Terrorism of the rich - A tale of two atrocities - from Solihull to Dhaka.

There should be two stories headlining the news in the UK today. This one I link below, yet another death as a result of far-right populist tabloid scapegoating masquerading as legitimate government policy. 

The other is the continuing nightmarish horror of the corporate mass murder of textile workers in Bangladesh. 

Now over one thousand confirmed killed, just so we can have cheap t-shirts. An act of capitalist terrorism against the working-class on a similar scale to 9/11. So why does it not receive the same coverage? Non-stop 24 hour rolling news for weeks? Hell, more than a decade on people still prattle on about 9/11 like it was the most terrible act of suffering ever experienced in the history of humanity.

But a thousand Bangladeshi workers die under the concrete of a collapsed corporate hell hole and its forgotten in days as an "and also in the news". Will the extended families of these people be made instant millionaires in compensation, as the 9/11 families were? Or will Primark, Benneton etc just throw a few pennies, wash the blood from their hands and carry on with business as usual?

From grannies committing suicide in the face of destitution in England, to young women and men crushed under concrete in Bangladesh, it is the same system, the same greed, the same class that pays the price. And it is the same class that is responsible, inflicting misery on the many for the luxury of their few. 

These are acts of terrorism. Acts of war on our people, whether in Birmingham or Dhaka, these are the chains that bind us in common suffering, but that also bond us in common cause. 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bedroom-tax-victim-commits-suicide-1883600

Bedroom Tax victim commits suicide: Grandmother Stephanie Bottrill blames government in tragic note

Grandmother who had to pay extra £20 a week throws herself in front of motorway lorry

Page One Photograph
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Ten days ago Stephanie Bottrill sat in the redbrick terrace house which had been home for 18 years to write notes to her loved ones, the Sunday People reports.

She ripped the pages from a spiral-bound notebook and placed them neatly in little brown envelopes.

There was one for her son. Another for her daughter. Her mother. Friends. And a very special one for the year-old grandson she doted on.

Then in the early hours of last Saturday Stephanie, 53, left her home for the last time, leaving her cat Joey behind as the front-door clicked shut.

She crossed her road in Meriden Drive, Solihull, to drop one of her letters and her house keys through a neighbour’s letterbox. Then she walked 15 minutes through the sleeping estate to Junction 4 of the M6.

And at 6.15am she walked straight into the path of a northbound lorry and was killed instantly. Stephanie Bottrill had become the first known suicide victim of the hated Bedroom Tax.

In the letter to her son, Steven, 27, she had written: “Don’t blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the Government.”

Stephanie was tormented over having to find £20 a week to pay for the two under-occupied bedrooms she had been assessed for.

Days before her death she told neighbours: “I can’t afford to live any more.”

Solihull council Labour group leader David Jamieson, who knows the family well, said: “I’m absolutely appalled this poor lady has taken her own life because she was worried how she would pay the Bedroom Tax.

“I hope the Government will take notice and reconsider this policy.”

The police came to Steven’s door at 9.30 last Saturday morning. They were there with his sister Laura, 23, and he knew something terrible had happened. They told him his mum had taken her own life.

He said: “It was a shock at first. You just ask why? The policeman told me she had left notes. I was on my own, looking after my little boy.

“I just wanted to keep looking after him, to keep it all in. I told the police to keep the note. I was still getting my head round it.”

So it was not until Sunday that Steven was ready to read the note.

He said: “I couldn’t believe it. She said not to blame ourselves, it was the Government and what they were doing that caused her to do it.

“She was fine before this Bedroom Tax. It was dreamt up in London, by people in offices and big houses.

“They have no idea the effect it has on people like my mum.”

On the Thursday before she died – when she wrote the farewell letters –  Stephanie had phoned her son to say she was struggling to cope.

He promised to get help and next day phoned her GP.

Stephanie came home from the GP’s surgery with sleeping tablets.

That Friday teatime, Steven came to see her after he finished work. He tried to reassure her, telling her everything would be OK. He says now he should have hugged her but he thought it might upset her.

Part of Stephanie's note to her son

Page One Photography

On the way home he resolved to take her to A&E next day and stay there until she got the help she needed.

That evening a neighbour took Stephanie some dinner. Like Steven, she thought Stephanie would cope. But neither saw her again. 

In the early hours of Saturday, Stephanie headed downstairs, past boxes of her things packed up and ready to go.

Boxes marked “kitchen” and “bedroom”. Stephanie had nowhere to go. But she had packed anyway so when the council found her a smaller place she would be prepared.

Steven said: “She didn’t want to go but she knew she had to. She couldn’t afford to stay. It was too hard.

“She wasn’t eating properly. There wasn’t any proper food. There were about 30 tins of custard.”

Stephanie had lived in her £320-a-month home for 18 years, but couldn’t cope with the extra £80 she had to find every month.

She needed to downsize but nothing suitable was offered to her.

And she was upset she would have to leave the home in which she raised her two children as a single mother.

The well-kept back garden was Stephanie’s pride and joy. She had buried her favourite pet cats there and she liked to sit out there in the sun and remember them.

Steven remembers they didn’t have much as they grew up. His mum would struggle to afford clothes and food but they were happy and always well-turned out.

As a child Stephanie was diagnosed with the auto-immune system deficiency, Myasthenia gravis.

The M6 motorway in Birmingham where Stephanie commited suicide

The illness made her weak and she had to take constant medication.

Steven said she wanted to work, but there was no way she could.

Doctors had told her she was too ill to hold down a job, but she had never been registered as disabled, so she lived without disability benefit. After splitting with the children’s father, Stephanie raised Laura and Steven on her own.

Steven, an HGV driver, said: “Even though it was difficult for Mum bringing us up on her own, we were really happy here.”

Eventually, Steven left to set up in his own place with his own family.

It was close enough to visit his mum and he came round whenever he could.

Then two months ago Laura also moved out and into a flat with her long-term partner. It happened quickly and Stephanie struggled at first.

It also meant that instead of losing 14 per cent of her housing benefit for one spare bedroom she would now lose 25 per cent for two rooms.

But friends and family rallied round and she began to adjust on her own.

She took the decision to tell the council she was living in a three-bedroomed house on her own.

The £80 per month extra she would have to pay was too much for her. She would have to leave her home.

Steven said: “She was sad about Laura going but she had got over that and was coping. Being asked for the extra Bedroom Tax money was just too much for her.”

Stephanie told her next-door neighbour Tracey Hurley: “I cannot afford to live any more.”

She was visited by officials, who told her she would be charged for any repairs to her property.

That would whittle away the £2,000 she had been offered by the council to move home. It meant Stephanie had to strip wallpaper and lift carpets herself. She also had to mend her back fence.

And they failed to find a suitable property for her – the bungalow they offered was a 30-minute walk from a bus stop and miles from her family and friends.

So Stephanie was trapped in a house she couldn’t afford.

And neighbours did their best to help as she faced losing her home.

Neighbour Tracey, 49, said: “Her garden meant so much to her.

“She called it her special place and the one place she felt at peace.

“But they were going to take that from her. She just couldn’t stand it.” Tracey did her best to care for her friend and saw her on the Friday before she died. She said: “Stephanie hadn’t eaten for three days. She was desperate.

“We were having a barbecue and she popped her head over the fence to say hello. She didn’t want to socialise so I took her some dinner.

“When I went round I hugged her and told her to just come and knock on the door if she needed me.

“I told her not to do anything stupid. The council would have to help her. She asked me for another hug. Then in the morning the police came. I couldn’t believe it.”

Other neighbours on the estate are being hit with the Bedroom Tax.

Tracey said: “They are making me pay it and it’s going to be tough but people don’t have any choice.

“This is not just politics, this is people’s lives.”

Next Friday, Tracey will be among friends and family at the funeral.

The family were struggling to pay so the Sunday People has made a contribution.

Stephanie’s death didn’t make headlines locally. But her friends know exactly what happened to her.

And they believe the shock of her death will be felt far outside her community.

Tracey added: “There’s no way Stephanie is going to be the last to die because of this Bedroom Tax. She’s not going to be the only one.”

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• Haunting Dhaka disaster picture: A last embrace after clothes factory collapse that killed 950

  Photographer Taslima Akhter captured the image of the so-far ­unidentified pair in the rubble of the collapsed building.

  
  
  Taslima Akhter
  This picture of a couple cuddled together in their last moments, illustrates the full human tragedy of the Dhaka factory disaster.

  Photographer Taslima Akhter captured the image of the so-far ­unidentified pair in the rubble of the collapsed building.

  Taslima, who was working alongside rescue teams in Bangladesh, said: “When I saw them, I felt I knew them.

  "They felt very close to me. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘We are not a number – not only cheap labour and cheap lives. We are human beings like you’.

  “Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me.”

  Student Taslima hopes her harrowing image will aid her campaign to improve working conditions in her native city.

  Yesterday 94 more bodies were found as the death toll hit 950 and another 2,500 were injured.

  
  

  

  Mass tragedy: Bangladeshi rescuers work at the site of a building that collapsed

  
  

  AP

  
  

  Today the two-week search for survivors and bodies ends.

  Bulldozers will move in at the site where workers earned £25 a month making clothes for Western firms including Primark which has said it will pay compensation.

  Several people, including the building owner, have been charged with negligence over the disaster on April 24.

  But Taslima will not rest until she has identified her unknown couple.

  She said: “I don’t know who they are or what their relationship is. We found them buried in rubble.

  "The blood from the eye of the man ran like tear.”

DPRK urges U.S. to drop hostility - World News - SINA English

DPRK urges U.S. to drop hostility - World News - SINA English

DPRK urges U.S. to drop hostility

2013-05-11 01:18:05 GMT2013-05-11 09:18:05(Beijing Time)  Xinhua English

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Friday blamed the United States for tensions on the Korean Peninsula and urged it to stop hostility against Pyongyang.

The U.S. claim that all its military actions are defensive while all DPRK actions are provocative is nothing but sheer sophism with rhetoric, the official KCNA news agency quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

It was the U.S. dispatch of B-52, B-2A, F-22 and other warplanes that compelled Pyongyang to take tough countermeasures for self-defense, said the unnamed spokesman.

"Unless the U.S. stops its hostile acts against the DPRK and drops its hostility, the root cause of tension will not be removed and the tension and danger of conflicts are bound to repeat themselves," he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama would be well advised not to talk about "change" in the DPRK but reflect on his own wrong view and make a bold decision to correct it, he added.

On Tuesday, after talks with visiting South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Obama reiterated his country's defense commitment to South Korea with both conventional and nuclear forces.

"Our two nations are prepared to engage with North Korea diplomatically and over time build trust," Obama said, asking Pyongyang to "take meaningful steps to abide by its commitments and obligations, particularly the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

The DPRK had slammed Park's first visit to the United States and her meeting with Obama as a prelude to war.

Tensions have been running high on the Korean Peninsula since the DPRK conducted its third nuclear test on Feb. 12.

Pyongyang warned Tuesday that it would "mercilessly avenge" any breach of its territorial sovereignty during the ongoing South Korean-U.S. anti-submarine drills in the Yellow Sea.

The International Socialist Organization and the imperialist onslaught against Syria - World Socialist Web Site

The International Socialist Organization and the imperialist onslaught against Syria - World Socialist Web Site

The International Socialist Organization and the imperialist onslaught against Syria

By David North and Alex Lantier 
11 May 2013

On May 1, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) released a statement, “Solidarity with the Syrian revolution,” signed by a politically disparate and dubious group of “Syrian, Arab and international activists”, in support of the imperialist-orchestrated conspiracy to remove the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The thoroughly reactionary and politically sinister character of this document is virtually self-evident. The ISO statement aims to provide a cynically-contrived pseudo-left cover, couched in the language of “human rights,” for a proxy war being waged by reactionary mercenary forces financed and armed by US and European imperialism. The ISO statement blatantly falsifies the character of both Syria’s Islamist opposition and US war aims in the Middle East, functioning as a propaganda instrument of power politics.

The timing of the statement’s publication is politically significant. It occurs in the midst of an escalating propaganda campaign in the American and European media to prepare public opinion for direct military intervention in Syria and the installation of a puppet regime in Damascus. The day after the statement appeared, Israeli air strikes hit the Syrian capital.

Held in Tunis, the World Social Forum offered middle class pseudo-left organizations the opportunity to rub shoulders, share drinks, and discuss mutual interests and strategies with scores of state intelligence operatives and established bourgeois politicians. The Tunis event was attended by the US Agency for International Development, which has a record of fronting for CIA operations in Asia and Latin America, and the think tanks of Germany’s two leading bourgeois parties, the Social Democratic Party’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Christian Democratic Union’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. An especially prominent figure at the gathering was Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a leading right-wing figure in the German SPD who served as foreign minister between 2005 and 2009 in the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.The circumstances surrounding the production of this document, which emerged out of a gathering of the World Social Forum in March, stink to high hell. The World Social Forum is a “left” political front of hundreds of organizations operating in the orbit of major corporate-financed think tanks with connections to state intelligence agencies.

It requires no great political insight to recognize that the Tunis gathering was seen by the Obama administration and its European allies as an opportunity to orchestrate “popular” support for the escalation of its war plans in Syria. The ISO statement served this purpose.

Significantly, the ISO does not identify the authors of the statement, let alone provide details of the discussions that preceded and accompanied its drafting. Nor does it offer information on precisely how signatories were gathered.

However it was drafted, or by whom, the published statement is an exercise in political obfuscation, evasion and deceit. It begins: “The following statement, signed by intellectuals, academics, artists, and activists from more than 30 countries, reminds the world that what is happening today is a people’s revolution for freedom and dignity—and for that reason, it should be supported by all means.”

If the world needs to be “reminded,” it is because the bloody carnage carried out in Syria by the imperialist-backed mercenaries for the last two years bears no resemblance to a “people’s revolution,” let alone one for “freedom and dignity.”

Washington, its NATO allies, and the Saudi and Qatari monarchies are waging a bloody sectarian war, using far-right Sunni Islamist militias as proxies. US officials and media admit that the opposition’s military spearhead is the Al Nusra Front, which emerged from Al Qaeda in Iraq—a terrorist group formed during the US occupation of that country—and recently pledged its loyalty to Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The US government itself has reported that, by last December, Al Nusra alone had carried out nearly 600 terror bombing attacks, killing thousands of Syrian civilians. Opposition forces have themselves told major media that they loot and destroy factories, such as pharmaceutical plants and granaries around Aleppo. They are responsible for sectarian massacres, such as that in Houla one year ago and, according to UN officials, for a poison gas attack that killed dozens of people in the village of Khan al-Asal.

The sectarian politics of the US-backed opposition find expression in the bloody ranting of leading Sunni cleric Sheikh Adnan al-Arur. Demanding “harsh and painful” punishment for the minority Alawite sect, from which the Assad regime’s leading personnel is drawn, Arur pledged that if Alawites resist the opposition, “by Allah, we shall mince them in meat grinders, and we shall feed their flesh to the dogs.” So much for the ISO’s clap-trap about “freedom and dignity.”

There is no great and unfathomable mystery about what is going on in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant. The Syrian war is the latest chapter in US imperialism’s efforts—with the support of its ultra-reactionary Gulf State clients—to violently carry out a restructuring of Middle Eastern and Central Asian politics. Most clearly symbolized by Washington’s installation of neo-colonial regimes after invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, this offensive has cost untold hundreds of thousands of lives. As part of this offensive, Syria, which appeared on “Axis of Evil” lists compiled by Bush administration officials, has been in Washington’s gun sights for over a decade.

The ISO, lying through its teeth, presents this US intervention in the Middle East as progressive. It writes, “The fight in Syria is an extension of the fight for freedom regionally and worldwide. It cannot be divorced from the struggles of the Bahrainis, Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis and other peoples who have revolted against oppression and authoritarianism.”

These words are fraudulent demagogy. The ISO statement makes no attempt to explain, concretely, how the events in Syria are “an extension of the fight for freedom regionally and worldwide.” In fact, the United States is regularly launching drone strikes and murdering Yemeni insurgents. Bahraini protests are being ruthlessly suppressed by the same regimes of the Gulf Cooperation Council that are playing a key role in financing the onslaught against Syria.

The comparison of the events in Syria to the Egyptian revolution is nothing short of obscene. The mass popular movement that unfolded in Egypt bore all the characteristics of a genuine revolution. Initial mass protests grew into a general strike, demanding the fall of Mubarak and better living standards for working people. The revolutionary movement unified Muslims and Christians participating in protests and strikes. And, in what was the surest sign of the popular and progressive character of the movement, it was opposed by American imperialism. The Obama administration supported Mubarak’s attempts to crush the protests. Only after it became convinced that Mubarak could not be saved did the United States shift its counter-revolutionary tactics and promote the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to the old dictatorship.

Of the examples given by the ISO, there is only one that bears comparison to the ongoing struggle in Syria. The Libyan operation of 2011 was, as is now all too clear, a trial run for the intervention in Syria. Then, as now, the United States and its NATO allies backed and armed various Islamist terrorist groups to overthrow and murder Gaddafi. The outcome of that conspiracy has not been “freedom and dignity” for the Libyan masses, but the virtual destruction of society.

In the Syrian war, as in the 2011 Libyan war before it, whatever initial protests occurred were overwhelmed and utilized as a pretext for large-scale military intervention by Washington against a regime with which it had long-standing grievances. In both wars, Washington’s key proxies were Sunni sectarian forces tied to Al Qaeda—veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in Libya and the Al Nusra Front in Syria.

The ISO statement invents a narrative that grotesquely distorts reality. It writes, “This is a revolt that was sparked by the children of Deraa and the sit-ins and demonstrations of the youth in the cities, the peasants of the rural areas, and the dispossessed and marginalized of Syria. It is they who rallied nonviolently through protests and songs and chants, before the regime’s brutal crackdown. Since then, the regime has pushed for the militarization of the Syrian nonviolent movement. As a result, young men took up arms, first out of self-defense.”

In what must be one of the most bizarre uses of post-modernist jargon, the ISO attempts to rhetorically fumigate the murderous activities of Al Nusra by referring to its terror bombings as merely the “negation of the Other.”

The ISO’s presentation of the war is out-and-out State Department propaganda. The “militarization” of the opposition’s activity in Syria was not a secondary aspect of its response to the Assad regime’s actions, but the central element of a strategy of escalation and regime change agreed upon with its foreign backers.

The opposition’s early June 2011 attack on Jisr al-Shughour came two days after a US-backed opposition council was established in Antalya, Turkey. Its first major campaign in Aleppo in February 2012, kicked off by a terror bombing which US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper attributed to Al Qaeda, was followed by news that US drones were overflying Syria. After the opposition campaign on Damascus in the late spring of 2012, which began with the May 10 Damascus car bombing and the May 25 Houla massacre, the New York Times confirmed that US intelligence was arming the opposition.

Since then, the Syrian opposition’s violent character and the aid and materiel it receives from the CIA and its allies, measured in the thousands of tons, have been a matter of public record. Nonetheless, despite this assistance, the opposition has proven incapable of bringing down Assad—a fact that testifies to the lack of support for its far-right, jihadist politics.

There is no question but that Bashar al-Assad heads a repressive bourgeois regime that is guilty of countless crimes against the Syrian working class. As is the case in all the former colonial countries in the Middle East, the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to carry through a genuinely democratic restructuring of society led to the establishment of quasi-Bonapartist dictatorial regimes, in which democratic rights were ruthlessly suppressed. However, it is a basic axiom of socialist politics that the overthrow of these regimes is the task of the working class. The struggle for democracy and socialism cannot under any circumstances be outsourced to the imperialist powers and their proxies.

A socialist perspective in Syria proceeds historically from its character as an oppressed, ex-colonial country, whose sectarian divisions are rooted in the imperialist carve-up of the Middle East—in Syria, that of the Ottoman Empire after World War I by Britain and France. The task of overcoming these sectarian tensions and securing the economic resources to ensure prosperity for all can be solved only by the unified struggle of the Middle Eastern masses for socialism. In this struggle, as Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution explains, the leading role falls to the working class, in a struggle against imperialism.

Such a struggle entails the revolutionary unification of workers in Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula across all ethnic and religious lines, the overthrow of the reactionary sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf, which monopolize most of the region’s oil revenues, and a common struggle with the American and European working class against the threat of imperialist intervention.

By aligning itself with the Islamist opposition in Syria and its backers in Washington, the ISO demonstrates its hostility to all of these struggles. It is contributing to the defense of the privileges of the opposition’s paymasters—the Persian Gulf royals and their US and European overlords—and to stirring the region’s sectarian tensions, which are inflamed by the opposition’s massacres and right-wing propaganda. The interests it is serving are not progressive, but reactionary.

The agenda behind US imperialism’s drive to war was bluntly laid out in a May 6 Wall Street Journal editorial. It wrote, “The immediate goal would be to limit the proliferation of WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction], but the most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region. The risks of a jihadist [i.e., Al Qaeda] victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel.”

That is to say, the Journal views an Islamist victory in Syria as a step towards Washington’s key strategic goal: the defeat of the Iranian regime and the establishment of full US hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East. This hegemony would be exercised first of all against Washington’s geopolitical rivals in Russia and China, who have supported Assad. These international conflicts underlying the Syrian war refute the ISO’s claim that it is backing a revolution.

The ISO attempts to make light of its open alliance with imperialism by commenting ironically: “The Syrian revolution has confronted a world upside down, one where states that were allegedly friends of the Arabs such as Russia, China, and Iran have stood in support of the slaughter of the people, while states that never supported democracy or independence, especially the US and its Gulf allies, have intervened in support of the revolutionaries.”

No, it is not the world, but the analysis of the ISO that is “upside down.” Is it really necessary to explain that Wall Street, the Pentagon, the major oil firms, and the crowned heads of the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are not fighting for a revolution? Is it not far more likely that the ISO, in keeping with the evolution of so many other pseudo-left organizations of the middle class, is pursuing a political line that is determined by the US State Department?

There is the matter of the signatories of this letter. As we have already noted, the ISO does not explain how this disparate group was rounded up and induced to politically prostitute themselves in the interests of imperialism.

Some of the signatories, such as Tariq Ali, Gilbert Achcar, Sherry Wolf and Michael Löwy, have long associations with the reactionary political intrigues of the rightward-moving pseudo-left parties. Many, however, have doubtless been roped in under the fraudulent banner of human rights—and have signed the declaration, probably without even reading it and without any serious knowledge of what is taking place in Syria. Such individuals should reconsider their association with this reactionary pro-war propaganda exercise and have their names removed from the list of signatories.

As for the ISO, it has irrevocably and comprehensively exposed itself as an instrument of US imperialism, using lies and euphemisms to drum up support for aggression against Syria. It is a political accessory to the crimes being committed against the Syrian people, and a direct accomplice of imperialism.

Margaret Thatcher: imperialism personified

Margaret Thatcher: imperialism personified

A sworn enemy of workers the world over

By Danny Shaw

APRIL 10, 2013

Cops repress 1984 miners' strike in Britain.

Photo: Alamy

While the ruling class mourns the death of one of their most loyal politicians and mouthpieces, the British and Irish working classes and oppressed peoples the world over are certainly not mourning Margaret Thatcher’s passing. From the streets of Belfast to the streets of Brixton, we are seeing a different response from working-class communities who remember all too well the “festival of reaction” that Thatcher reigned over.

Thatcher’s term as prime minister and Ronald Reagan’s as president symbolized U.S. and British imperialism’s brutal offensive against the working classes of their two countries and increased military aggression abroad. “Thatcherism” and “Reaganism” represented union-busting, greater poverty and an enriched elite.

Thatcher’s track record included the intense suppression of the Irish liberation movement, military invasion in Latin America and a war against the interests of British workers.

Ireland—the oldest colony in the world

Nowhere was Thatcher more hated than in Ireland, meaning that she believed the six northern counties of Ireland were part of the United Kingdom. Ireland was in fact divided by British imperial dictate in 1921, leaving the six northern counties under the jurisdiction of the British crown.

When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, “the Troubles” had already raged for over 10 years. She continued the repression against the Irish Republican forces. Republicans in Ireland are those who advocate an Irish Republic free from British control.

The “Troubles” refers to the two decades of intense violence that began in 1968 when the oppressed Catholic population in northern Ireland—who began massive civil rights marches to demand the end of systematic repression and discrimination—were brutally attacked by the fascist Royal Ulster Constabulary. Armed resistance arose by the republican forces against the pro-British terrorist paramilitaries. 

Thatcher refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Irish resistance, the fighters having been stripped of their political-prisoner status in 1976. She infamously stated: "Crime is crime is crime. It is not political." 

In 1981, the Republican prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest being treated as criminals and not prisoners of war. Thatcher stood by callously as one by one, the beloved Irish revolutionaries died in a series of 10 continuous hunger strikes that popularized Ireland’s struggle across the world.

In retaliation, the Irish Republican Army narrowly missed killing her in 1984, exploding bombs at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, killing four other Conservative Party delegates and seriously wounding members of Thatcher’s delegation.

In 1988, she introduced a broadcasting ban in the six counties making it illegal to broadcast the views of the political party Sinn Fein "to deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity on which they thrive.”

Despite her best attempts to break the back of Irish resistance, that freedom struggle pushed on with hundreds of thousands of people coming into the streets in support of the hunger strikers. Before his death, Bobby Sands said: “They won’t break me, because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon.”

An imperialist abroad, a racist at home

Thatcher oversaw Britain’s role in its war with Argentina over the Malvinas islands, which are situated 8,000 miles away from London in the south Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Argentina. Britain first claimed the islands in 1833 as part of its global empire. 

In April 1982, the Argentinian ruling junta under fascist general Jorge Rafael Videla ordered the military to retake the Malvinas in an attempt to distract workers from the dictatorship's repression and tap into long-standing Argentinian anger at Britain’s claim on the islands. Despite having helped the Argentinian dictatorship come to power, U.S. imperialism sided with its British imperialist ally by providing intelligence and transport help.

Thatcher gave direct orders for the British nuclear-powered submarine called “The Conqueror” to attack an Argentinian naval vessel even though it was outside the area of conflict. In that attack, 323 Argentinian sailors were killed. Britain continues to claim the Malvinas because of their interest in plundering the oil in the region.

The 1980s represented a sharpening of global class war from Nicaragua to Mozambique to Moscow. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan worked hand in hand to carry out a neoliberal agenda and quell liberation movements worldwide.

The 1980s represented a sharpening of global class war from Nicaragua to Mozambique to Moscow. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan worked hand in hand to carry out a neoliberal agenda and quell liberation movements worldwide. Thatcher was a close ally of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and other infamous fascist dictators. She allowed the U.S. Air Force to bomb Libya from airbases in England. She supported Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who would oversee the restoration of capitalism in Russia. She supported apartheid in South Africa even as governments around the world began to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. She labeled the freedom-fighting African National Congress “terrorists.”

Within Britain, Thatcher’s role was to carry out a vicious ruling-class agenda to dismantle the social safety net and crush the voices of oppressed sectors of British society.

In 1981, a social rebellion swept across Britain sparked by high unemployment and unequal social conditions. The racist police brutality against the Black Caribbean population of Brixton in South London was the spark that led to months of insurrection. When confronted with this pressure from below to address segregation and provide opportunities to youth, Thatcher rejected the idea that social conditions had anything to do with the unrest. In her typical inhumane, cold-blooded fashion she stated: “What absolute nonsense. ... No one should condone violence. No one should condone the events. ... They were criminal, criminal."

Thatcher sought to break the power of labor unions—attacking nationalized industry, upholding the "free market" and waging a war against the "welfare state."

Thatcher presided over the 1984 privatization of the coal mining industry in Great Britain. The denationalization meant that 20 coal pits were shut down resulting in the loss of 20,000 jobs. Many families in the north of England, Scotland and Wales lost their primary source of work

On June 18, 1984, near Rothertham, thousands of police brutally attacked striking miners in what was dubbed “The Battle of Orgreave.” Seven miners were killed in the conflict by the police who functioned as the shock troops for capitalist interests.

While Thatcher herself has died, Thatcherism, the legacy of unfettered attacks on workers and their right to live in peace continues. There is still saber rattling against Argentina over the Malvinas. Irish Republicans continue to be targeted for harassment and violence by the British state. Oppressed communities continue to be scapegoated and ruined. 

We should not be misled by the Obama White House’s statement: “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.” The truth is that the pillagers and looters of the world lost one of theirs. We have no reason to mourn the loss of this loyal servant of our exploiters.

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Thatcher Dead: Why we celebrate.

Huge Chavez, Presente!

The battalion of the fallen has a new soldier. Hugo Chavez, Presente!

 In death our martyrs attain immortality. Their spirit lives in all those millions now, and for generations to come, who resist, who dream, who fight and who build for the good of humanity.

 Do not mourn. Organise! Venceremos!

British Workers Unite - For more of the same, but worse!

The Guardian interviews four UKIP voters. Three of them are working-class. One is middle class.

"I did 22 years in the services fighting communism. For what? What did we achieve? David Cameron is not a Conservative, no way. He is a social democrat"

 "I fully expect 2-4 million Bulgarians and Romanians to come over. What's it going to be like? We're a small island."

 "Labour shut itself off from me because of uncontrolled immigration. The Tories have come in and they seem hamstrung by the Liberal Democrats."

 "They have talked to me about their policies and I agree with a lot of what they have told me. There's going to be more and more foreigners coming in and taking everything from us. It's diabolical. They come and get this and that. We couldn't go to their country."

 These are voices of the English working-class. Obsessed with race, with immigration, with blaming everyone poorer than them for what has been done to them by the rich.

Right-wing government and neo-liberal economics failing them? Then demand they be MORE right wing, MORE neo-liberal, MORE cuts. The veritable turkeys voting for Xmas. That infamous english masochism at it's most pathetic; they take a kicking, get spat at, laughed at, bent over and royally fucked, and their response?, "Please sir, can I have some more?".

 There is no working-class "unity" in the UK. There is not even basic common ground for potential unity. The Scottish people will only be pulled backwards if we stay in this Union.

We need to look forward, we need to cut the chains that will only drag us further down into the far-right abyss that England demands. We need our own government; real, sovereign government that takes Scotland where the people of Scotland want it to go.

And we can only get that through voting for independence in 2014.

Because the alternative on offer is not even the status quo, more of the same.
It is something far, far worse.

Eastleigh By-Election and the forward march of British Socialism!

62 votes for socialism in the Eastleigh by-election! An earth shaking 0.15% vote for the massed ranks of the 'Trade Union and Socialist Coalition'!

The arguments for keeping Scotland in the UK so that the Great British working-class can be strong and united for the socialist revolution, which is surely just around the corner, comrades, have never looked more profound in their correctness!!!

 Scottish workers Unite under the glorious red (, white and blue) flag of your British vanguard! Abandon the Stalinist petty bourgeois nationalist deviation of gaining independence next year; with more results like this we will have full blown international socialism, with the glorious United Workers State of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at its helm, standing as a shining beacon for the incipient world revolutionary Empire in maybe less than, oh, say no more than 200 years or so. Maybe 300.

One more push comrades!!! And then a few more.

 62 votes today - onward to 72 votes in 2015!!! Let us smash the 'Elvis Loves Dogs Party' into 9th place. There has never been a better time to be a British Worker.

TabTV Inside: A Day with the EDL - The Pride of England

The SWP's rape scandal and the Unbroken Thread of Trotskyism's degenerated "workers" sects

Nobody does "Stalinist behaviour" better than Trotskyists. Irony or hypocrisy? Whatever, the Left is a disgusting mess by any standards and deserves to be as ignored, irrelevant and ridiculed as it is. Unfortunately that means that while the Left plays its dirty, pathetic little games and its wannabe Chekists and make-pretend Central Committees get their jollies in their grubby little empires, those who deserve the best, deserve to be fought for and defended, deserve a voice, they get left abandoned and unrepresented. 


From the WRP, through the SSP and the SWP, and a myriad of seedy little sects in between, the stories of power tripping little Napoleans and the women they abused run like an unbroken thread through the lineage of Trotskyism. Could almost make one wonder if the rumours about the Old Man himself were maybe not just (here is that word again) "Stalinist" propaganda, that maybe that icepick was a reminder that just because a naive young woman respects your ideas doesnt mean she consents to be a dirty old man's sex toy. 


" ...instead of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations". Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's assassin explaining his motives.



Really, just how many "leading" names on the Left could we put those words to?

So the real point of the Mercader quote is that, whilst it may or may not have been true of Trotsky himself (and there were indeed rumours about his behaviour at his Mexican compound towards some of the young women who came to work there), Ramon's words just fit so well when we look at the conduct of so many of our own Little Trotskys.

Of course it isnt just a problem within trotskyism, this mysogyny exists within all strands of the communist movement (as indeed the current wave of sex-scandals within the Chinese CP rather shamefully attest to). Indeed by all accounts Marx himself was no paragon of feminist virtue when it came to how he treated the women in his life. But my issue really is that when these cases do come up within the left on this island, as they invariably do, those on both sides tend to just put it down to that lazy all-weather swear word "Stalinism" and then pretty much leave it at that, as though this explains all. It certainly doesn't. The "crimes of Stalinism", of the "degenerated workers states" are all repeated on a micro-level within the micro-groups of trotskyism. And anarchism too for that matter. Abuse of power and organisational authoritarianism and conservatism, corruption and nepotism are all endemic within the Left, at all levels, and within all of its brands.



Now that is fine when it is just a few oddballs falling out over some doctrinaire squabble. No one else is listening and no one else cares. But this time, and yet again, this something serious, something that is not isolated and which is deeply damaging on every level.

There is something deeply flawed, rotten even, about how the Left conducts itself, and that is not about 'Stalinism' (a word that is used to cover so much that really it has no meaning other than as a political curse word), and indeed not even Leninism (although there is a strong argument that the democratic centralist model is too readily open to abuse).

If there is anywhere where women should feel safe, it should be within the Left. If there is any place where women should be able to work and organise without having to deal with harassment and lechery it should be the Left. But we all know that just isnt the case. And never has been. Racism, whilst it exists within the Left, is not openly tolerated and covered up for. But sexism, up to and including rape and sexual abuse, is. 



People are what they are, complex, simple, confusing and predictable. And no more so than when it comes to sexuality and sexual behaviour. I don't think anyone thinks a new wave of leftist puritanism is an answer to these problems, but there are behaviours and attitudes that must be challenged. And the structures of organisation that protect those behaviours and stifle the challenges have to be addressed. There is institutionalised patriarchy within the left. But how that is addressed and resolved is going to take a much deeper level of analysis and self-reflection (organisational and personal) than just blaming "Stalinist practices" and men behaving badly.