The true face of Turkish ‘democracy’
Eric Lee of LabourStart writes:
Gokhan Bicici is a friend of mine.
In 2011, he invited LabourStart to hold its annual Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul.
I remember the conversation well — we had in a café next to Gezi Park, just off Taksim Square.
Last night, Gokhan was filming the demonstrations.
He was brutally attacked by police and dragged off.
Incredibly, the attack was filmed and you can watch the entire minute-long video here:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10201308689182667
If you use Facebook, please share the video widely.
As I write these words, over 11,200 people have already done exactly that.
But over 60,000 of you who are receiving this message have not yet signed up to the current LabourStart campaign demanding an end to police violence in Turkey.
Please do not delay a moment longer – sign up now:
http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1840
If you have already signed up, please encourage your union to spread the news by email to as many members as possible.
Your union has thousands of members who would support this campaign if they knew about it.
This is the largest online campaign LabourStart has ever done with over 18,300 messages sent to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan.
I think it can be even larger.
As for Gokhan, here is what the Independent Media Centre have to say:
“He suffered an eyebrow cut, his gas mask was broken, his iPad was confiscated and he was kept waiting, injured and handcuffed, for four hours by police who told him he had been detained but refused to tell him where he would be taken, and failed to carry out any official procedure. As of 23:30, our friend is being held inside a police vehicle in front of the Taksim Atatürk Cultural Centre, and has been told he will be taken to the Istanbul Police Directorate. We strictly condemn the abusive treatment of Gökhan Biçici, and demand that he is immediately released, that those who are responsible, who are clearly documented in various photographic and video recordings on social media, are immediately revealed and brought to trial.”
He is still being held by the police now, hours later.
Spread the word. Build the campaign.
Thanks
Eric Lee
Religious bigot Newman witch-hunts secular Labour woman
Above: secular campaigners of all races. ‘Cardinal’ Newman doesn’t like this.
The misnamed Socialist Unity blog seeks to witch-hunt a Labour Party woman who dares to fight for secularism:
The increasingly bizarre religious apologist Andy ‘Cardinal’ Newman writes:
I first came across Anne Marie Waters when she put herself forwards for the South Swindon selection, and very unusually for a Labour politician Waters gave as her personal reference a Central Committee member of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, Maryam Namazie. It was also very difficult to get a straight answer from Ms Waters what she actually does for a living, and how it is funded.
Both Namazie and Anne Marie Waters signed a letter in 2010 to the Guardian opposing the state visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the UK.
I would submit that Newman’s use of the title “His Holiness” tells us all we need to know about this character’s attitude to religion.
Newman gives his filthy, reactionary, little game away when he admits: “alongside her bigoted anti-religious views she is also a pro-NHS campaigner, there is a danger that the left and some unions may support her for the Labour candidacy.”
The liar Newman deliberately misrepresents Waters when he suggests she made an anti-immigration broadcast. Watch it for yourself, and you’ll see she makes it absolutely clear that she’s not arguing against immigration.
Mind you, if you did want to find an example of anti-immigration agitation within the labour movement at the moment, you could do worse than check out the resolutions passed at the recent GMB congress (Mr Newman is an enthusiastic supporter of the GMB leadership), and especially motion 239 (passed with support from the leadership):
“This Congress calls on the GMB, along with the Labour Party, to present a constructive policy on future immigration, in time for the next election, to stop the growth of the smaller political parties, which in most cases are anti-trade union and racist.”
I’m sure we call all work out what that really means.
So Newman’s a rank hypocrite as well as a religious bigot and enemy of democracy, the enlightenment, and secularism.
LabourStart message on Turkish protests
From LabourStart:
Turkey: Stop police violence – allow the protests!
  In partnership with the International Trade Union Confederation and DISK, the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions in Turkey. |
The brutal crackdown on protests at the end of May in Istanbul’s Taksim Square has shocked the entire world — and triggered a massive wave of protests across Turkey. A coalition of organizations including trade unions has issued demands which trade unionists everywhere will support. These include: free all those arrested; drop all charges against them; hold accountable those responsible for the police violence; and lift all bans on meetings and demonstrations. Please send your message of protest and spread the word today.
You can help! Type in your name and email address, then click on ‘Send Message’ here.
Turkish protests: the unions enter the fray
The following report is from Juan Cole’s appropriately-named Informed Comment blog, where some of the best available coverage of the Turkish protests can be found.
Posted by Juan Cole, 4th June 2013
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is now risking Turkey’s economic miracle by his imperious reaction to the protests in dozens of cities that have roiled Turkey and are entering their fifth day. Two are dead and hundreds injured. The Turkish stock market, which had been up 300% since 2009, has taken a hit. The country’s $29 billion a year tourism industry is also imperiled (Erdogan should ask his friend, Egypt’s President Muhammad Morsi, what social turmoil does to tourism). One of Erdogan’s boasts is that he has attracted billions in foreign investment, and in 2012 foreign direct investment was on the order of $16 billion (Turkey is ranked 13th in the world as a desirable place to put in such money). But he’ll find that investors are skittish about urban street battles.
The news that Turkey’s Public Workers Unions Confederation (KESK), representing coalition of 11 trade unions with 250,000 members has now announced a two-day general strike in sympathy with the protesters signals the entry of an element of class conflict into the movement. The unions in Turkey are weak, having been destroyed by the secular right wing military dictatorship of the 1980s, which had the side effect of also destroying the Turkish Left as a viable political bloc. The ruling center-right Justice and Development Party probably benefited in implementing its pro-market policies from the weakness of unions. The unions and the remains of the Left may see an opportunity for revival.
Erdogan has blamed everyone but himself for the public discontent, decrying the ‘lies’ spread on Twitter, hinting darkly that the opposition party, the secular Republican People’s Party [CHP] had conspired to provoke the protests, and now even saying that the demonstrators are ‘linked to terrorists.’
Erdogan’s theory of what is happening shows an unflattering streak of paranoia and arrogance, and, worse, it is clearly wrong. If a prime minister cannot understand what is happening in his own country, it is a very bad sign. Read the rest of this entry »
Woolwich: motion for union branches
Model motion for union and Labour Party branches, drawn up by the AWL:
Unite against the EDL and Islamism: defend civil liberties
This ****** condemns:
1. The murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22 May.
2. The reactionary politics of Islamism, in this case extreme, ultra-violent Islamism, which seems to have inspired the killing.
3. The ramping up of racist hostility towards Muslims, from abuse and harassment in the street to the firebombing of a mosque in Grimsby to demonstrations by the English Defence League and British National Party. According to the interfaith group Faith Matters, on 30 May there have been 201 anti-Muslim incidents since the murder, a 15-fold increase.
4. Possible attacks on civil liberties, including reviving the Communications Data Bill, which would allow police and security services access to all electronic communications.
Believes:
1. That the main threat posed by Islamism is directed against working-class organisations, women, LGBT people, atheists and secularists, dissidents and critical-minded people in Muslim countries and some communities in the UK.
2. That acknowledging that British foreign policy has created conditions which help Islamists to grow should not mean failing to condemn Islamist politics.
3. That opposing the racist backlash and attacks on civil liberties must be top priorities for the labour movement.
4. That this is a wake up call – if the left and labour movement cannot build a force in working-class communities capable of appealing to the angry and dispossessed, then reactionary ideas like Islamism and nationalist racism will continue to spread.
Resolves:
1. To issue a statement based on this motion.
2. To support and publicise protests against the racist and fascist threat, and oppose attacks on civil liberties.
3. To contact local Muslim organisations and mosques to offer support in defence against racists and the far right.
McCluskey sticks it to Mandelson
Above: the reptile and its master
The very idea of Peter Mandelson complaining about “cabals” within Labour “trying to exert influence” is simply laughable. The reptilian Mandelson was central to New Labour’s 1990′s takeover of the Labour Party, when he and his Blairite cronies systematically undermined Party democracy, imposing ex-Tories and SDP’ers as parliamentary candidates while excluding long-standing, loyal members.
So Mandelson’s extraordinary bleating about the efforts of Unite in supporting working class people as parliamentary candidates, and in particular, the nomination of Unite member Katie Murphy for Falkirk, deserves to be treated with one bloody great horse-laugh. Unite’s alleged “manipulation” involves encouraging its members to join the Party and subsidising their first year’s membership. This is done quite openly and is entirely within Party rules. The support given to Blairite would-be candidates by Mandelson’s ‘Progress’ group, funded by multi-millionaire Lord Sainsbury, is much more secretive and conspiratorial. Yet Mandelson has the audacity to accuse Unite of “manipulation”!
Len McCluskey puts Mandelson in his place in an article in today’s Graun. Lenny’s a bit more polite than I would be, mind:
Peter Mandelson’s selection argument is about politics not procedure
Opposition to union-backed MPs is driven by a desire to keep New Labour the preserve of a socially restricted elite
You report that Peter Mandelson is accusing my union, Unite, of “manipulating selection procedures” in the Labour party, which “stores up danger for a future Labour government” (Labour warned on selection panel procedures, 13 May).
This does no service to Labour democracy or the facts. I have no axe to grind with Lord Mandelson. His second stint at the business department under the Labour government was marked by fresh thinking about industrial policy, which I wish he had had the opportunity to develop; and he seems more willing than some to acknowledge that the pre-2008 economic model was flawed.
But now he appears rattled that Blairite true believers are not winning every Labour nomination. Your report does not have him alleging any breach of party rules or procedural abuses, perhaps because there are none. Unite’s aim is simple – to recruit members to the party (welcome, I would have thought) and then encourage them to endorse union-supported candidates in one member-one vote selections. A sinister construction is put on this – “selections are being run by a cabal of union members”, according to your report. This is, to say the least, an irony. Many serving Labour MPs were parachuted into constituencies at the request of leading members of the last Labour cabinet, including Mandelson himself.
Dishing out seats on the basis of personal connections bears a closer resemblance to the rotten borough system before 1832 than it does to modern democratic procedures, and it also helps keep politics as the preserve of a socially restricted elite. Mandelson also appears untroubled that Lord Sainsbury’s vast wealth, channelled through the Progress organisation, has been used to give particular candidates, invariably on the right, an advantage in Labour selections.
Mandelson argues, correctly, that it is “wrong to conflate trade unionists and the working classes”, although the overlap is hard to miss. I don’t conceal that I want to see more Labour MPs supporting the sort of policies developed by Unite and other trade unions, regardless of their personal backgrounds. But Labour MPs look less and less like the people they seek to represent. The big strides made in securing more women Labour MPs have also, unfortunately, been paralleled by a decline in those from working-class backgrounds. Mandelson has no proposals to address this.
This is really an argument about politics, not procedure. Mandelson is probably intensely relaxed about cutting democratic corners if it means more “New Labour” special advisers and the like on the green benches, but utterly opposed to the normal workings of Labour democracy if it means leftwing or trade union candidates being chosen.
Let’s have the political debate instead. I am confident that most potential Labour voters want to see both a more diverse Labour party in parliament, and also a Labour government radically different from the last one.
Finally, I object strongly to his insinuation that union-backed MPs might be loyal not “to the party as a whole”, but “a section of it”. Trade unionists have always been Labour loyalists. Rightwing MPs, not unions, split Labour in 1931 and 1981, just as it was New Labour parliamentarians who fuelled the debilitating Blair-Brown factionalism that so weakened the most recent Labour government, as Mandelson surely knows.
TSSA: comments from beyond the grave
Background: the TSSA (Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association) is about to ‘transfer’ into Unite.
The late Alexander Walkden (former General Secretary of TSSA) comments via ouija board:
I’m looking down on the disgraceful shenanigans at the Head Office named after myself. I am turning in my grave at the way the current ’leadership’ are mismanaging the Association. They are doing a disservice to the existing membership, and have forgotten why they are there. The members ARE the union so I cannot understand why they would intimidate and bully those who gave up there time and put so much effort into representing the TSSA in their workplaces only to be driven out of the Association.
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We have lost (at the last count), 9 very experienced activists due to the bullying.
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We cannot afford to lose any members never mind activists & now, due to the bullying they not only have left but have joined another Trade Union and are finding that those who trusted, admired and relied on those activists have also left.
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We cannot afford to lose any members so WHY are the GS, AGS & FTO’s continuing with this bullying culture?
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It’s embarrassing.
.
Current GS – Manuel Cortes
AGS No1 – Frank Ward
AGS No2 – Lorraine Ward
AGS No3 – John Page
AGS No4 – Steve Coe
FTO - Luke Chester
Jobsworth – Val Stansfield
.
My first question is why, for a total membership of 30,000, do we need to have 4 Assistants?
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Due to mismanagement, we are now one of the smallest trade unions in the country, if not the smallest, but you are all acting like your back in the 1950s & ’60s when our membership was at its height, however, never in the history of the TSSA have so many bullies been employed at the same time.
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Ironically in my day, this could not have happened because (shamefully) women were never given equal opportunities. But the demise of the modern TSSA Union can be put down to one person in particular, Lorraine Ward.
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If she had any integrity at all, she would hang her head in shame and leave the TSSA to become a stronger union but as history has shown time and time again, she won’t do that as she believes she has done nothing wrong and so will continue to bully staff for the rest of her working life.
Rana Plaza: today’s the deadline for safety plan
The global union federation IndustriALL (of which Unite and the USW are major affiliates) has been running a campaign to support workers in the Bangladesh textile and garment industry.
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http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1813
and signing the letter to the Bangladesh Prime Minister demanding an end to these outrages.
http://www.industriall-union.org/hundreds-of-bangladeshi-garment-workers-die
and also via Union Solidarity International:
http://usilive.org/bangladesh-end-the-race-to-the-bottom/
Below, Tony Burke (writing yesterday at Left Foot Forward) gives some more backround:
The tragedy in the Bangladesh garment industry at Rana Plaza in Dhaka, which has claimed the lives of over 1,000 workers when a building that housed eight factories collapsed, has lead to outrage across the world.
Condemnation has come from all quarters. Governments, NGOs and customers who have been wringing their hands saying “we must put a stop to this – but how do we do it?”.
Those persons condemned include the building’s owner, (who went on the run and now faces with calls from workers for his execution); the owners of the factories; the builders themselves (now all under arrest); but also the Western customers, such as Primark, Mango and others who allegedly ignore abuses of millions workers in the garment industry in order to produce cheap clothing for sale in the West.
The Rana Plaza tragedy follows on from the deadly fire which killed over a hundred workers at Tazreen Fashions in late 2012. And this week eight more workers were killed in a fire at a clothing factory.
Mass industrial manslaughter
The global manufacturing union federation IndustriALL has correctly described the Rana Plaza tragedy as “mass industrial manslaughter”.
Seeing large cracks appear in the building, workers at Rana Plaza evacuated the building – only to be forced back to work by the factory owners.
At Tazreen escape and entry doors and windows were locked shut and workers could not escape the blaze.
IndustriALL has been running a long-term campaign to support workers in the Bangladesh garment industry. There are around 100,000 Bangladesh companies associated with the garment industry, employing up to four million workers who feed the West’s insatiable appetite for cheap clothes. The industry itself is worth 20 billion US dollars .
According to BRAC, one of the leading NGOs in Bangladesh, the country has a safety inspection force of just 18 people.
IndustriALL reports that there are 39 unions in the national garment industry, and too many times they have failed to co-operate with each other. Read the rest of this entry »
Enemy intelligence: Benedict Brogan on the Tories’ Europe madness
It’s always worth listening to what intelligent members of the class enemy have to say. Just like serious shop stewards read the Financial Times. We’ve done it before, here at Shiraz Socialist, but intend to do it more regularly, using the heading Enemy Intelligence. Here’s some wise inside info from Benedict Brogan of the Daily Telegraph, on the Tories’ disarray on Europe. Anyone who thinks Labour should meet Ukip half-way, or that there’s a “left wing” case for EU withdrawal (as espoused by the moronic Bob Crow), should read this:
The Tory party’s gone crazy over Europe, and it’s Cameron’s fault
By Benedict Brogan
For a while yesterday, the European flag flew proudly over Michael Gove’s office. The Education Secretary’s vote of no confidence in the EU the day before had made no difference. Whatever others in Whitehall might say, it seemed, the Department for Education remained happily collegiate in matters continental. It had accepted a request to show the flag for Europe Day last week, which was why the circle of gold stars on a deep blue background proclaiming the penetration of Brussels deep into the workings of British governance could be seen flapping erratically in the breeze at the top of Sanctuary Buildings in Great Smith Street. No one raced for the halyards when Mr Gove appeared on television on Sunday morning to announce that he would vote to leave the EU if he could, and it was only at lunchtime yesterday, when the flag’s presence was drawn to the boss’s attention, that his ideological preferences were brought to bear and it was hastily lowered.
The waving of a flag tells us nothing about the Government’s European policy, of course, save perhaps that the EU is more deeply embedded in the fabric of the state than we would like to admit. The speed with which it was whisked off the DfE’s flagpole once it was detected by those who understand the power of symbols tells us plenty, however, about how twitchy the Conservative Party has become since the latest flare-up of its Euro neuralgia. Over the past few days it has, with a troubling degree of deliberation, thrown away the small but growing political advantage it had given itself in recent weeks in order to indulge in another of those interminable arguments about the nature of our relationship with the EU. In the space of a fortnight the Tories have gone from leading a national conversation about Labour’s unsuitability to govern a changing Britain, to staging a public family feud about who emptied the dishwasher last time and where they should go for the holidays. Read the rest of this entry »
The pathetic self-delusion of the anti-EU “left”
As the ultra-right within the Tory Party increase their campaign to get Britain out of the EU, it should by now be obvious to everyone that the anti-EU cause is by its very nature, the preserve of the racist, anti-working class and thoroughly reactionary forces within British society. However you dress it up in “anti-capitalist” rhetoric, this is a right-wing cause and those deluded souls on the anti-EU idiot-left, need to wake up and smell the latte.
RMT General Secretary Bob Crow said:
“RMT’s position is clear, not only should there be an early in/out referendum but also we are calling unequivocally for British withdrawal.
“Across Europe, and specifically in Spain and Greece which are at the eye of the storm, it is the working class who are suffering the most as democracy is ripped apart and the EU and the central bank demand cuts to jobs, wages and pensions and wholesale privatisation of public assets.
“RMT will not sit back and allow this debate to be dominated by UKIP and the right wing of the Tory Party. Ministers like Michael Gove are now only raising the issue of withdrawal out of pure political opportunism. He could not care less about the rates of youth unemployment across Europe, the only concern of these Tory “Johnny Come Lately’s” is saving their own political skins.
“RMT will continue to set out the left wing, pro-worker case for British withdrawal from the EU that puts jobs, standards of living, democracy and public services centre stage. The truth is that you cannot be pro-EU and anti-austerity when the whole structure of the European project is dominated by the interests of bankers and big business, the driving forces behind the imposition of austerity measures across the Continent.”
ENDS
Union calls for withdrawal from EU
