TMP Online

The 8th March is International Women’s Day. To celebrate this TMP (The Multicultural Progressive) is putting a spotlight on Womens’ rights and liberation, throughout this week. As part of this, TMP has commissioned a special report into the state of women in the UK and internationally.

The London based Black Women’s Rape Action Project has produced this report exclusively for TMPOnline.

Since 5 February, women in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (Bedfordshire) have been on hunger strike. They are protesting indefinite detention, lack of medical care and legal representation, and inadequate time and help with their legal claim. On top of this, they have suffered racist abuse and other violence from private agency staff. Many are mothers suffering separation from children, and most are survivors of rape and other torture. Their detention is contrary both to international law and Home Office regulations.

SOAS students showing solidarity with Yarl's Wood detainees

On day four of the strike, guards with riot shields ‘kettled’ the women in an airless hallway without access to water or toilets. Others were locked outside in freezing conditions for a sustained period of time. Four women, isolated from the others, were transferred to prison.  None of the women have been charged with committing any crime.

Despite efforts from the authorities to divide them,  at the start 84 women from many countries came together to organise the hunger strike.  Most of the detained women are from China, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

Last week John McDonnell MP tabled a parliamentary motion for an immediate independent investigation and a “moratorium on all removals pending the results of that investigation”.

Embarrassed Home Office officials wrote to all MPs denying that women were refusing food – they were getting food from visitors, they said. Women furiously pointed out that visitors are banned from bringing in food.

Other slurs were answered by the All African Women’s Group and Black Women’s Rape Action Project, based in Kentish Town ’s Crossroads Women’s Centre. Teams of volunteers continue to provide round-the-clock support to hunger strikers, providing lawyers’ visits media and contacts (publicity is a protection against abuse).  Sometimes the groups take on cases and stop removals themselves.

Cristel A miss of Black Women’s Rape Action Project said

“We are in daily contact with hunger strikers. Claims that women are treated with ‘dignity and respect’ mean nothing in the face of overwhelming evidence of appalling conditions and abuse. The case for mothers, rape survivors and other vulnerable women to be released grows stronger every day. ”

Stella Mpaka from the All African Women’s Group commented:

“Either children suffer alongside their mothers in detention or they suffer the pain of separation.  Ending the detention of children has to mean ending the detention of families. We know from the many acts of kindness, understanding and compassion from the public that there is widespread though hidden support for us. ”

Mothers will be taking their own action in Yarl’s Wood during the Mothers March for Recognition and Support for the Vital Work of Mothering, Sat 13 March, 2pm.

Activists showing solidarity with Yarl's Wood Hunger Strikers

Abahlali baseMjondolo Solidarity group in association with SOAS War on Want Society Presents:

The Right to Know: The Fight for Open Democracy in South Africa

- A Short Film Showing and Discussion -

7pm – Wednesday 3rd March

Room 4418 (4th Floor, SOAS Main Building)

Since the mid-2000s, a number of social movements in South Africa have organised and acted to improve the lives of those living in substandard housing and working, if at all, precariously in the informal economy and fighting against privatization, evictions, water-collection and electricity cut-offs.

These community-oriented struggles are based in the “illegal” settlements which are mushroom in and around major cities and sections of the countryside because of South Africa’s ongoing housing crisis. Loosely linked together in the Poor People’s Alliance, movements like AbM, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement, and Abahali baseplasini (Rural Network), have taken direct action against government policy and official neglect.

Abahlali Website

UK group email list

Facebook event (please indicate if you’re coming)

UK group blog

All are welcome to enjoy the short film and discussion on these movements, as well as learn how YOU can help support their struggles.

As Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) announce quarterly profits of £772 million this week, cleaning workers and their supporters will be demonstrating at their London offices on Friday 12th February.

The demonstration is in protest at attacks on workers’ pay and the dismissal of Alberto Durango, the cleaners’ now former shop-steward.

Alberto and his supporters believe his sacking is directly related to his workplace union organising and campaigning work.

Many of the cleaners – who are members of the Unite trade union and are predominately migrants from West Africa, Latin America and some European countries – were involved in a campaign in 2008 to win the “London Living Wage” at UBS, currently £7.60 per hour.

Despite this victory, most workers still have to work multiple shifts in order to make ends meet. UBS has encouraged a race to the bottom resulting in their cleaning contractors cutting cleaning staff hours – therefore pay – or make redundancies.

This in contrast to UBS’ announcement on 9th February reporting a 34% increase in their bonus pool to £1.72 billion and their decision last year to increase their London banking staff wages by 15% – 20%.

“Maria” has been cleaning desks and toilets at the UBS Lombard Street offices for over 3 years.

She said:

The Company has broken their promise that they would not change our hours or conditions after we won the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ campaign. A year after getting an agreement on the living wage, we are still fighting. I just want to earn enough to be able to spend time with my family during the weekend.

Unite the Union representative Chris Ford said

The public are outraged by the continued and undeserved bankers’ bonuses since banks like UBS, Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland have been bailed out by public money across the world.

What’s the bankers’ excuse for attacking the subsistence wages of the people who wipe their computer screens and clean their toilets?

Friday 12th February’s “Defend Living Wage – Justice for UBS Cleaners” demonstration is at 1pm outside UBS Capital, 100 Liverpool Street, London EC2M 2RH.

Hat/tip: Liberal Conspiracy

Judith Amanthis reports on how an innovative artist is pioneering methods of engaging working class communities whilst combating the far-right.

Everyone on the UK left knows why some members of the white ex-industrial working class have voted BNP. None that I know of knocks on doors in Doncaster or Dagenham, says “What can we do to help?” and talks to people. That’s what the BNP does.

Is it useful to engage in inside-left (excuse the pun) debate about whether the BNP is a fascist party? Is an elected Hitler likely in multi-racial 21st century UK? When the government’s far right immigration policy is an attempt to stem the haemorrhage of whiteness and Englishness from the UK working class anyway?

Whichever anti-BNP slogan the left chooses, one young woman is acting creatively. Artist Rachel Horne and her friends are trying to drag her South Yorkshire ex-mining community, and especially her generation, away from the BNP, but also from the British army and the drugs barons. An increasingly coercive and privatised social security system doesn’t help.

Horne, a strike baby, was born in a pit village in 1984. It’s where last month, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Great Strike, she organised an All Day Mining Party called Bring Out The Banners. 3000 people came, the brass band played, so did psychedelic folk bands, and Anne Scargill spoke about miners’ wives leaving their kitchens for police cells and speaking tours. Artists ran banner-making workshops. Photos, videos, miners’ memorabilia, and NUM banners became art and local history exhibition in one.

Horne, like Bob Marley, believes that to make something of the present you need to know where you come from. She first saw NUM banners drooping against the wall of Denaby Main and Cadeby Miners Welfare (the pit her father and generations back had worked down) when she was a teenager. Her immediate reaction was as an artist: their beauty and narrative power astounded her.

Then the banners’ meaning: that unity, watching each other’s backs and helping each other out, won battles for better wages and safer working conditions. Going on strike – losing pay – required collective loyalty. Helping your mate out down the pit lost you pay before nationalisation in 1946 brought in the basic wage. (But the bonus was a continuing incentive to work dangerously.) On all these marches, pickets and police battles, NUM banners were what people could see, what rallied them. None of the miners or their wives was armed. For a tightly-knit community, non-violence is a possible fighting tactic.

Horne’s videos, installations, collages, photos and drawings are about her community’s history. She takes it, distant and not so distant, to her community. She wants to create a new culture, new rituals, to replace (or substantiate) the ones Thatcher destroyed.

In 2006 she organised, in her home village Conisbrough, a day event and light installation called Out Of Darkness, Light to commemorate the 410 lives – men, boys and women – lost to Cadeby Main before its closure in 1986. She’s campaigning to get erased and grassed-over ex-colliery sites marked on UK reference maps. She’s had London art shows in which a lump of coal on a plinth takes centre stage, and got flak for it. She’s contributed to a street art exhibition. In 2007 she invited striking postal workers to a screening of her video Life And Land.

Can art be instrumental? Can it change the world for the better? Is Rachel doing art or is she just organising and talking to people? Who’ll pay her wages? Aren’t there problems with public art? Isn’t art really about making objects? Can a culture be fought for, or changed, or even healed, without a concomitant change in people’s standard of living? What’s she offering her community the BNP isn’t?

Horne is nothing if not controversial. But – she’s no fool – she believes artists like her can learn from her community’s collective creativity. She‘s trying to strengthen her enclave of the UK working class. That’s what other communities in the UK working class are doing: the Tamil diaspora, the Somali diaspora, west African women tube cleaners resisting victimisation for union organising, the list goes on. The stronger all these groups are the weaker the BNP is.

© Judith Amanthis 2009