed an anti-fracking poster, but this later vanished.Immediately after nominations closed,Natasha Engels’ team began to circulatea four-page open letter, supportingfracking but with some possible protec-tions.

This letter went inside a local maga-zine to every house in Dronfield, andwas probably distributed inother areas too. At hustingsNatascha Engel took this sameline, which was basically pro-fracking. Yet previously theConstituency Labour Partyhad taken an anti-frackingstance at an all-members meet-ing, in her presence and with-out any votes against this view.

Her change of position onlocal fracking was probablyvery damaging to her vote.The successful Conservativecandidate issued several leafletsin which he opposed the MarshLane proposal, although hewas ambiguous about the widerfracking issue.

After the 2015 General ElectionNatascha Engel had become one of theDeputy Speakers of the House of Com-mons. This requires incumbents to with-

draw from an activepolitical role: DeputySpeakers must not vote inCommons debates.

While Lindsay Hoyle,the most senior DeputySpeaker, uses his web-sitesand the local media to tryto overcome this by asso-ciating himself with pro-gressive causes, NatashaEngel was not thought lo-cally to be doing as muchas possible in this situation.

Some constituents ap-parently felt dissatisfied

with her efforts if they took issues to her. As in Mansfield, some constituents

thought that she would not stand againin the next General Election, but the sur-prise nature of this election gave MPs lit-tle time to take decisions, with very littletime for parties to select new candidates.

When first elected Ms Engel hadmoved into a house within the locality,but it appears that was sold some timeago. Recently there had been no clearConstituency Party knowledge of whatlinks she still had with her constituency.

Some campaigners in North East Der-

byshire were worried that great effortswere put into the election campaign forChesterfield’s Toby Perkins, while theNorth East Derbyshire seat, thought tobe much more vulnerable, required moreattention.

It appears that this was more than justa local issue, as the national Labour lead-ership, worried by pre-election opinionpolls, had decided that they needed towork hard for every seat, rather thanputting extra resources into seats at mostrisk.

In fact, Chesterfield’s Labour MPToby Perkins held Chesterfieldthis year with a majority of9605, an improvement on per-formance in the 2015 GeneralElection.

There have been reports thatthe national Labour leadershipmay be willing to target re-sources on more vulnerableseats next time. However, theremay be dangers in this.

In the neighbouring Bolsoverconstituency, where DennisSkinner (pictured) has beenMP for many years, we see thathis majority was halved thisyear, with a strong performanceby a Conservative candidate

who came second, despite a split in theright-wing vote.

UKIP, although losing many votes inBolsover since the previous GeneralElection, still polled 2129, so there iscause for concern here.

Many constituencies previously domi-nated by the organised working class,especially former mining or manufactur-ing areas, are now utterly changed, withthe dramatic decline in work, in tradesunion presence and morale.

In these places of poverty it is becom-ing much harder to get out a Labourvote. The national Labour Party leader-ship has, during demonstrations, toldtrades unionists and campaigning organ-isations that the Labour Party will sup-port their struggles.

Of course this marks an advance, butit will require work by local Labour par-ties as well as national leadership. Inmany local Labour parties this change offocus from electoral machine to ongoingcampaigning work does not seem to behappening.

In North East Derbyshire there is anactive Dronfield Labour Party educationand discussion group which seems tohave played a positive role in the last fewyears, and seems to be connected to theanti-fracking campaign.

However, the geographical spread ofthe constituency seems to limit the influ-ence of this group.


Many constituencies previously dominated bythe organised workingclass, especially formermining or manufacturingareas, are now utterlychanged, with the dramatic decline inwork, in trades unionpresence and morale.


In Scotland Labour begins to recover

ures in government as it focused on in-dependence at the expense of what theywere actually elected to do at Holyrood.

However, this offers no explanation asto why the Tories should be the benefi-ciaries of this disillusionment.

The seats won by the Tories were inrural or relatively wealthy constituenciesand in a sense, therefore, they werereturning to type.

A proportion of the Tories gains herewere people not very committed to theSNP, but who had voted nationalist inthe past as a tactical vote against Labour.

However, there was a good perform-ance across the board by the Tories, notjust in these seats.

Although it does not fit with the prop-aganda that Scottish Nationalism is cud-dly and inherently left-wing, there hasalways been a right-wing in the SNP andamong its supporters.

In every other respect, apart from theissue of independence, this section ofvoters might have found the transition tovoting Tory easier than voting Labourwhich also opposed a second independ-ence referendum.

This on its own, however, would stillnot account for the number of votes thatthe Tories picked up.

Though disillusionment with endlessreferenda and a poorly performing gov-ernment were part of the reason the SNPlost support, the elephant in the room,unacknowledged before, during or evensince the election, was Brexit.

Scotland voted to Remain by 62% to38% and the SNP leader, Nicola Stur-geon, has used this to further her cam-paign for independence. She has beenextremely voluble about Scotland being“dragged out of the European Unionagainst its will”.

This ignored the concerns of the manySNP supporters who voted Leave. If25% of SNP supporters voted for Brexit,as some polls suggested, that could be360,000 votes.(2) A proportion of thesevoters more than likely made up a chunkof the Tories additional 323,852 votesalong with Lib Dem and UKIP voters.

In this light the Tory success begins tomake sense and was similar to the suc-cesses it achieved in winning votes and

There was little expectation beforehandthat Labour would make much head-way, however it won back 6 seats, in-creasing its number of MPs to 7. Threeof the newly elected MPs were sup-ported by the Campaign for Socialism.

The Scottish National Party (SNP)expected some losses from their aston-ishing success at the last election when itwon 56 out of 59 seats on the back ofthe failed independence referendum.

However, it did not lose just a fewseats it lost 21, reducing its tally to 36.In a further blow it lost two ofits key figures at Westminster -Alex Salmond, former FirstMinister of Scotland andAngus Robertson, its deputyleader and leader in the Houseof Commons.

In every single constituencythe nationalists’ vote share wentdown, mainly in double digits.The biggest loss of vote sharewas 21.1% in Banff andBuchan which had been SNPsince 1987, but was a Tory seatprior to that. Their smallestloss of vote share was 3.8% in Berwick-shire, Roxburgh and Selkirk.

There are now 16 SNP MPs sittingon majorities of less than 2000 of which9 are less than 1000, including 4 under100. In Fife North East their majority isjust 2.

In 9 of these 16 seats Labour wasplaced second, with another being aclose three-way marginal. In most of theothers Labour could easily benefit froma further shift from the SNP overtakingthe Tories to be in a winning position.There are undoubtedly seats beyond thisnumber where the SNP is vulnerableand where Labour could win.

Unfortunately as well as good newsthere is also bad news from the election.The Conservative Party confirmed itsposition as the second party in Scotland

In Scotland Labourbegins to recover

increasing its tally of seats from 1 to 13.In every constituency apart from Orkneyand Shetland, where it fell by 0.2%, itsvote share increased mainly by doubledigit percentages.

The biggest was Gordon where theTories’ vote share increased by 29%.This was the seat that Alex Salmond lostand had previously been a Liberal De-mocrat (Lib Dem) seat. There and insome other seats, the Lib Dem vote col-lapsed, aiding the Tories.

The SNP vote fell drastically - theylost nearly ½ a million votes,however, few of these votesseem to have gone to Labour.

Only Labour and the Toriesadded votes, every other partylost votes.

The Lib Dems and UKIPlost about 40,000 votes eachand the Greens over 30,000.(1)

Despite losing votes, the LibDems increased their numberof seats from 1 to 4.

In all 260,000 fewer peoplevoted. It would be a fair guessthat this group were largely

SNP voters, accounting for half theirlosses.

The Tories increased the number vot-ing for them by 323,852, whereasLabour’s actual net gain was only 9,860.Even if the Tories got the overwhelmingbulk of the Lib Dem and UKIP votes,they still made a further gain of around240,000 votes a figure which looks verymuch like the other half of the SNP’s lostvotes.

But how could this be? Why wouldSNP voters transfer their allegiance tothe most strongly pro-unionist party?

Much was made during the campaignof disquiet at the SNP plans for anotherindependence referendum, this was trueeven among some Yes voters weary offurther division and diversion. There wasalso growing concern at the SNP’s fail-

The fact that there is good electoral news from Scotlandmakes a welcome change with the 2017 general electionseeing the dominance of nationalism take a severe dent.

By FRIEDA PARK

Alex Salmondlost his seat.



In Scotland Labour begins to recover

seats in the Midlands and North of Eng-land, where it was seen to be the safestpair of hands to ensure Brexit.

In more working-class constituenciesthese results challenge Labour in Scot-land just as in England.

Other things helped the Tories. Thedivisions over independence had begunto push protestant unionists into thehands of the Tories even prior to thiselection and the charge that Corbyn sup-ported the IRA - though it failed to takeoff in other places - potentially did dosome damage here.

Ruth Davidson is an effective leaderand has tried, with some success, to po-sition the Scottish Tories as more one-nation and socially liberal than the partynationally.

By contrast Labour’s Kezia Dugdalehas never really grown into the job. Herpresentation is humourless and often un-convincing, doggedly sticking to the anti-independence script during TV debates.

Labour’s recovery, though very wel-come, was relatively modest. The biggestincrease in its vote share was in the seat ofits one sitting MP Ian Murray – 15.5%.No others got out of single figures and in13 seats vote share actually declined.

Sometimes seats were won because theLabour vote was up only a little and theTories slashed the SNP vote. Rutherglen& Hamilton West was won by Labourwith an increase of only 2.3% in voteshare, whereas the SNP was down15.5% and Tories up 12%.

The improvement in Labour’s for-tunes appeared to happen late in thecampaign and has been attributed to a“Corbyn bounce”.

With national TV coverage, socialmedia and his personal appearances inScotland, Corbyn’s message of hope andthe impressive content of the LabourManifesto began to make an impact withScottish voters.

This was in stark contrast to the poorcampaign run by Scottish Labour, orrather by a narrow section of the leader-ship and bureaucracy of the party. Theythrew everything into attacking theSNP’s poor record in government due toits obsession with independence.

These things definitely needed to besaid, however, as the dominant motif ofthe campaign they became annoyinglyrepetitive. Without making the positivecase for Labour’s policies it also madethe party look as though it was in com-petition with the Tories, who were pitch-ing the same line. Not a good look.

Above all this approach did notaddress the Labour voters who haddefected to the SNP in big numbers,having voted for independence.

They did this largely because of dis-

enchantment with Labour over decadesand the belief that the SNP and inde-pendence offered some hope of socialprogress stymied by Tory and coalitiongovernments in Westminster. Sloganslike “only Labour can defeat the SNP”were hardly likely to win people overwho were still not convinced that theSNP needed to be defeated. As somewere won over by Corbyn so others werealienated by a Scottish Labour negativecampaign.

Having said that, Corbyn’s successoffers Scottish Labour hope for the fu-ture. Not only have the SNP got prob-lems, but the Scottish Tories will find itharder to distance themselves from thecrisis-ridden party in the rest of thecountry, not to mention the difficultieswhich they will have in negotiatingBrexit.

This may help reverse some of theiradvances in Scotland, as will any biggerrecovery in Lib Dem fortunes.

The SNP have relied on simplistic andunhistorical assertions about Scotlandand England to woo left wing voters’sympathies. They have brazenly adaptedthese as one by one they were provedfaulty and their arguments are now un-ravelling.

We were told that we needed inde-pendence because fairness is in Scot-land’s DNA and England is irredee-mably Tory/UKIP. The election of aUKIP MEP in Scotland did not stall thisnarrative.

Labour was a neo-liberal Party whichSturgeon described as “Tory-lite” dur-ing the 2015 general election. Othersbranded Labour “Red Tories” a phrasewhich bizarrely still has some currency.The SNP claimed that they would pullLabour to the left in Westminster. Thebest options for Scotland were, therefore,independence and the SNP.

Did the election of Jeremy Corbyn asleader of the Labour Party change this?Hardly at all. Nicola Sturgeon repeatedlydismissed him using words like “pa-thetic” and scoffing at his leadership andelectoral prospects.

Although latterly when the SNP re-alised that they were beginning to loseground to Labour in the election andCorbyn was gaining support they putforward the line that they would be bet-ter supporters of Corbyn than his ownback-benchers, so still best to vote SNP.

Fortunately, however, despite the con-tortions of the SNP and their supportersordinary voters are waking up to the pos-sibilities of real change across Britain.

SNP lies have been debunked -Labour is not irredeemably neo-liberal,it is electable and Jeremy Corbyn hasdemonstrated outstanding leadership.

Scotland is not special - there are plentyof Tories here now.

Though the vote share for Labour wasstill disappointing in the election it washeaded in the right direction. Further-more canvassers found people on thedoorsteps much more thoughtful abouthow they would cast their votes, morepositive about Labour and there waslittle hostility.

With a more positive campaign theycould re-connect with the hopes of vot-ers who abandoned them for the SNPand gain significant successes in futureelections.

Under pressure in the election theSNP began to make errors of judgementand their losses have opened up divisionsin the party which are usually kept wellsubmerged.

What to do about a future independ-ence referendum is a major headacheand has forced Sturgeon to delay theprojected date from Spring 2019 to2021, though she still fudges that to keepher more fundamentalist supporters onboard.

These divisions are not just on the sur-face, but run deep. Corbyn’s challengefrom the left will open up further con-flict within the SNP about the directionit is taking.

Managing the pressures of those whowant more instant action on independ-ence, the division between left and rightin the party and unhappiness about thenarrow clique which runs it will becomeincreasingly hard to manage.

The only party dreading another electionas much as the Tories is the SNP. Many oftheir MPs are sitting on small majoritiesand the rug has been pulled from undertheir narrative that only they represent aprogressive option for Scotland.

People must now know that Labourcan form the next UK government andthat the best way to achieve that is by ac-tually voting Labour. If Scottish Labourlearns the lessons from Corbyn’s cam-paign it could again be the biggest partyin Scotland.

FOOTNOTES1. At the 2015 general election theGreens stood in 32 constituenciesand this time round in only 3. They arestrong supporters of independenceand there were allegations that theyhad quit the field to help the SNP, al-though it may simply be evidence thatso-called radical alternatives to theSNP have run out of steam.2. Based on the SNP having pollednearly 1.5 million votes at the lastelection in 2015.



How Corbyn cut through: exclusive interview with a senior Labour strategist

In his first interview since the poll, SteveHowell - Corbyn’s deputy director ofstrategy and communications - saidFleet Street’s “smear campaign” hadbackfired.

Howell, who joined Corbyn’s team inFebruary, believes the election hasexposed a fundamental mismatch be-tween most of the London-based pressand the views of the electorate.

He said: “They switched into gear,thinking they could destroy Jeremy Cor-byn and Labour with their usual tactics.It was an extraordinary smear campaignand they thought it would work.

“I think the political spectrum of thenational press is way to the right of thepolitical thinking of the peo-ple of Britain. Our nationalpress is not representative atall of public opinion and canno longer shape it in the wayit used to do.”

The fact that broadcastersare obliged to give equal -and fair - coverage to polit-ical parties during electioncampaigns gave Corbyn thefirst real chance to put hisviews across to the widerpublic, according to Howell.

This was recognised byresearchers from Cardiff andLoughborough universitieswho found Labour receiv-ing roughly equal broadcastcoverage from week two ofthe campaign – the weekthat saw Labour’s biggestpoll surge.

Howell explained: “We knew thatonce people are exposed to him, theylike him. People had not been exposedto him, because they were just gettingthis very filtered impression of himthrough 10 second clips on broadcastmedia – and a very distorted picturethrough print media. With the election,we had an opportunity to correct that,

because broadcast media has an obliga-tion to be more balanced.”

Reaching outBroadcast coverage was thefirst key part of the party’smedia strategy for Corbyn.

The second was the use ofsocial media, including ex-penditure of £1.3m on digitaladvertising on Facebook,Snapchat and Google (includ-ing “pre-roll” adverts that areshown before videos play onYouTube). The aim was toget beyond Corbyn’s – andLabour’s – own social media

footprint and talk not only tothe converted.

Before the election, Cor-byn had 800,000 followerson Twitter, a figure whichhas now risen to 1.25m –compared to 356,000 forTheresa May.

His Facebook page is likedby 1.2m, comparedto 427,000 for May. Accord-ing to Howell, Corbyn’sFacebook page had a weeklyreach of 29m in the finalweek of the campaign.

He said: “Having a budget[for digital advertising] com-plimented this massive “or-ganic” reach. Some postswere seen by 15m people -meaning they came up ontheir Facebook page.”

Taking risksBeyond the emphasis on broadcast andsocial media, Howell believes Labour’steam succeeded in turning Corbyn’s per-ceived weaknesses in some areas intostrengths.

He said: “Conventional wisdom saysif you’ve got a perceived weakness, youtry to deflect and go onto something else.

We took the view that some of thesethings that were perceived as weaknesseswere actually strengths and that we wereprepared to take them head-on.

“Some people [in the Labour cam-paign team] thought this was risky – andit probably was. But I think it’s proven tobe the right thing to do.”

A key decision for the party wasregarding how to resume campaigning

after the Manchester terroristattack. Howell says some inthe Labour team thoughtthey should focus on domes-tic issues, such as the NHS.

But they chose to make aspeech about terrorism andBritish foreign policy, whichled to a backlash in the press,attacking Corbyn’s record onopposing terrorism.

Howell said: “We couldn’tknow it in advance, but itturned out that what he wassaying chimed with whatmany people felt, that public

opinion shared that view that some ofthe foreign policy decisions have not ac-tually made us safer.”

Behind everything was the awarenessthat the Labour leader was likely to beattacked as an extremist.

It was reported by the Daily Tele-graph that Howell had proposed the slo-gan “The Tories are the real extremists”to a campaign meeting, but had beenoverruled.

He denies that the proposal was to usethe slogan in campaigning: “There was aslide that talked about the Tories as thereal extremists.

“The point of the slide was to say thatwe did need an element of attack in ourcampaign - and the Tory campaign wasalmost all attack.

“So all I was saying in my presenta-tion was that we needed to show that ifthey were going to attack us as extrem-ists, many of the things that they weredoing were pretty extreme.”

With the election over, Howell saysLabour’s campaigning strategy will bemaintained: “We definitely don’t want tolose the momentum - but a degree offocus moves back to parliament, [so] ithas to dovetail with campaigning.

“We keep momentum on both fronts -they have to complement each other.”

The combined impact of social media and the obligation onbroadcasters to give fair coverage were the major factors inLabour’s unexpected strong showing in the UK generalelection, according to a key member of leader Jeremy Corbyn’s communications team.

By JAMES STEWART - Lecturer, Cardiff University.

How Corbyn cut through: exclusiveinterview with a senior Labour strategistPublished in - The Conversation UK - of which Cardiff University is a founding partner.

Steve Howell

Jeremy Corbyn



Letter from troubled Latin America

VenezuelaThe crisis deepens, and a clear pro-im-perialist strategy has now appeared.

There is an economic war, created bythe right-wing opposition with imperial-ist help in maintaining low crude oilprices. Venezuela, with the largestproven oil reserves in the world, is tooimportant to the USA to give up easily.

I suspect that the continual refusal ofSaudi Arabia to cut production enoughto lift prices has to do with pressurefrom its US ally to maintain the crisis inVenezuela.

Is it too far-fetched to think that thedeal made with Iran, to lift sanctionsand thus increase oil supply, was also in-fluenced by this factor?

So there are shortages of food andmedicines, hoarding, the black market,galloping inflation, speculation and cor-ruption in general.

The violent protests organized by theopposition, are limited in Caracas, thecapital, to an upper middle class area,but have no end. Although there isgrowing feeling against violence, theatmosphere of destabilization will havesome effect.

Taking advantage of the discontentcaused by the government’s inability tosolve the economic problems, the right-wing scored a major victory in the De-cember 2015 elections to the NationalAssembly (Parliament).

The opposition MUD (Table ofDemocratic Unity) got 56% of the votes(7.7 million), and the Great PatrioticPole 41% (5.6 million). This latter in-cludes the PSUV (United SocialistParty), with 52 seats, and the Commu-nist Party, 2 seats.

The results of the election of fourdeputies (MPs) in the Amazonas regionwere declared void by the SupremeCourt (TSJ) because of irregularities butthe opposition insisted on countingthem. Thus the National Assembly put


itself in contempt of court, and its deci-sions have been ignored by the govern-ment since.

Faced with opposition violence andthe deepening crisis, President Madurorepeatedly appeals for peace. In a sur-prise measure, on May first he called forelections to a new National ConstituentAssembly (NCA) to write a new consti-tution.

This promises peace, a solution tofinancial speculation, and a move to anew economic model.(1) It will at leastbuy time to try and solve the dramaticeconomic situation.

The MUD organized an unofficial‘plebiscite’ on Sunday 16th July, de-manding rejection of the NCA, and call-ing on the armed forces to supportdecisions of the National Assembly.

They claimed 7.6 million votes but nocheck is possible, as the ballots werepublicly burned the same day. This wasfollowed by a call for a ‘civic strike’ onthe following Thursday.

This was said to be very partial by the

government, apart from affecting com-merce, but public transport was affectedin opposition-held areas of Caracas.There were road blocks, an attack on thenational television station, people burnedalive, and armed attacks on police andbarracks, including now the use of rifles.

Then, the Assembly illegally voted toappoint new judges on the SupremeCourt. Their strategy seemed to be:Sabotage the 30th July elections and tryto achieve a low voter turnout; Declarethe NCA to be illegitimate, and theNational Assembly (NA), its appointedSupreme Court, and Election Council tobe the legitimate powers, and call for for-eign intervention to back this up.

The viciously neoliberal governmentsin Brazil and Argentina, the big powersin Latin America, would support themand a coup d’etat might follow, depend-ent of course on achieving significantsupport in the armed forces.

Is the political process in Venezuelarevolutionary? Certainly, because achange in class power is at stake.

The Communist Party of Venezuelahas formed, with other left-wing forces,a ‘Popular Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Front’, which calls for a revolu-tionary solution to the crisis, powermoving definitively to the working classand the people. It has called for unitywith the PSUV.

Maduro has said the judges ‘ap-pointed’ by the NA to the supreme courtwill be arrested, a strong, positive move.

The opposition called a 48 hour civicstrike for Wednesday and Thursday 26thand 27th July, just before the NCA elec-tion. These ever more violent protestshave increased the desire for peace.

In any revolutionary process there arecritical points, decisive for the future. Imay be too sombre, but I have been re-minded of the title of an article by JorgeInsunza, the Chilean communist leader,some months before the coup in 1973:‘You must be a hammer or an anvil’.

He was quoting from Georgi Dim-itrov’s speech when on trial for his life in1933 in Germany for the Reichstag fire.

The great Bulgarian communist leaderquoted in turn from the poem ‘Another’by the renowned German poet, Goethe:

Hope is never lost, but the present picture in Latin Americais not good in general, and very different from the sweepingleftward surge of a just a few years ago.

By DAN MORGAN, Chile.

There is an economic war,created by the right-wingopposition with imperialisthelp in maintaining low crudeoil prices.

Venezuela, with the largestproven oil reserves in theworld, is too important to theUSA to give up easily.

... the continual refusal ofSaudi Arabia to cut productionenough to lift prices has to dowith pressure from its US allyto maintain the crisis inVenezuela.



“.. You must either conquer and rule orserve and lose, suffer or triumph, beanvil or hammer.”

Dimitrov continued: “Yes, he whodoes not want to be an anvil, must be ahammer. The German working class didnot realize the truth of this either in1918, or in 1923, or on July 20, 1932,or in January 1933 ...”.

Faced with an ever more intransigentand aggressive opposition, backed by im-perialist money and plotting, it is to behoped that the Venezuelan working classwill choose to be hammer, and not anvil.

The NCA is a good start. Electionstook place on Sunday 30th July. Theresult was a massive vote of over 8 mil-lion, 41% of the total possible, despitethe boycott with intimidation by theopposition.

Note that the voting machines give apaper record for each vote, so claims offraud are laughable. It was a vote aboveall for peace.

Many of the countries in Latin Amer-ica have fallen in with the US State De-partment line of calling for an ‘end toviolence, and dialogue’ implicitly andfalsely blaming the government for theviolence and crisis.

ALBAAt the recent meeting of the Organiza-tion of American states (OAS) an at-tempt to censure Venezuela was defeatedby the majority of Caribbean islands,who have received important solidarityfrom Venezuela in the form of cheap oil.

The countries of the ALBA - theBolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of

Our America - have rejected the recentthreats of intervention by the govern-ment of the USA.

Apart from Venezuela, the ALBAcountries are: Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador,Nicaragua, and the islands of St Lucia,St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Granada,Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts& Nevis. Suriname and Haiti are alsoobserver nations.

Cuba is in the process of discussion ofa new economic model, which aims toprotect its economic independence.

Bolivia has the highest economicgrowth rate in the continent this year,and continues to improve social welfareand reduce poverty.

Ecuador has also suffered from low oilprices but is now recovering. The rightwing there also made a push for the re-

ARGENTINA

LATIN AMERICAnNo of countries: 20

nPopulation: 627 million

nLargest countries by pop.Brazil - 205.6mMexico - 122.4mColombia - 49.1mArgentina - 43.5mVenezuela - 31.6mPeru - 31.4mChile - 18.0m

nLargest cities by pop.Mexico City - 20.9m (Mex.)Sao Paulo - 20.8m (Bra.)Buenos Aires - 13.4m (Arg.)Rio de Janeiro - 12.5m (Bra.)Bogota - 9.8m (Col.)Lima - 9.7m (Peru)Santiago - 7.2m (Chile)



cent general elections, with the massmedia as usual having the most impact.

However, Lenin Moreno was electedin the run-off with 51%, having got 39%in the first round.

Lenin is the successor to Rafael Cor-rea who, in 10 years as president,achieved remarkable social and economicsuccess, having inherited a country al-most in bankruptcy and chaos.

Lenin Moreno is another Latin Amer-ican politician whose name reflects theinfluence of communist parties on thecontinent. There are several Vladimirs.

He seems to be very different, how-ever, and even Correa, no hard-liner, hascriticized him for being too conciliatorywith the rabid opposition.

NicaraguaNicaragua - since 2007 - under Presi-dent Daniel Ortega again, is probably themost stable of the Central American

countries, with economic progress andsocial gains, at the cost of giving up theaim of moving to socialism.

ColombiaAfter 53 heroic years, and severalattempts to win a peace agreement, the

financing of them all (nearly) by bigbusiness in Chile.

The right-wing press and a lot of postson Facebook hammer away at this, andthe centre-left will suffer as right wingersdo not worry about it.

The Communist Party, with 6deputies in congress, has had a signifi-cant impact in improving the policies ofthe ruling coalition, the New Majority(NM) but has suffered electorallybecause of its association with theothers.

The main candidate for the NM is anindependent, a senator but a formerjournalist. The hope is, he will sufferless than a party political candidate.

He is against Sebastián Piñera, thedevious former president, a teflon manwho shrugs off the evidence of his shadybusiness dealings.

A new political movement has alsoarisen, due to the revulsion against thetraditional parties - the ‘Frente Amplio’(Broad Front).

This is a varied alliance of left-wing,green and liberal parties and movementsand has got a lot of publicity from ‘ElMercurio’ the consistently right-wingand pro-imperialist daily. Its candidate,Beatriz Sánchez, will split the progres-sive vote but probably not achieve goingto the second round of voting.

These elections, for Congress also, willbe the first under new rules: perhaps thebiggest gain of this parliament has beenthe prohibition of companies financingpolitics, and the end of the binominalsystem. There will now be a limited formof proportional election, with at least 3deputies or senators elected from eachconstituency.

guerilla army FARC-EP has finally beenable to disarm and pass onto politicalstruggle.

President Santos fought hard againsthis predecessor Uribe to achieve this,and now the agreement is not beingproperly fulfilled by the Colombian state– whether with Santos’ connivance, or bystate forces opposed to the agreement, isnot known.

The situation is not easy by anymeans: political violence in Colombiahas been almost continuous since 1948,and many leaders of previous guerrillagroups were assassinated after peaceagreements.

Murders of trade unionists, social andpolitical activists are common and themeans to stop these are difficult to find.

ArgentinaPresident Macri, after wining just 51%of the votes against a weak candidatechosen as the successor to Cristina Fer-nández, has now reversed many of theprogressive policies of Cristina and Nés-tor Kirchner before her.

This has been helped by the weak po-litical base; Peronism is such a diversemovement. Now it seems to be re-orga-nizing, and forming alliances with moresolid and left-wing movements.

There have been successful strikesagainst Macri’s policies – opposition tothem is massive, and what is needed noware the political alliances to defeat themfirstly at the ballot box.

BrazilHere in the continent’s giant, the situa-tion is similar. The fraudulent impeach-ment of Dilma Rouseff for non-existentcorruption, by the wholly corrupt Con-gress, has been followed by the imposi-tion of vicious neoliberal policies.

The reaction is developing but the ob-vious opposition leader, Lula de Silva,may be prevented from standing nextyear as president by a recent convictionfor corruption – followed by the freezingof his assets.

He will appeal but the reactionarysupreme court may well uphold the de-cision.

Another Workers’ Party (WP) candi-date might be found but would not havethe popularity of Lula.

The WP itself is far from free of cor-ruption, and a long furrow needs to beploughed to develop other, more consis-tent socialist forces.

ChileThe elections in October this year will behard fought. There is much feelingagainst the traditional political parties,because of the revelations of illegal

FOOTNOTES1. The 9 objectives of the NCA, asgiven by President Maduro, are: 1) To restore peace, 2) Develop a new economic model, apost-oil economy, 3) Give the Social Missions constitu-tional status, 4) Strengthen the judicial system totackle corruption, impunity, specula-tion, etc., 5) Recognise the new forms of democ-racy like the ‘Comunas’, 6) Defend Venezuelan sovereigntyagainst foreign intervention, 7) Promote pluriculturalism, to over-come racial and social hatred, 8) Recognise youth rights, including toa first home, and 9) Preserve biodiversity and promoteecological culture.

Daniel Ortega after his election victory in 1984 and (below) today

as President once again.

Chile’s resilient working class


Cocooned as we still are - just - in oneof the citadels of imperialism, where thestability of the system made it necessaryto buy off the workers, and imperialistsuper-profits made it possible, it issometimes difficult to imagine what classwar can be like. Incidents like Orgreaveare the exception, not the rule.

In contrast Steve Cushion demon-strates, in his short account ‘KillingCommunists in Havana’, the savagerythat the ruling class can descend to; butthat it can also make mistakes; and thatthe Cuban working class was very re-silient despite a long murderous cam-paign against it.

He also shows the anti-communistAFL acting as the frontrunner for theAmerican State Department in LatinAmerica.

Published by the Socialist History As-sociation and subtitled The Start of theCold War in Latin America, this bookletcovers in detail about fifteen years fromthe beginning of the Second World War,and describes the battles between the or-ganised working class and the big USfirms invested in Cuba and representedby the Cuban government.

Having quickly shown how Americancapital, in particular sugar capital in thename of the United Fruit Company,came to dominate and constrain theCuban economy, Cushion describes thedevelopment of the Cuban trade unionmovement, which, with over one sixthof the population organised in the CTC(Workers’ Confederation of Cuba), had,by the late nineteen-forties, ‘the highestpercentage of trade unionised workers inLatin America.’

The CTC was dominated by theCuban Communist Party, founded in1925, later known as the PSP (PartidoSocialisto Popular).

In consequence of the perceived needto defend the Soviet Union by helpingthe war effort, during the Second World

Cuba’s resilientworking class

War the Cuban Communist Party, likemany other communist parties in Alliedcountries, had temporarily come to termswith the government and big employers,in return gaining certain reforms.

However with the defeat of the Axispowers, the Soviet Union once again be-came, to the capitalist class and Americain particular, the enemy, along with thecommunist parties in the countries hith-erto allied with it.

Thus in Cuba the aim of the employ-

ers was, of course, to remove the gainsmade by the workers during the war, todiminish the power of the working class,and to remove the influence of the PSP.

American Federation of LabourIn the United States the American Fed-eration of Labour (AFL), an anti-social-ist organisation which placed ‘the interestof the union bureaucracy over any no-tion of workers’ solidarity’, during theSecond World War offered its services tothe US government in combating com-munism in Latin America.

An Italian anti-communist, SerafinoRomualdi, under its auspices touredLatin America towards the end of thewar and in February 1946 he wasappointed as AFL special representativeto Latin America. Philip Agee describedhim as, “The principal CIA agent forLabour relations in Latin America.”

His task was to destroy the CTAL(Confederacion de Trabajadores deAmerica Latina), set up in 1938 to uniteall the workers of Latin America.

It contained communists and its leaderwas regarded as a fellow-traveller. Ro-mualdi saw the Cuban CTC as crucialto the CTAL, and set about destabilis-ing the CTC.

In the CTC at that time the importantpolitical parties were the PSP and thePartido Autentico, the ruling party inCuba, known as the Autenticos.

Because the latter party had littleworking class support it was convenientfor it to co-operate with the PSP.

These two groups plus other inde-pendent trade unionists willing to workwith them referred to themselves as theunitarios – probably what we would callthe broad left. The overtly anti-commu-nist Autenticos formed the ComisionObrera Nacional (Autentica)(CON(A)).

During the war the US State Depart-ment had reined in the CON(A) in itsattempts to take over the CTC, but in1946 the Cuban President Grau won amajority in the mid-term parliamentaryelections, which meant he no longerneeded the support of the communists.He encouraged the CON(A) thenceforthin its anti-communist crusade.

Around the 1947 Congress of theCTC a battle was waged which startedwith arguments about delegates’ creden-tials and ended with a member of theCON(A) killed and a PSP memberwounded.

The Minister of Labour, Carlos Prio,suspended the Congress. The CTC of-fices were then raided and several peopleincluding Aracelio Iglesias, a leadingdocker, were arrested on trumped-upcharges of possession of arms.

The new government-appointed cre-dentials committee then dragged its feetand had not reported a month later, so,following a successful May Day rally, theGeneral Secretary of the CTC, LazaroPena, ‘decided not to wait for the creden-tials report and the CTC executive con-vened the fifth congress on the 4th May.’

Despite a call from the CON(A) toboycott the congress, three quarters of

Killing Communists in Havana (The Start of the Cold War in Latin America) by Steve CushionPublished by the Socialist History Society

Review By GINA NICHOLSON

Killing Communistsin Havana

(The Start of the Cold War in Latin America)

by Steve Cushion

Published by the Socialist History Society

Steve Cushion demonstrates... the savagery to which theruling class can descend; butthat it can make mistakes;and that the Cuban workingclass was very resilientdespite a long murderouscampaign against it.



the labour movement sent delegates.The CON(A) and the independents

then held their own Congress on July6th, and elected Angel Cofino, an ‘inde-pendent’ and leader of the electricalworkers’ federation, as General Secre-tary. This congress was financed by theMinistry of Education with $40,000 in-tended for primary education.

Carlos Prio, the Minister of Labour,had been working, behind the scenes,with Eusebio Mujal, who soon becamethe effective leader of the CON(A).

Cushion describes him: ‘Mujal hadnever been a worker, but was an ex-Communist, ex-Trotskyist, now Auten-tico parliamentary representative fromGuantanamo ... He did not allow this tostand in his way; his political connec-tions, personal corruption, and murder-ous ruthlessness amply compensated forhis lack of a base in the trade unionmovement.’

The Ministry of Labour recognisedthe CON(A) congress and held the uni-tarios’ congress to be null and void, ex-pelled the unitarios from the CTC HQand handed over the keys to AngelCofino.

The consequent protest strikes wereput down with ‘considerable brutality’and hundreds of arrests. The PSP radiostation was closed down.

Then the CON(A) moved against theunitarios in the constituent unions. Insome this presented no problem; in oth-ers there was a more entrenched tradi-tion of struggle and this demandedstronger methods. The governmentturned to armed gangsters.

GangsterismCuba had a history of gangsterism. Pres-ident Machado had used police andarmy against the street protests arousedby the 1929 slump, and had also set up

unofficial death squads to murder his op-ponents. Inevitably counter-death squadsarose, with little politics but a hatred ofMachado.

Under President Grau (1944-48) twoof these gangs became embedded in thepolice force, leading to an armed battlebetween two factions of the police,known as the Orfino affair.

Under President Carlos Prio (1948-52) gangsterism was raised to a methodof government.

Cushion explains: ‘[Prio] had particu-larly close links with a gang called Ac-cion Revolucionaria Guiteras (ARG)who did much of the dirty work of re-moving those unitario CTC leaders whowould not go quietly and could not bebought; a task facilitated by Prio givingARG leader Eufemio Fernandez a job ashead of the Policia Secreta Nacional ...and appointing Jesus Gonzalez Cartas(aka El Extrano), another prominentARG hoodlum, as Chief of the PoliciaMaritima del Puerto de la Habana’.

Public transport was well unionisedand the union was dominated by thePSP. A leading member of the ARG,Marco Hirigoyen, ‘gained control of thetransport workers’ union in a particularlyruthless manner.’

A peaceful deputation of bus workerswas ambushed and shot at by police andthree workers wounded, one of whom,Anton Lezcano, later died of his injuries.

The police with Ministry of Labourofficials then ejected the elected leader-ship from the Autobuses Modernosunion offices and installed the ‘official’CTC.

There followed a wave of assassina-tions, and shooting attacks (for examplethree train drivers were wounded in ashooting attack, and see table below forsome of the assassinations) whichHirigoyen used to gain control of

the transport union. In the tobacco industry mechanisation

was accepted by the tobacco workers’union (Federacion Tabacalero Nacional(FTN)) for the export market but resis-ted for the domestic market.

When at the end of January 1948Aguirre, the new Minister of Labour, an-nulled the FTN elections, the union‘took scant notice and on 28th February1948 launched a campaign to defendhand rolling of cigars for domestic con-sumption’.

The Minister of Labour then ap-pointed one Manuel Campaneria Rojasas the new head of the FTN. Campane-ria on April 1st attacked the headquar-ters of the Sindicato de Torcedores(Cigar Rollers’ Union) where the ‘dis-placed unitarios leadership of the CTChad taken refuge’, but the building wassuccessfully defended by a large crowdof workers.

The next day Campaneria with tenothers attacked a cigar factory and killeda popular leader of the Havana cigarmakers, Miguel Fernandez Roig. ‘Thegunmen escaped with the aid of thepolice’.

Later that year the FTN held furtherelections which the unitario candidateswon; the government then seized thebuilding of the Cigar Rollers’ Union; theHavana tobacco workers responded witha general strike during which nearly1,000 pickets were arrested.

Attempts by the ‘official’ CTC to getscab labour failed, and the strike contin-ued until all those arrested had been re-leased. The campaign of violencecontinued for some time but the PSPwas able to maintain a significant pres-ence in the industry.

In the sugar industry the union - theFNTA - was controlled by the unitarios.During the late 1940s the sugar industry

2.10.47 Anton Lezcano Transport workers’ leader Killed by police

10.11.47 Manuel Montoro Leading communist activist on the buses Shot in café by ARG gunmen

22.01.48 Jesus Menendez Sugar workers’ leader Shot in back by army officer

02.04.48 Miguel Fernandez Roig Tobacco worker- shop floor activist Killed by newly appointedCampaneria (ARG)

11.04.48 Hector Cabrera Rank and file communist on the buses Killed by ARG gunmen

15.10.48 Aracelio Iglesias Dockers’ leader Killed by two gunmen

20.10.48 Carlos Febles Bus driver, union activist Shot dead while asleep in his bus

18.09.49 Jose Oviedo Communist, sugar workers’ militant Shot by Oscar Faez, a CON(A) appointee

18.09.49 Amancio Rodriguez Communist, sugar workers’ leader who had been removed during the purges Shot by gunmen

Some Assassinations 1947-49

was suffering through the fall in sugarprices worldwide.

An alternative - very small - FNTAwas set up and recognised by the gov-ernment. The unitario FNTA ignoredthis and began a campaign of strikes anddemonstrations against wage cuts at theend of 1947. The government sent sol-diers to attack union meetings in the lo-calities.

Jesus Menendez Larrondo, GeneralSecretary of the FNTA, toured thelocalities and at Matanzas station anarmy officer shot him in the back, an as-sassination ordered by the Chief of theArmy General Staff. The funeral ofMenendez was a huge protest in itselfand there were many protest strikes.

In the Havana docks rampant inflationhad been partly met with wage rises, dueto the militancy of the dock workers andthe inspired leadership of Aracelio Igle-sias, who was on the national executiveof the National Maritime Workers’ Fed-eration (FOMN).

Cushion writes: ‘In February 1948, theMinistry of Labour imposed GilbertoGoliath and Juan Arevalo as leaders ofthe FOMN and the communist daily,Hoy, reminded its readers of Arevalo’slinks with Serafino Romualdi and theAFL, whose hand they saw behind thisparticular move.’

When Iglesias was re-elected FOMNsecretary for the port of Havana the gov-ernment annulled the election and gavecontrol of the union to supporters of theCON(A).

Strikes and demonstrations followed,and two days after a mass meeting Igle-sias was shot in the back and murderedby two gunmen.

Notes of a US Embassy meeting inHavana the following year make it clearthat a gangster named Soler had ‘delib-erately killed Iglesias at the instance ofthe Suri Castillo faction’ and that therewere ‘about 12 more Communist lead-ers that must be eliminated as soon aspossible.’

In 1949 Eusebio Mujal, by a series ofmanoeuvres, took over as General Sec-retary of the CTC. In this year the head-quarters of the anti-communist CIT,which had been set up in opposition tothe CTAL in Latin America, was movedto Havana.

In 1951 the CIT changed its name toOrganizacion Regional Interamericanade Trabajadores (ORIT). In the mid-fifties ORIT out-manoeuvred and re-placed the CTAL in Latin America, thusachieving a more complete victory foranti-communism in the region than waspossible in Cuba itself.

While the assassinations of a numberof workers’ leaders had been setbacks

recover the union subscriptions. The solution was a compulsory check-

off of union dues. This proved unpopu-lar and in many cases unworkable, withthe employers in the sugar industryforced to pay one percent of their wagebill to the FNTA and the CTC and theworkers threatening to strike if thededuction was made to their wages -thus the payment was made out of com-pany profits and greatly resented by theemployers.

This was not the only debacle whichincreased the unpopularity of the gov-ernment, already widely despised be-cause of rampant corruption andcriminality.

The chaotic state of Havana’s publictransport system was due to WilliamPawley, owner of Autobuses Modernos,and the gangsters of the ARG who ranthe transport unions. (For further fasci-nating details of William Pawley, fraud-ster and incompetent spy, the readermust refer to the book itself.)

In this situation the government choseto increase fares, which caused a publicoutcry and gave the PSP newspaperHoy, which had just won a legal battleand restarted publication, a popularcause. After massive protests the increasewas dropped in September 1951.

The magazine Bohemia in January1952 ran an opinion poll in which theOrtodoxos came out 12 points ahead ofthe ruling party, the Autenticos.

President Prio feared an Ortodoxosvictory because they had promised to in-vestigate him, so he ignored all warningsof Batista’s projected coup and inter-vened to prevent the ARG from mur-dering him. When Batista finally stagedhis coup the business community werehis most enthusiastic supporters.

Cushion concludes that the brevity ofBatista’s hold on power was partly dueto the resilience of the working classwhose organisation had been forced todevelop new structures due to the attacksof the post-war years, and had survivedthem.

and it took some time for the workers’movement to recover, that recovery waswell under way in the early fifties.

The corrupt Mujalista leadership ofthe CTC and some constituent unionsproved incapable of completely reiningin the workers’ demands, and on theground the unitarios network remainedand was able to organise quite effectively.

“Dead Cities”In July 1951 an outbreak of strikes in thetobacco industry (against mechanisation)culminated in a wave of ‘dead cities’(ciudades muertes) a form of action inwhich a general strike is accompanied bythe voluntary closing of businesses andshops in an entire town.

During one such action, a protestor,Alfredo Lopez Brito, was shot dead bypolice in Cabaiguan and the townsfolkbegan taking up arms. Seeing that it waslosing control of the situation, the gov-ernment capitulated.

The previous year had seen consider-able turbulence in the sugar industry, inwhich the ‘official’ leadership was mar-ginalised by the still-existing unitarios or-ganisation in the localities.

Cushion points out that the strikes,which broke out simultaneously in anumber of provinces, could not havehappened without ‘an effective networkof militants able to generalise and plansuch action.’ There were also strikes in anumber of docks which the governmentfinally settled at some cost.

The mujalista control of the unionshad destroyed the official organisationwhich collected subscriptions, and itbecame important despite a governmentsubsidy for the ‘official’ unions to

When Batista finally staged hiscoup the business communitywere his most enthusiasticsupporters.

SocialistCorrespondentThe

Discussion, debate and authors’ opinions to encourage the broadest possible discussion and debate around the aims of exposing capitalism and promoting socialism.

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Ten Days that Shook the World

It is impossible to over-estimate the sig-nificance of the Russian Revolution ofNovember 1917, when for the first timein history the working-class gained statepower and held it in the face of all kindsof de-stabilisation and adversity.

Right at the heart of events as theydramatically unfolded John Reed, anAmerican journalist and communist,was eye-witness to the Ten Days thatShook the World.

The vivid title is typical of his writingas he brings to life events both historicand everyday so that the reader can feelwhat it was like to live through the Rev-olution in Red Petrograd, Moscow andat the front in the fight against thecounter-revolutionaries.

It is so skilfully written that it readslike an adventure story, but also man-ages to illuminate the key issues facingthe Bolsheviks and the revolutionaryworking-class.

He draws together what he himselfwitnessed along with excerpts fromspeeches, proclamations, newspaper arti-cles and decrees. It is a must-read foranyone who wishes to understand notonly the Russian Revolution, but any so-cialist revolutionary process.

Reed gives a bit of background at thestart of the book to the development ofthe revolutionary movement from thestrikes and mass political activity of1905.

Russia was a backward country, with arelatively small working-class and a hugepeasantry under the heel of largelandowners.

It was governed autocratically by theTsar, however, the struggles of 1905began to pressurise Tsarism for demo-cratic change. Reforms, however, weretoo little too late and did not address themany grievances of workers, peasantsand soldiers.

Reed also gives an index of the differ-ent political parties, popular and govern-ment organisations of the time. This ishelpful as the sheer number of these andtheir shifting positions in an array of dif-ferent government and popular meetingscan be confusing. Official governmentbodies were increasingly being chal-lenged by organs of popular power, theSoviets, committees directly representingworkers, soldiers and peasants.

The action proper starts in Chapter 3,which covers October 30th to Novem-ber 6th.

During this time Reed gives a pictureof the debates and preparations leadingup to the revolution. He is present in theBolshevik headquarters in the SmolnyInstitute. At the centre of the Revolutionthe Petrograd Soviet (pictured below) isin continuous session with delegatesscarcely sleeping.

The struggle rages in the streets, inworking-class organisations and amongthe soldiers. This is a battle involvingarmed power and force, but is also a bat-tle of ideas and of propaganda where thesupport of each section of the class andthe peasants and each regiment of the

army has to befought for.

“In the barracksand the working-class quarters of thetown the Bolshevikiwere preaching, ‘AllPower to the Sovi-ets!’ and agents ofthe Dark Forceswere urging peopleto rise and slaughterthe Jews, shop-keep-ers, Socialist lead-ers…

“On one side theMonarchist press,inciting to bloodyrepression – on theother Lenin’s greatvoice roaring, ‘In-surrection! ...Wecannot wait anylonger!’”(1)

Each of the nextseven chapters cov-

Ten Days That Shook the World - by John ReedFirst Published - March 1919

Review By FRIEDA PARK

Ten Days thatShook the World

CENTENARY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

John Reed

1917: A meeting of the

Petrograd Soviet Assembly.



ers a single day capturing the excitingebb and flow of the revolution.

At the start the Bolsheviks were not amass party, nor did they command ma-jority support, however, they worked towin people over to their bold and prin-cipled position, that the situation in Rus-sia provided the opportunity forcapitalism’s defeat and for the working-class to take power.

Chapter 4 chronicles the decisive turn-ing point on the 7th of November whenthe Provisional Government falls and theSoviets assume power.

Using their American passports, Reedand his colleagues talk their way into theWinter Palace, at that point still the gov-ernment building.

He describes the demoralised chaos allaround and it is later that same day thatthe assault on the Palace takes place,defining the victory of the revolution.

Reed is out once more in the streets inthe thick of the action: “As we reachedthe Nevsky again another armoured carcame around the corner, and a manpoked his head out of the turret-top.‘Come on!’ he yelled. ‘Let’s go onthrough and attack!’ The driver of theother car came over, and shouted so asto be heard above the roaring engine.‘The Committee says to wait. They havegot artillery behind the wood-piles inthere…’”(2)

“At the Mikhailovsky a man appearedwith an armful of newspapers, and wasimmediately stormed by frantic people,offering a rouble, five roubles, ten rou-bles, tearing at each other like animals.

“It was Rabotchi i Soldat, announcingthe victory of the Proletarian Revolution,the liberation of the Bolsheviki still inprison, calling upon the Army front andrear for support…a feverish little sheet offour pages…”(3)

Though a decisive turning point hadbeen reached victory had not yet been

secured. Among the working-class, peasantry,

soldiers and others, key groups still hadto be won for the revolution and theforces of reaction were organising mili-tary action and de-stabilisation to try tooverthrow the new revolutionary power.

Reed was there on the 8th of Novem-ber when Lenin appeared at the Con-gress of Soviets. He draws a pen pictureof his appearance and demeanour andthe electrifying moment when he an-nounces: “We will now proceed to con-struct the Socialist order!”(4)

In the first place that meant turningthe slogan of the Revolution, “Peace,Bread and Land”, into practical meas-ures.

That day congress debated and agreedas the priority - The Proclamation to thePeoples and Governments of all of theBelligerent Nations - proposing thatthere be a negotiated end to the slaugh-ter of the first World War ensuring a justand democratic peace.

In the same session the Decree onLand was agreed, abolishing privateownership of land and transferring itfrom the big estates to the peasants.

This was followed by the Decree ofthe Constitution of Power, which trans-ferred power to a new state structurebased on the Soviets.

By the standards of our own ponder-ous political processes the swiftness andability of the new Soviet power to agreethese positions demonstrates thedynamism of a revolutionary situationand the seemingly limitless possibilities itprovides.

The debates in the Congress were in-tense and hard-fought, however, puttingits decrees into practice proved evenmore challenging.

Internally and externally there werehuge problems in holding power andbeing able to use it effectively.

Civil servants at all levels refused tocollaborate with the Soviet Government,preventing access to, and sometimes de-stroying, vital records, including finan-cial information.

Funds were cut off to the needy, withthe government unable to counter suchactions. Banks refused to deal with it andthe government had no cash. Utilitiesand telephones were cut off to theSmolny.

It was a day to day struggle for powerand resources.

Reed describes the scene in the tele-phone exchange, where despite the offerto improve the pay and conditions of thetelephonists, most of them fled the build-ing, leaving only a handful of womenwho then had to train from scratch amotley selection of volunteers.

Food which had been horded by spec-ulators was seized and emissaries sentout with goods to barter with the peas-ants for grain.

The use of electricity was limited tosave power. The banks were nation-alised.

Despite the chaos and defying theodds stacked against it, the Revolutionfound solutions to the problems it en-countered, doing whatever had to bedone.

Efforts at destabilisation went further.Counter-revolutionaries declared war onthe Soviet government and were backedup in this by foreign powers.

On November 9th, Kerensky placedhimself at the head of the regimentswhich “remained faithful to the father-land”.(5) Kerensky had been prime min-ister in the toppled ProvisionalGovernment and was on the right of thereformist forces in Russia.

The capitalist press played its part inspreading untruths and stoking up fear,leading to the banning their newspapers.

On the 10th of November Reed visits


February 1917 - “Red” Petrograd: revolutionaries (left) and Red Army soldiers (right)march in support of the revolution.

Petrograd - originally named St. Petersburg in 1713 - became Leningrad in 1924 and again St. Petersburg in 1991.



the front-line, describing graphically thefight for Petrograd.

“As we came out into the dark andgloomy day all around the grey horizonfactory whistles were blowing, a hoarseand nervous sound, full of foreboding.By tens of thousands the working-peo-ple poured out, men and women: by thetens of thousands the humming slumsbelched out their dun and miserablehordes.

“Red Petrograd was in danger! Cos-sacks! South and south-west they pouredthrough the shabby streets toward theMoskovsky Gate, men, women and chil-dren, with rifles, picks, spades, rolls ofwire, cartridge-belts over their workingclothes … Such an immense, sponta-neous out-pouring of a city was neverseen! ... the revolutionary proletariatdefending with its breast the capital ofthe Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic!”(6)

Ultimately this attempt to over-throwSoviet power is defeated by troops loyalto the revolution, the Red Guards(7) andthe armed working-class that Reeddescribes. Kerensky flees and his troopssurrender on November 15th.

“I went back to Petrograd riding onthe front seat of an auto truck, driven bya workman and filled with Red Guards.... The old workman who drove held thewheel in one hand, while with the otherhe swept the far-gleaming capital in anexultant gesture. ‘Mine!’ he cried, hisface all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petro-grad!’”(8)

During all this ferment the Congress

of the Soviets continued to meet andissue decrees. On November 15th thereis the Declaration of the Rights of thePeoples of Russia, signalling the end ofimperial domination of the minorities ofthe Russian empire. Secret treaties be-tween Russia and other imperialist pow-ers are published and Russia sues forpeace effectively ending its involvementin the First World War.

On the international stage the new So-viet government demonstrates its radicaldeparture from the norms of imperial-ism, dominating and exploiting other na-tions.

It is an end to Russia’s involvement incarving up the world by agreement be-tween great powers and to the fightingof wars to serve these interests.

The final chapter of the book coversthe Peasants’ Congress. By that point,18th November, 11 days after the storm-ing of the Winter Palace and the fall ofthe Provisional government the peasantsof Russia still had not been fully won forthe Revolution. Given the vast numbersof peasants, compared to the working-class this was a necessity.

Reed describes the cut and thrust ofdebate, with the congress eventually de-claring unanimously its support for theRevolution and the victory of Socialism.

There are many lessons about the rev-olutionary process that can be drawnfrom Reed’s account:

nThere was already mass unrestacross Russia leading up to the Revolu-tion. This did not initially have a revolu-

tionary or socialist character,nevertheless, Lenin and theBolsheviks understood thedepths of the crisis of Tsarismand capitalism and that thepeople were prepared to act toaddress their grievances.

nDisaffection among ordi-nary soldiers worn out bybeing cannon-fodder forTsarism in the First World Warmeant that the state could notrely on them to put down aninsurrection, indeed manywere also being won over torevolutionary, socialist ideas.The Bolsheviks correctly iden-tified that this had the poten-tial, not just to achieve changein Russia, but to be a revolu-tionary moment.

nThough not a mass party,the Bolshevik’s organisationand political analysis won overworkers, soldiers and peasants,defeating the other partieswhich had more cautious, re-formist programmes.

nUsing a Marxist analysis,the Bolsheviks were clear about the na-ture of class power and the necessity ofdefeating the ideological and armedmight of the capitalist state, completelyreplacing it with the institutions andideas of working-class power.

nThey anticipated and resolutely com-bated counter-revolutionary attempts atdestabalising and over-throwing Sovietpower.

The success of the Russian revolutionwas not a foregone conclusion but, see-ing that it could be possible to achievesocialism, the Bolsheviks acted decisivelyto make it happen.

They also saw the significance of therevolution as not just national, but as in-ternational, ending the imperialistslaughter of the First World War, offeringfreedom to the oppressed peoples ofRussia and leading the way for the work-ing-class elsewhere to follow its example.

FOOTNOTES1. All quotes from Progress Publish-ers Edition of Ten Days that Shook theWorld. P602. P873. P88.4. P1175. P1326. P1567. These were militias of working peo-ple, not part of the regular armedforces of the state.8. P200


US, British and Japanese troops parade in the Russian Pacific port ofVladivostok in support of the Tsarist counter-revolutionary White Army.

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