From The Commune

Last month the English Defence League announced plans to march in Tower Hamlets, East London, in protest at an Islamist conference planned for June 20th at the Troxy centre. The conference was planned by groups tied to Islamic Forum Europe, among the major Islamist groups in the area.

Anti-racists planned to demonstrate against the EDL: but the SWP-run Unite Against Fascism and its front group United East End insisted this should be on the basis of uncritical support for — and collaboration with — the conference organisers. This meant whitewashing the worst religious fundamentalists and supporting their right to represent the Bengali community in the borough.

While the conference was ultimately cancelled by the Troxy centre, and the EDL abandoned their march, UAF held their demo regardless. Here local Bengali secular activist Ansar Ahmed Ullah reflects on the episode.

What is Islamic Forum Europe?

In 1971, during the Liberation War of Bangladesh, there were widespread killings of the civilians and other atrocities were carried out by the occupying Pakistani forces and their local collaborators.

The collaborators were local Islamist groups, namely Jamaat-e-Islam, Nezam-e-Islam and the Muslim League.

Soon after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 some of the alleged Jamaat-e-Islami war criminals fled Bangladesh and took refuge in various Arab countries, Pakistan and the UK. A Channel 4 Dispatches programme aired on 1995 exposed such 3 alleged war criminals.

The IFE was set up by one such alleged war criminal in 1989 to disguise their past crimes and fundamentalist ideology.

What was your reaction when the EDL announced their plans to march and UAF planned its counter-demo?

The entry of the English Defence League into Tower Hamlets to protest against the meeting was a direct provocation to stir up racial tensions, foment dissent among faiths and attempt to bring disunity amongst the communities of the borough. We condemned the fascist EDL whose sole objective is to act as storm troopers for the British National Party and pick up the pieces for them after their miserable rout in the local and national elections in neighbouring Barking and Dagenham Council.

However, we are also opposed to fundamentalism and so had watched with growing concern the way in which the United East End coalition become a hub for legitimising the base of Jamaat-e-Islami activists in the borough. We had questioned how and why the Islamic Forum Europe came to occupy such a central place in the mobilisations.

We believe that fascism and fundamentalism should be challenged equally.

They are both right wing forces growing in strength and numbers within local areas, and any campaign against the right wing should encompass an active stand against both fascism and religious fundamentalism.

We continue to oppose the EDL unconditionally but we also do not want to be involved in anything that consolidates the power base of IFE in this way.

We in the Bengali and the Muslim community were being asked to stand side by side with the most reactionary, far right, anti-Bengali, Anti-Hindu, Anti-Jewish, fundamentalist group, IFE. This we refused to do. The IFE does not represent the Muslim community in Tower Hamlets nor do they uphold the glorious tradition of Cable Street, Altab Ali (murdered by racists in 1978) and the anti-racist movement.

Under the patronage of an exclusivist Wahhabi Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia they are attempting to impose it amongst the Bengalis in the borough. Just as the EDL takes the guise of being ordinary English citizens to hide their true identity of fronting the fascist BNP, so do IFE act as the sole representatives of ordinary Muslims but are in fact operating under the direction of their parent organisation Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh.

What effect did this episode have on the Bengali community?

It is hard to say what threat the EDL posed because they do not exist in Tower Hamlets: but whatever the threat the Bengali community is able to defend itself.

The Bengali community has a long tradition of resisting racists from the 1970s to 1990s. Racism has to be fought on many fronts, socially with the local white working class, politically with alliances with other progressive anti-racist parties, institutionally and in unison with all communities.

The cancellation of the Troxy event was a victory for secular forces and those who are opposed to fundamentalism. The majority of Bengalis are secular, (in the South Asian sense, not necessarily opposed to religion but against religious persecution). Like any other community, the Bengali community has many factions based on ideology, class, region, profession and party political lines. But a sense of community does exist when it comes to the greater welfare of the whole Bengali community.

Why have Islamist groups become influential in Tower Hamlets, and why do the left associate with them?

By the 1990s another key development was the increasing importance of religion, in the case of Bengalis, Islam. This was partly due to New Labour government association of faith in its agenda.

In addition, in the weeks after 11th September 2001, with the prospect of a US-led war in Afghanistan, the Stop the War Coalition was founded in London, bringing together a number of organisations, the largest of which was the Socialist Workers Party and more importantly MAB (Muslim Association of Britain) associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) its leadership associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami. The inclusion of MAB & MCB enabled the mobilisation thousands of Muslims, including the young, to get involved in the anti-war movement. This ensured for the first time that large numbers of third generation Muslims took part in global political campaigns.

The MCB-linked Jamaat-e-Islami is the largest Islamist political party of the Indian sub-continent, that operates under various charities and religious organisations centred around the East London’s biggest mosque. Its activists have managed to infiltrate all the major political parties including the Respect Party that came out of SWP-MCB partnership.

The SWP under the banner of Stop the War Coalition and Respect Party has been working with Islamist groups. This wasn’t surprising as in 1994, Chris Harman, one of the SWP’s chief ideologists argued that the party should make common cause on the issue of “anti-imperialism” with Islamist movements, in part as a way of recruiting their members.

George Galloway’s victory in the 2005 General Election in the Bethnal Green and Bow area was seen as a protest against the Labour Party’s foreign policy. But it also demonstrated the strength of the Islamists within the community and the dramatic shift in British politics when it came to securing the support of Muslim voters. It reaffirmed that global issues were prioritised in the Islamist agenda and when it came to appeal to the Bengali voters, the ‘Muslim’ sentiment was the focus of the election campaign.

We must challenge those who advocate the racialisation of politics.

Southwark Trade Union Council presents: Southwark Unites against the Emergency Budget at the Salvation Army Community Church Hall, 1 Princess Street, London SE1 6HH on Monday 19th July 2010 at 7pm.

The Coalition Government have declared war against working people and the poor. Despite attempts to dress up the budget as “progressive”, independent economists have given it a damning verdict.

Join the fight for our rights and collective interests and get involved

By Joshua Rooney

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls at the City of London Academy

From 2004 to 2008, I attended the City of London Academy in Southwark, one of four Academies sponsored by the Corporation of London; the others are in Camden, Islington, and Hackney. The main subject focus of the school was therefore Business studies, regardless of the fact that it was neither a required curriculum subject nor students’ desire to actually study business, and students were also required to take the mandatory Business GCSE, again, regardless of student needs or wants.

In addition to the educational favouritism, the school also had a token amount of students who actually lived in the City, and they were provided with minibuses to ferry them to and from school every day, whilst non City students had to take public transport – even when it was quite late at night after clubs and detentions, there was no consideration for the younger students who were made to travel on buses through rough areas as late as 9PM. Uniforms were also expensive, up to £90 for a blazer, and a requirement for leather shoes, once again, not a problem for the City kids, but a large investment for the families of students in poorer areas which made up about 95% of the school population, including myself.

For the first two years of the schools existence, it was housed in a sizable complex of portacabins, first on the grounds of Waverley School (now Harris Girls Academy) in Peckham, and for the last year, on what would become the completed building’s football pitch. By the time it was moved to Bermondsey, the population had doubled, and was far too small for 300 students and 100 staff, in addition to this, it was often freezing cold in winter, or boiling hot in summer, and after a year of use, was incredibly tatty on the inside, with only two sets of toilets for males and females, these often became disgusting to the point of unusable as so many people had to use them. No attempt to improve the facilities was ever made, even after numerous complaints.

The lack of facilities or care on this matter has to be the responsibility of the overall management of the school, which was appalling. They weren’t referred to as “heads” or “deputy heads” in day to day parlance, they were the “Senior Management Team”, in addition to this, the school employs “heads of years”, these roles are not teaching roles, but another subsection of the management. This is a school, not a business, although the levels of micromanagement would lead people to believe otherwise.

I hated it there, I hated the disorganisation (GCSE students work was routinely lost, resulting in poorer than deserved results), the way badly behaved students were provided with so many resources and benefits whilst the students who actually wanted to achieve were set aside and had to suffer for it, and those students with genuine problems such as ADHD, were excluded. No help, no support, just exclusion. I have no doubts this was to keep the records looking good.

The ConDem academies program must be stopped, this is not the way our future should be taught, this serves to damage their confidence in the education system, and will leave them seriously struggling at GCSE time and the beginning of their adult life.

NASUWT & Anti-Academies have called for a lobby of Parliament on Monday 19th July 2010. For more information visit here: http://www.antiacademies.org.uk/Home/opposing-the-academies-bill/protestonjuly19th

by Chuka Umunna

So now we know: the action being taken by this Lib-Con government in the name of deficit reduction will cost at least 1.1m jobs across the public and private sectors. How do we know this? Because the Treasury says so, hence today’s big story.

But far from the media circus, a new deficit is growing. Not a fiscal deficit, but a generational one. It takes the form of the thousands of young people who will leave school this September with no prospects of work or training and who risk slipping into a crippling cycle of long-term unemployment. It is a debt that the new government is racking up in order to fund a macho, ideologically motivated drive to slash government spending deep and fast. And unlike the fiscal deficit, it will not take four or six or 10 years to pay down; it will take a generation.

The cause? The cavalier approach of this government to youth unemployment. After less than three weeks in, the coalition announced it would be abolishing Labour’s £1.2bn Future Jobs Fund (FJF), substituting it with apprenticeship funding worth some 12% of the original total. This move ditches the 100,000 jobs for 18-24 year olds funded by the FJF this year alone.

In my neck of the woods, the FJF has provided £1.2m to support 200 posts for local young people who, otherwise, would be in the dole queue, losing hope and motivation with every passing month. Instead, it has given them valuable new skills, self-esteem and a sense of structure and purpose – all of which stimulates the local economy, cuts crime and makes everyone healthier and wealthier.

A cursory glance at Labour’s budget in March shows the FJF was entirely compatible with the goal of reducing government debt. It has helped boost the fragile recovery and, in the medium term, will actually reduce government outgoings. Research by the Treasury has shown that every £1 invested in similar schemes in the past saved the taxpayer £3 in benefits. It’s no-brainer, but Britain’s new chancellor doesn’t get it.

And the similarities between his emergency budget and Geoffrey Howe’s budgets in the early 1980s are deeply worrying when one considers the civil unrest which followed then. It is all the more worrying given that Howe sought to reduce spending by 4% and George Osborne now seeks to do so by a whopping 25%. Then, as now, the government cut too soon and too deep, with no effectual schemes to keep young people active.

It sends a shiver down my spine to reflect on the effect this had on my area – riots in the north of my constituency in the 1980s tore my community apart. On one occasion, my mum was out shopping with my sister and me when unrest broke out. She had to drop the shopping, grab us and run. Yes, police racism was a big cause of the trouble but those riots were also rooted in the deprivation and despair of long-term youth unemployment. The Scarman inquiry, which followed the riots, was clear: “There can be no doubt that [unemployment] was a major factor.”

Today, once again, we witness a Conservative government abandoning young people – this time abetted by the Liberal Democrats. In the long term, this will increase pressure on welfare spending and reduce economic growth, a debt that will cost future governments many billions when the brewing “generational credit crunch” hits. The government appears to suggest we cannot afford to provide the training, employment schemes and apprenticeships needed. They are wrong – we cannot afford not to do so.

Chuka Umunna is the founder of TMP and also the Member of Parliament for Streatham.

From Lefty Cartoons

From the texts I got last night, it appears a lot of my English friends are all Ghanaians now with the disgraceful crashing out of the Capello’s men. England is going home, unsurprising when England failed to beat Algeria, it was a harbinger of worse things to come. The millionaire footballers failed to deliver and Sunny Hundal, editor of Liberal Conspiracy tweeted last night:

England today destroyed right-wing meme that more incentives means people work harder. Cut footballers & boardroom pay!

That tired meme favoured by ideologues of the Right can be summarised further:

It isn’t for anyone to decide wages, laissez-faire capitalism: the market knows best.

This idea has covered multitude of sins from England’s poor World Cup campaign to the greatest recession for 70 years, and once again this meme has exposed to be far from a “truism” but instead a pernicious fallacy.

In 1998 the average yearly wage of a Premiership footballer was £190,000 after a period of getting intensely relaxed about the filthy rich, in 2010 it is now £1.4 million. Therefore you could expect that the England team of today are at least twice (if not 9 times) as good as the England team that led the France ‘98 World Cup campaign. It clearly doesn’t add up.

Capitalism promotes the idea that return on investment must be made as quickly as possible and so footballers rather than being nurtured and cultivated are being bought and sold as mere commodities across the globe. This concept has been extended to football clubs, and ownership has passed around without discrimination, from exiled and corrupt billionaires to debt-ridden American businessmen, the Premiership has already bankrupted more than a few football clubs with the promise of more to keep financial administrators busy. This all happens while millionaire footballers, conspire to avoid paying tax in the country that has enriched them.

The marriage of business and football has long been a tradition in FIFA, but in the Premiership it has brought collosal debt, extortionate match ticket prices, a high turnover of managers and players, and the WAG phenomenon.

However the footballing loving public aren’t taking it lying down completely, there are World Cup alternatives and a supporter-led fightback in Manchester United, supporter-owned teams such as Barcelona point to a better sustainable future for football fans, though Spain isn’t immune to big business football.

Meanwhile in the World Cup, Argentina footballing legend and current Argentina manager Maradona is inspiring and getting the best out of his highly paid players, but those who support capitalism in football must answer this question, can Mammon do the same?

This is painful but important to watch, Diane Abbott struggles to answer very tough questions from Andrew Neil on the “This Week” sofa last night.

It was indeed very harsh and caught Diane unaware which has led some to claim foul play. I can’t say it is unfair for legitimate political questions to be asked on a topical political programme.

Watch:

Will she survive this to win the Leadership election?

Some political commentators are already predicting she’ll need to be getting another taxi.

Hat/Tip: Paul Waugh

Buses also leaving from across Toronto: http://wp.me/sVzSF-buses.

From The Commune

With its first cuts plans the Conservative-LibDem coalition has declared war on the working class.

Day by day we hear fresh appeals to accept mass redundancies, tighten our belts and heap blame on the ‘work-shy’ who are somehow meant to find jobs.

In a sense, the position of communists and the workers’ movement more broadly is obviously weak. The lay-offs and cuts, which had already begun under the Labour government, have only sparked isolated moments of reaction.

Millions are angry at suffering because of the capitalist crisis, but have no confidence in their ability to change the way the world works. In the UK as in crisis-ridden and strike-plagued Greece, a massive cut in working-class living standards is the obvious capitalist solution. Indeed, short of a challenge to the basic assumptions of the system itself, it is inevitable.

To emerge from a state of weakness, or even passivity, we must pose a more fundamental challenge to the order we live in. Fighting this or that cut in jobs and services is insufficient: for that is only organising a defensive reaction to events, not a challenge to how the world is run.

The state we’re in

Capital is constantly adaptable, ever-revolutionised to exert greater control. On  one hand, our employment status and stake in this society is ever-more unstable; on the other, the demands of capital accumulation have an ever-increasing stranglehold over our free time.

In response, many on the left repeat the same old mantras, leading only defensive and sectional struggles while ultimately accepting that the cuts do have to fall somewhere – preferably on ‘someone else’.  Some unions have even produced alternative, ‘fairer’ cuts plans. They question the way in which the products of capitalism are allotted, not the system itself.

But capitalism is not just a system which unfairly distributes wealth amongst the population, or wastes money on weapons rather than schools and hospitals. Rather, it is a series of social relations and hierarchies, at that, a profoundly alienated one.

The much-vaunted need to ‘calm market fears’ or ‘stabilise the euro’ typifies this. An imaginary representation of capital accumulation is allowed to rule over our own needs and wants. This is much like the manner in which religious people police themselves with the laws of divine powers who are in fact mere human creations.

Capitalism denies our human potential. For the sake of order it drills into us the idea that we are powerless; that some are destined to manage and lecture others, whereas the rest of us can change nothing. This is both the main obstacle to building a confident challenge to our rulers, and a central characteristic of existing social relations we need to uproot.

Therefore it is not enough to demand full employment and better wages in spite of the plans for cuts: this only goes so far as asking how to run the capitalist state in a ‘socialist’ way. It does not help us escape from living out the existing social relations.

New order

Rather, communists must advocate a vision to inspire, one which challenges the many hierarchies and expressions of alienation in capitalist society. Only by fighting these alienated relations in the here and now – and including, within the left – could we ever hope to rebuild a confident and revolutionary opposition to the existing social order.

Thus campaigns against education cuts should not only ask why the government is cutting the deficit, but what the purpose and content of education really is and what are the relations between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’, between learning and institution.

The fight against redundancies should not glamourise ‘our industries’ or ‘skilled trades’ but rather be combined with the demand for the right of all to a comfortable life with the maximum of free time and opportunity for learning and leisure.

In struggles against the coalition government we must resist the efforts of managerial Labour politicians – or left group hacks – to take the ‘leadership’ and control of campaigns which are our common endeavour.

Whatever the context, communists should challenge all existing power relations. We must leave no gendered or racist prejudice unchallenged, no overt nor informal hierarchy left standing. We want the real empowerment of millions, not just a few tawdry ‘left’ politicians like Diane Abbott.

Communism

What is most important is to see the communism latent in the struggles of today: we are not just fighting today’s cuts, today’s managers, today’s politicians, but looking to imbue our organisations today with the principles of the society we hope to build for the future.

The left does not have to be bureaucratic, lethargic, without spirit. The left does not have to be undemocratic even more than capitalist society: as many left groups are. The left does not have to reflect the alienation of working-class existence in capitalist society. The Commune looks to express a challenge to alienation, a challenge to the assumption that we are powerless and that humanity deserves its current fate.

“All the idols made by humanity, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to us, and that is why we will always have it in our power to destroy them.”
Simone de Beauvoir

So VAT is up to 20% next year and Nick Clegg has indicated that most Liberal Democrats will vote for it.

Hat/tip: DBH