Stopping the Arms Trade

In London, a judge acquitted eight anti-arms trade protesters who tried to disrupt the Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) event at Stratford's ExCel Centre last September, District Judge Angus Hamilton accepted the defendants’ argument that they had tried to prevent a greater crimes, such as genocide and torture, from occurring by blocking a road to stop tanks and other armoured vehicles from arriving at the exhibition centre. The campaigners, who chained themselves outside the ExCeL centre, had been charged by the Crown Prosecution Service with blocking a highway.

Witnesses described the role of the arms trade in facilitating the repressive Bahrani regime, in Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign over Yemen, and with Turkey’s internal repression of its Kurdish population.  The judge said the evidence of illegal weapons sales had been left unchallenged by the prosecution and that such sales would potentially break arms control laws. “There is clear, credible and largely unchallenged evidence from the expert witnesses of wrongdoing at DSEI and compelling evidence that it took place in 2015," he said. “It was not appropriately investigated by the authorities. This could be inferred from the responses of the police officers, that they did not take the defendants’ allegations seriously.” He also said there was no evidence of an investigation by authorities into whether illegal arms were being sold at the trade show.

Raj Chada, the lawyer who represented the defendants said the Government was turning “a blind eye” to unlawful activity at DSEI. “It is clear that there are no proper checks at DSEI from any state agency. The government has turned a blind eye not only to the unlawful activity at DSEI, but also to the consequences of a trade that is killing thousands in Yemen and elsewhere. It is shameful that the government did not act – and our clients felt that they had to,” he said.

Adeela Khan, another defence lawyer in the case, added “Critically, the government’s continued failings to stop the illegal exhibition of certain equipment used for torture or the sale of weapons to regimes that the UK knows are committing human rights abuses clearly demonstrates its inability to enforce its own law in this area. Our clients therefore feel justified in their action and make no apology for raising the public’s attention to this event.”

The ruling comes as the Government ignores calls from the House of Commons International Development Committee and the European Parliament to impose an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, which has been accused of committing war crimes in its bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Sales of British bombs to Saudi Arabia surged from £9m to more than £1bn in the three months before DSEI took place, according to Government arms export licence statistics.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said: “At the same time as the defendants were being arrested for peaceful protest, the arms dealers were working with civil servants to sell even more weapons. It should never have been campaigners in the dock this week, not when UK arms are being sold to dictatorships and human rights abusers, and when UK fighter jets and bombs have been so central to the destruction of Yemen. Arms fairs like DSEI can never be right or acceptable, and we all have a role to play in shutting them down for good.” 

Discussing the Issues

Our candidate for the London Assembly South West constituency, Adam Buick, had a short letter published in the local newspaper, ‘Richmond and Twickenham Times’, under their heading of "We Own It"

“George Galloway (RTT, April 8) is right to pick up on Sadiq Khan's promise to be "the most pro-business Mayor ever". This shows that Labour, even under Corbyn, still wants to be seen as better managers of the capitalist system than the Tories. But capitalism can never be run for the benefit of those who, in Galloway's words, "work for businesses". This is why it needs to be replaced by a system based on common ownership and democratic control not production by profit-seeking businesses.”

 Another letter from him was published in the Surrey Comet

"Green Party mayor candidate Sian Berry has a point (Surrey Comet, April 1) when she says that the present model for providing so-called affordable housing, as housing at a rent or price below the going rate, isn't working as it is based on signing "big deals with developers".
 These deals have to allow the property developers to make a profit but the more below-market-rate housing the mayor requires them to provide in any project the less their profit. So there are limits as to how far they can be pushed.
 If they aren't allow to make enough profit they will just walk away.
 Not enough profit, no production. That's the way the capitalist system works and why it should be replaced by a society based on common ownership and democratic control, which will allow production, including of houses, for use instead of for profit."
 

Apple - Built-in obsolescence

When you buy a new iPhone 6S for £539, Apple only expects it to last three years. 

Your iPads and Apple Watches are the same - to only last three years. 

Mac computers to last only four years.

Russian round table (1982) (short story)

A Short Story from the May 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was a motley lot that boarded the Aeroflot jet for Moscow on April 13. There was the ex-Life-guardsman who bragged about sitting on his horse in Whitehall. Then the crazy little Spanish Communist waiter, who rushed around shrieking “These lousy Americans think they peeze da best Pale Ale’’. The dustman from Reading who had been in the National Front, then the SWP and now organises the CND in the local Conservative club. A lorry driver from Worthing. The daughter of Russian aristocratic exiles, born in China but now living in Sydney, talking more like Barry Humphries. A mixed-up American who was petrified “in case Reagan starts something while I’m still here”. Plus two Australian fellow-travellers, a retired Naval Officer, a pleasant young actor from the TV show Stalky & Co, a couple of retired teachers and two members of the SPGB, both with a reasonable command of colloquial Russian.

On reaching Moscow, our guide suddenly informed us that we were invited to a “round-table” discussion about the Soviet Union. The hall originally booked was unavailable and we were switched to the Karl Marx Museum, which gave us the chance to see the exhibits, which are unique. Two “experts” were there to enlighten us—the Russian Editor of Moscow News (the English Soviet Weekly) and a “sociologist”, apparently English. Little did they know that, before they were born, one of the Party members had lived in Moscow and the other had been there as a student.

The proceedings started off quietly enough. We were informed of the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions. “Comrade” Brezhnev’s speech to the Russian Trade Union Congress, offering European arms limitation, was quoted. This brought further reference to the Russian Trade Union organisation. We were told it has two hundred million members and of its great achievements in organising production, protecting workers at work, and setting up Sanatoria and Sports Clubs.

The first break came with the question: “How can there be Trade Unions in a socialist society which, by definition, is classless?” This led to a series of “explanations” of the great difficulties Russia had faced, the disastrous effects of the war, the backwardness of parts of the economy, especially agriculture, and so on. Various members of the group then pointed out that Britain also has social security legislation; that the unemployed in Britain also get subsistence benefits; that in Britain Trade Unions also protect their members’ interests. The reporter then drew attention to what he called “workers control” in Soviet industry. The Russian factory manager, he claimed, was in an impossible position, between the devil of the requirements of the Plan and the deep blue sea of the workers’ demands. The Trade Union Committee discusses every aspect of the Plan and rejects what it does not like. “Why,” he proclaimed, “116 factory managers were sacked last year alone, as a result of trade union action ”.

This was the signal for a barrage of questions from the now thoroughly restive audience:

“How can the workers control production if the government does?” 

“Are the workers allowed to go on strike?"
(“Well! No! there is no need to.”) 

“Who appoints the factory managers?”
“Does the Communist Party control the trade unions?”
(“Only in the sense that they are the most active members.”) 

“What about the obviously flourishing black market?” 

“Why are there queues outside the food shops?” 

"How can you call it socialism when there are wages?”
“Did not Karl Marx call for the abolition of the wages system?” 

“Can you have a money system in a socialist society?”

By this time our experts were getting decidedly tetchy. A member of the SPCIB proceeded to outline the real nature of socialist society and point out that state capitalism operates in Russia. This apparently filled our hosts with the greatest respect. They called her “professor”, saying “With regard to the lady professor’s last question”, and “with great respect to the lady professor’s great knowledge of the subject . . .” Finally, the senior speaker climbed down and freely admitted that socialism had not been, and could not yet be, established in Russia because the problems of production had not been completely solved. But he claimed that the Russian people understood this, too. “We are working towards it”, he said.

It was pointed out, amid general agreement, that nobody underestimated the enormous achievements of the Russian people in turning a vast, barbaric feudal cess-pit into a modern industrial country in the shortest time in the world’s history. We realised the frightful toll of two world wars but we, like Lenin, had done our best to persuade the workers not to slaughter each other. To call the set-up in Russia socialism was untrue, and to claim to be “building socialism” while establishing state capitalism was dangerously misleading.

What our experts thought about all this, they did not say. They certainly looked as though they were thinking very hard. But that could have been indigestion.

Horatio

Yemen War: Home Office V Foreign Office

An internal Home Office assessment contradicts claims by the Foreign Office that Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen are not in breach of international humanitarian law.

The assessment issued guidance to immigration and asylum decision-makers, advising them that “indiscriminate violence” in the country was likely a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Home Office states: “There are reports of the use of indiscriminate acts of violence by both sides, including the use of cluster bombs and attacks on civilians, homes, schools, factories, markets and reports of civilians fleeing airstrikes and being chased and shot at by helicopters.” It adds: “In the north, west and center of the country the humanitarian and security conditions are likely, in many cases, to breach Article 3 and/or Article 15(c) of the European convention.” 

However, the Foreign Office memorandum, published on the same day, takes a completely different stance on the Yemen conflict.  A Foreign Office memorandum released to the select committee on arms exports licenses declared that Saudi Arabia is acting within international law. Furthermore, the memo asserted there was no need for Britain to suspend weapons exports to the Gulf state. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, Ministry of Defence Middle East adviser until late 2014, urged the committee not to suspend exports to Saudi Arabia. “Our supporters are already dismayed and exasperated by our predilection to indulge special interest groups over our national interest. Our competitors can only see great opportunities to fill the economic vacuum that would be left by the UK’s actions, and our enemies will delight in seeing the UK’s commitment to Gulf stability weakened or broken,” he writes.

The US Tax Cheats

Oxfam America, which is the US arm of the global anti-poverty organization Oxfam, said in a new report on Thursday that 50 top American companies are denying the US administration, and other governments much needed tax income. US corporate giants, such as Apple, General Electric, and Microsoft, which have hidden nearly $1.4 trillion in dozens of offshore tax havens.

The report said the funds stashed by the corporations offshore between 2008 and 2014 show the extent to which tax havens allow firms to avoid taxes. The companies also used more than 1,600 subsidiaries in tax havens to hoard and move money around outside the reach of fiscal authorities, the report pointed out. At the same time, the corporations keep on taking benefits from government support in their home countries, but ordinary people are bearing the cost, it added. "When corporations don't pay their fair share of taxes, governments -- rich and poor -- are forced to cut services or make up the shortfall from working families and small businesses. Neither is acceptable." said Oxfam American President Raymond Offenheiser in a statement. 

"Multinational corporations that benefit from trillions in taxpayer-funded support are dodging billions in taxes," added Offenheiser. "The vast sums large companies stash in tax havens should be fighting poverty and rebuilding America's infrastructure, not hidden offshore in Panama, Bahamas, or the Cayman Islands."  The report pointed out the huge profits that major corporations have reported they are holding offshore, partly because of the high taxes they say they would have to pay for shifting the profits back to the US. For instance, General Electric has $119 billion, Microsoft $108 billion, Pfizer $74 billion, and Google parent Alphabet $47 billion.

Kids going hungry

Thousands of children in England started school underweight last year and rising numbers of children do not get enough to eat, says the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger. "For a minority of children, the school lunchtime represents the only chance each day to eat something substantial," the group reported. "In an age of rampant child obesity there has been a shock increase in the number of children starting their first and final years of school who are underweight," say the MPs. In addition, the most recent data suggested that more than half a million under-fives were anaemic in 2011, the highest level in 20 years. A small study in Birkenhead and South Shields show more than a fifth of pupils in some schools arrive hungry, with some complaining of "persistent hunger".

 There is evidence to suggest "too many children have hunger as their most constant companion". In "maybe most" of these families, parents do not have sufficient income properly to feed their children.

Food bank usage has continued to rise for another year, according to figures from the country’s biggest provider, the Trussell Trust, as new data revealed that hunger is most common in areas with high levels of disability and long-term illness. Overall 1,109,309 emergency food packages were distributed by the Trussell Trust in 2015-16. The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hunger, published today, estimates that more than half of the emergency food aid supplied in the UK comes from independent food banks and other organisations not covered by the Trussell Trust’s figures – indicating that the true scale of hunger in the UK could be far greater. The poorest households require 41 per cent of their income to cover the costs of food, fuel and housing; an increase of ten percentage points since 2003

Primary schools in England have been accused of “social segregation” after a report from the Sutton Trust showed more than 1,500 schools were turning away disadvantaged pupils in favour of children from higher-income families. 

Unicef's Fairness for Children report compared inequalities in income, education, health and life satisfaction between children from rich and poor families. The report found the UK lags behind other rich countries in reducing inequality in child well-being, coming in at joint 14th place - alongside Germany, Greece and Hungary. In inequality in education, where the UK was ranked 25th out of 37 countries in reading, maths and science. Britain also had a large gap between rich and poor children in the levels of fruit and vegetable consumption and the levels of physical activity.

The cost of removing decayed teeth in children in hospital has soared by 66% since 2010-11, according to councils demanding tougher action to tackle sugar addiction. Dental decay is the top cause of childhood hospital admission for children aged between five and nine, with nearly 26,000 admitted in 2013/14

Australia - the bullying neighbour

 Timor-Leste which won independence from Indonesia in 1999 is now engaged in a new economic independence struggle with Australia over rights to oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. In March, more than ten thousand East Timorese led by the Movimentu Kontra Okupasaun Tasi Timor (MKOTT or the movement against occupation in the Timor Sea) held a two-day peaceful protest in front of the Australian Embassy in Dili demanding a re-negotiation of the maritime borders of the oil- and gas rich Timorese sea. While some would like to say the protests were orchestrated by the Timorese Government, there should be no doubt that these protests grew out of the strong sentiment held by the Timorese and it was neither government led, nor government incited. The forceful, yet peaceful, protests were organised by Timorese civil society. The Timorese know themselves what is right and wrong.

“We fought a long struggle for 24 years for our independence and for sovereignty over our land, now we are in a new struggle to secure sovereign rights over our seas,” former prime minister, Xanana Gusmao told journalists.

Agio Pereira is the Minister of State, Timor Leste's second most important Cabinet position after the Prime Minister made the case that Australia was behaving like China in its approach to the domination of the South China Sea "I think Australia cannot go on lecturing other countries about respecting international law in the limitation of maritime boundaries, and yet look the other way in its closest neighbour, Timor Leste." 

Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, with an eye on China’s territorial aggression in the South China Sea, had urged other countries to abide by international law and called on the Americans, to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), the very UN convention that the Australian Government refuses to acknowledge in its dispute with Timor-Leste. Australia has withdrawn from the maritime boundary jurisdiction of UNCLOS.

In 1972, when East Timor was still a Portuguese colony, Australia and Indonesia agreed a boundary dividing the waters separating their countries. At that time, the continental shelf was generally recognised as the basis for determining maritime frontiers. As a result, Australia received 85% and left only 15% to Indonesia. Portugal rejected this arrangement. When Portugal pulled out in 1975, Indonesia invaded and annexed East Timor. The Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, sent his government a confidential telegram that has since been made public: "Closing the present gap in the agreed sea border could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or an independent Portuguese Timor.’ Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia's secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia” “

 In 1982, the UN Law of the Sea Convention formalised the median line as the basis for such agreements. Although Indonesia stood to gain in 1989 it signed a treaty ceding most of the resources in the Timor Gap to Australia in return for de jure recognition of its sovereignty over East Timor, a recognition that violated UN resolutions. Portugal took Australia to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). But Indonesia refused to recognise the ICJ's jurisdiction. In the absence of one of the parties, the court declared itself incompetent to rule but warned Australia that the treaty would not be binding on an independent East Timor.

Under the treaty of 1989 Australia and Indonesia created a Zone of Cooperation A (Zoca) in the Timor Gap. If the internationally-accepted median line principle had been followed, the resulting revenues would have gone entirely to East Timor. Instead, throughout most of Zoca, the governments shared royalties equally. Timor's interests were further damaged when the lateral boundaries of Zoca were drawn so as to exclude the Laminaria-Corallina field to the west and 80% of the Greater Sunrise field to the east.

In January 2000, a UN legal adviser announced, on the grounds that "we do not want to retrospectively legitimise, or give any legitimacy to the conclusion of the treaty, which was done by Indonesia over what is part of the territory of East Timor. So this is not a case of succession, it is a new legal instrument that we will create". The terms of the 1989 treaty would be renegotiated once Timor had achieved independence.

In March 2002, Australia withdrew from the ICJ's jurisdiction and rejected arbitration by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg. With recourse to the courts ruled out, there remains only the law of the strongest and where the Australian government was  caught bugging the Timorese cabinet room so it could spy on Timor-Leste’s leaders and officials.

When East Timor gained independence,  a consortium of oil companies led by ConocoPhilipps demanded a swift agreement on the Bayu-Undan field, which lies entirely within Zoca, so that they could pursue investments to exploit it. Australia sought to persuade the Timorese that they would lose everything if they asked for too much and Australia's foreign minister, Alexander Downer, remarked ominously that any revision of the share-out of royalties "plays into the overall size of the Australian aid programme in East Timor". However, threatened by further action under international the Australian government conceded 90% of the royalties from Bayu-Undan - 90% of the royalties from Bayu-Undan came to $100m a year over 20 years, not an insignificant sum. But this 90% share applies only in the Bayu-Undan field in Zoca, now designated the Joint Petroleum development area (JPDA). The situation remains unchanged in the Laminaria/Corallina fields to the west, which Australia exploits unilaterally at 150,000 barrels per day, and in Greater Sunlight to the east. These fields would treble East Timor's reserves if the frontiers were redrawn in accordance with the Timorese claim, which most experts support as legally correct. Australia continues to contest the claim on the basis of the continental shelf. Having delayed its response to the Timorese request for border negotiations until 18 months after independence, the Australian government then postponed the first meeting until April 2004. When the Timorese demanded monthly meetings, Australia claimed that lack of time and personnel made a six-month interval necessary, meanwhile collecting $1m a day from Laminaria/Corallina.

 In April 2004, Gusmao made an exasperated appeal to public opinion: "If our larger, more powerful neighbour steals the money we need to repay loans, that will put us deeper in debt. We will be one more country on the list of debt-ridden countries all over the world." Australia insisted upon its  generosity in conceding 90% of the royalties from Bayu-Undan and in giving $170m in aid. Oxfam Australia, however,  has calculated that, during this period, Australia had made more than $1bn from the Laminaria/Corallina field.

The Timorese government uses some the money raised from oil and gas revenues to provide essential services to its young population. Sixty percent of Timor-Leste’s 1.2 million people are aged under 25 years of age and the country continues to struggle on key development indicators, including hunger. According to the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, malnutrition is a major concern for Timor-Leste with 44.7 percent of children under five years old underweight.

And they said they didn't know...

More than 45 years ago the Stanford Research Institute presented a report to the American Petroleum Institute (API) that warned the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels could carry an array of harmful consequences for the planet. The main body for the oil industry in the US, knew about the dangers of climate change at least 20 years before the issue was brought into mainstream public knowledge via the former Nasa scientist James Hansen. Former US president Lyndon Johnson also received an early warning about climate change, with scientists explaining the mechanism of the greenhouse effect in 1965. Last year, it was revealed that ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, knew of climate change as early as 1981, only to spend millions of dollars over the following 27 years to promote climate denial. The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) said hundreds of documents show oil and gas executives met in 1946 to agree that they should fund research into air pollution issues. The subsequent findings were then covered up to protect company profits.  Carroll Muffett, president of CIEL, said the latest documents from 1968 “add to the growing body of evidence that the oil industry worked to actively undermine public confidence in climate science and in the need for climate action even as its own knowledge of climate risks was growing.

“Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic change,” the 1968 Stanford report, found and republished by the Center for International Environmental Law, states. “If the Earth’s temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.It is clear that we are unsure as to what our long-lived pollutants are doing to our environment; however, there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.” The study, written by scientists Elmer Robinson and RC Robbins, adds that accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause “serious worldwide environmental changes”.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, said it was “disgraceful that industry groups like API knowingly hid the dangers of their project decades ago when they first learned of them, much as the tobacco industry hid the dangers of their product”.

Chasing the real cheaters?

Benefits fraud costs the government £1.3bn a year, according to official statistics, while the gap between tax owed and tax paid is put at £34bn a year by officials. 

3,700 department of work and pensions (DWP) staff have been assigned to investigate welfare fraud, while 700 work at HM Revenue and Customs in the two units whose job it is to investigate the wealthiest 500,000 people living in the UK. 

HMRC’s “affluent unit”, launched in October 2011, now employs 320 investigators, focusing on individuals with assets of more than £1m and income of more than £150,000 a year. The tax office’s “high net worth” unit, which has a further 400 investigators , focuses on the estimated 6,200 UK residents worth more than £20m in assets.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/13/benefit-or-tax-evasion-row-over-the-tories-targets

UK Child Poverty

Britin ‘lagging behind developed world’ on child poverty’, Unicef report reveals.

The UK ranked 25th out of 37 wealthy countries covered by the report – behind Poland, Romania, and Slovenia – for its equality levels in children’s reading, maths and science skills at age 15. Britain also saw the biggest difference between rich and poor children for consumption of healthy food such as fruit and vegetables, and it also had one of the largest gaps in levels of physical activity between children from high and low income backgrounds.

Lily Caprani, Unicef’s deputy executive director for the UK, said, “Inequality between children is damaging their lives and aspirations,” she said. “Taking children’s rights seriously means acting with urgency to make sure no child is left behind.”

Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said that for growing numbers of children, “childhoods are going to be shaped and limited by poverty-producing policies.”

Professor Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said that the report presented “a worrying picture of child health and wellbeing in the UK. Poverty and inequality impact on the way in which children develop, their future health, happiness, and economic prosperity,” she said. “It is particularly concerning that the UK has the largest difference in levels of healthy eating between children from low and high socio-economic status. Combined with one of the largest gaps in the levels of physical activity, more of our children are at risk of becoming overweight and obese which will have a significant impact on their future health and the health of the nation,” she added.

Swansea Branch street stall

Swansea Branch held their first street stall (in the main shopping area) last Saturday, 9 April, using the newly acquired folding table and banner.  Not much in the way of sales but the four comrades had some good discussions and handed out loads of leaflets.

The branch has agreed to have a stall (weather and personal commitments permitting) every Saturday 10am till 12noon (possibly 2pm) until further notice. We are hoping that we will come across people who has voted for us in the past. We are looking forward to distributing the EU referendum leaflet.

Venue:
Quadrant Shopping Centre
Swansea
SA1 3QW

Wales or the World?

That’s the issue in the Wales Assembly election – says Brian Johnson, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate in Swansea West.

‘Could the Welsh Assembly be the most important thing that has ever happened to Wales?’

This was the question posed by a journalist Brian Walters writing in the South Wales Evening Post in March 1999 shortly before the first Assembly elections. He suggested that the Assembly would profoundly affect our lives deciding issues on education, health, housing, transport.

16 years on, is Wales any better? Are the problems in Wales – job insecurity, poverty, crime, poor health-care -- any less than anywhere else in Britain?

The answer has to be ‘no’. The reason for this is clear.  These problems don’t come from particular constitutional arrangements. They come from the basic way society is organised – production for profit and ownership of the vast majority of the wealth by a tiny minority of people: the global system of capitalism.

The other parties

This is what all other political parties exist to administer. They have different ideas on how that system can be best maintained, but all agree it must be retained.

Many of their supporters have good intentions but are unaware that, in campaigning for these, they are helping to maintain this built-in system of minority privilege. However different the policies of Corbyn seem from those of Cameron, they offer no alternative to the present way of running society.

No matter how well-meaning politicians may be, they can’t control the system – it controls them. The best any government can do is ride the storms of the market.

So what's the alternative?

We propose an alternative to the system based on ownership of capital and market forces that currently exists in Wales, the UK and worldwide. This alternative is a society of common ownership that we call socialism.

But not ‘socialism’ as you probably know it. Not the type of dictatorships that collapsed in Russia and elsewhere and that were, in fact, a form of state capitalism. Not the various schemes for state control put forward by some in the Labour Party.

For us socialism means something completely different and something much better. We are talking about:

•  a world community without states or frontiers based on participatory democracy

• a society without buying and selling where everyone has access to what they require to satisfy their needs, without the rationing system that is money

• a society where people use the earth’s abundant resources rationally and sustainably, and freely contribute their knowledge, skills and experience to produce what is needed

To sum up:

• If you don't like present-day society

• If you’re fed up with the way so many people are forced to live – hanging on for dear life to a job that gives little satisfaction and doing it just for the money

• If you are sick of seeing grinding poverty alongside obscene wealth

• If you are sick of the Earth being abused by corporations who couldn’t care less about the future or the environment

• If you think the root cause of most problems is the market system and the governments that maintain it

. . . then you’re thinking like we are.

What you can do

We are not promising to give you the society we describe. We are not putting ourselves forward as leaders.

The new society is one without leaders just as it is one without owners and wage-slaves. It is a wholly democratic society, which can only be achieved when you – and enough like-minded people – join together to bring it about peacefully and democratically.

If you agree with this, you will obviously not want to vote for anyone but our candidate. In casting your vote for Brian Johnson, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate, you will be voting for the kind of socialism you – and we – stand for.

Out of sight, Out of mind

The first groups of migrants have been put on ferries from Greece and deported back to Turkey. But what happened to them next – and what is likely to happen to the thousands who will surely follow – is much less clear.

According to media reports, they were transferred to a recently built detention centre in Pehlivanköy, northwestern Turkey. Journalists have had no access to them. The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, is yet to be granted permission to speak to them. It later emerged that 13 returnees had illegally not been given the chance to apply for asylum in Greece.

Can Turkey be considered a ‘safe third country’, as defined by international and European laws as a country where returnees can expect a fair and efficient asylum process. Those determined to have valid asylum claims should then be entitled to the standards of treatment and the rights set out by the 1951 Refugee Convention. Refugee law experts pointed out that Turkey does not meet these prerequisites. Greece attempted to work around the issue of the definition of a safe third country by hastily passing a law on 1 April that means Turkey can be considered a ‘first country of asylum’ for people deemed to have had ‘sufficient protection’. This removes the requirement that returnees must have access to individual refugee status determinations and protection in accordance with the 1951 Convention and means only that they must be safe from ‘refoulement’ – return to a country where their life or freedom would be under threat. It is questionable whether Turkey meets even this lower threshold of protection. In recent weeks, human rights groups have alleged that asylum seekers from both Afghanistan and Iraq have been detained, denied access to proper asylum procedures, and forcibly returned to their home countries. There have also been multiple accounts of Syrians being pushed back to Syria after attempting to cross the border into Turkey.

UNHCR’s regional director for Europe, Vincent Cochetel, was quoted in a French newspaper last week stating that “Turkey cannot be considered as a country of asylum” and that its asylum law was not operational.

“There’s a deafening silence from Turkey and UNHCR on whether Turkey will let non-European asylum seekers returned from Greece lodge refugee claims and process them fairly,” commented Gerry Simpson, a senior refugee researcher with Human Rights Watch. “If Turkey starts automatically deporting them to places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, Greece would be in clear breach of EU law prohibiting return to unsafe countries.”

 Orçun Ulusoy, a human rights lawyer from Turkey, cited allegations of abuse at a deportation centre for irregular migrants in the town of Askale and described Turkey’s asylum and migration system as “still in its infancy”…Inexperienced, under-equipped, under-trained, and under the wrong influences, this system is far away from providing a safe haven from migrants and refugees,” he wrote.

A tax haven dream

 Proposals by the European Commission to help crack down on tax dodging by multinational corporations are “close to pointless”, major international charities have warned. 

Oxfam said the EC’s proposals to make firms operating in Europe report where they make profits and pay taxes would allow companies to continue to “rob the world’s poorest”. Christian Aid meanwhile said the plans would allow “dodgy business as usual”.

“The European Commission's piecemeal proposals are not enough to end tax dodging that robs the world's poorest people of billions in lost revenue each year,” said Mark Goldring, Oxfam's GB chief executive. “The new plans only require big companies to report on their activities in the EU and a yet-to-be-decided list of tax havens that is likely to be arbitrary and limited. Unless these proposals are extended to cover all countries there's a risk they could be close to pointless as businesses will still be able to dodge taxes by diverting money to territories not included on the list.”

Diarmid O’Sullivan, ActionAid Tax Policy Adviser, said the plan was "a huge missed opportunity which falls far short of what is needed to stop multinationals hiding tax dodging behind opaque corporate structures".

Toby Quantrill, Christian Aid’s tax justice expert, said: “The Commission plans will allow multinationals to hide large parts of their global affairs from public scrutiny, which is a recipe for dodgy business as usual. “Unless companies have to report on their activities in all the countries where they operate, they could continue to dodge tax on a massive scale, using the places still hidden from view.” 

Class divide?

Graduates from richer families earn significantly more than poorer students who do the same degree at the same university, a huge study of over quarter of a million people has found. Research has found a marked link between parental income and earning potential of their children. In 2012/13, the average gap in earnings between students from higher and lower-income backgrounds was £8,000 a year for men and £5,300 a year for women, 10 years after graduation.

Even after taking account of the subject studied and the university attended, the average student from a higher-income background earned around 10 percent more than the average student from other backgrounds.

Between the richest and the poorest graduates,  the differential was even starker. The 10 percent highest-earning male graduates from richer backgrounds earned about 20 percent more than the 10 percent highest earners from relatively poorer backgrounds.

Jack Britton, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the paper, said that income inequality appeared to persist even among students with the same university experience. “This work shows that the advantages of coming from a high-income family persist for graduates right into the labour market at age 30.” 

Meanwhile, High Pay Centre finds that UK chief executives continued to enjoy pay and benefit rises, with average FTSE 100 boss receiving a £5.6m overall package. Stefan Stern, director of the High Pay Centre, said: “The evidence, which is coming directly from companies’ own annual reports, is that the 20-year rising trend in top company pay continues unabated. Yet, the average UK worker suffered from six years of falling wages in real terms from 2008 as inflation outpaced pay growth. Average weekly earnings still worth £40 a week less than before the financial crash.

The end of nations

Concluding the discussion on migration featured in the current issue of the New Scientist

At one time countries used to worry more about keeping people in than keeping them out. Then came the nation-state and the need to control citizens. Governments only started to control who entered their country relatively recently. Roman and medieval laws kept peasants bound to their farms. In the 1600s, English labourers needed locally issued passes to travel for work, partly to stop them “benefits shopping” for parish poor relief. But controls were largely internal. External passports were mere requests for safe conduct, rather than restrictive documents determining where you could go, says John Torpey at the City University of New York. The passport as an instrument of state regulation was born of the French revolution of 1789. At first, ordinary people were issued passes to control internal movement, especially to Paris. But after the king tried to escape, and foreign aristocrats attacked the revolution, the authorities started requiring such papers for exit and entry to the country. The revolution created one of the world’s first “nation-states”, defined by the “national” identity of its people rather than its monarchs’ claims. “This novel importance of the people and their nationality made identity papers integral to creating the modern state,” says Torpey.

As the idea of the nation-state spread, so did passports. But as the industrial revolution snowballed in the 19th century, there was pressure to allow free movement of all the factors of production – money, trade and labour. Passport requirements were widely relaxed across Europe – in 1872, the British foreign secretary, Earl Granville, even wrote: “all foreigners have the unrestricted right of entrance into and residence in this country”. The situation was similar in North America. In the early 20th century, European legal experts were divided over whether states even had the right to control people’s international movements. But the nationalism that was propelling Europe towards war changed that. Among other things, it meant foreigners might be spies.

Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Those coloured patches on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a “people” or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of them. And more and more peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring a caliphate Islamic State. Many of the conflicts, from Palestine to the Ukraine and from rows over immigration to membership of the European Union, are linked to nation states in some way. Even as our economies globalise, nation states remain the planet’s premier political institution. Large votes for nationalist parties in this year’s EU elections prove nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it. The nation-state model also fails often: since 1960 there have been more than 180 civil wars worldwide.

Yet there is a growing awareness that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments. The nation state is a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world.

For most of the past thousand years, there were no nations in Europe. It was a hotchpotch of tribal groupings, feudal kingdoms, autonomous cities and trading networks. Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states, says John Breuilly of the London School of Economics. If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. Humanity started as wandering, extended families, then formed larger bands of hunter-gatherers, and then, around 10,000 years ago, settled in farming villages. Such alliances had adaptive advantages, as people cooperated to feed and defend themselves. Several villages allied themselves under a chief; several chiefdoms banded together under a higher chief. To grow, these alliances added more villages, and if necessary more layers of hierarchy. These alliances continued to enlarge and increase in complexity in order to perform more kinds of collective actions. For a society to survive, its collective behaviour must be as complex as the challenges it faces – including competition from neighbours. If one group adopted a hierarchical society, its competitors also had to. Hierarchies spread and social complexity grew. Larger hierarchies won more wars, fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage, record-keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed. But these were not nation states. A conquered city or region could be subsumed into an empire regardless of its inhabitants’ “national” identity. “The view of the state as a necessary framework for politics, as old as civilisation itself, does not stand up to scrutiny,” says historian Andreas Osiander of the University of Leipzig in Germany.

Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. Even quite late on, rulers spent little time governing, says Osiander. In the 17th century Louis XIV of France had half a million troops fighting foreign wars but only 2000 keeping order at home. In the 18th century, the Dutch and Swiss needed no central government at all. Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. Before the modern era, says Breuilly, people defined themselves “vertically” by who their rulers were. There was little horizontal interaction between peasants beyond local markets. Whoever else the king ruled over, and whether those people were anything like oneself, was largely irrelevant. Such systems are very different from today’s states, which have well-defined boundaries filled with citizens. In a system of vertical loyalties, says Breuilly, power peaks where the overlord lives and peters out in frontier territories that shade into neighbouring regions. Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes. Such loose controlmeant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. Some, like the Roman Empire, did this on a very large scale. But complexity – the different actions society could collectively perform – was relatively low. In 1648, Europe’s Peace of Westphalia ended centuries of war by declaring existing kingdoms, empires and other polities “sovereign”: none was to interfere in the internal affairs of others. This was a step towards modern states – but these sovereign entities were still not defined by their peoples’ national identities. International law is said to date from the Westphalia treaty, yet the word “international” was not coined until 132 years later.

The tipping point was the industrial revolution. This demanded a different kind of government. Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split. In 1776 and 1789, revolutions in the US and France created the first nation states, defined by the national identity of their citizens rather than the bloodlines of their rulers. According to one landmark history of the period, says Breuilly, “in 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.” For various reasons, people in England had an earlier sense of “Englishness”, he says, but it was not expressed as a nationalist ideology

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around. France, for example, was not the natural expression of a pre-existing French nation. At the revolution in 1789, half its residents did not speak French. In 1860, when Italy unified, only 2.5 per cent of residents regularly spoke standard Italian. Its leaders spoke French to each other. One famously said that, having created Italy, they now had to create Italians. Siniša Maleševic of University College Dublin in Ireland believes that this “nation building” was a key step in the evolution of modern nation states. It required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s circle of family and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. Benedict Anderson of Cornell University described nations as “imagined” communities: they far outnumber our immediate circle and we will never meet them all, yet people will die for their nation as they would for their family. Such nationalist feelings, he argued, arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.

According to Brian Slattery of York University in Toronto, Canada, nation states still thrive on a widely held belief that “the world is naturally made of distinct, homogeneous national or tribal groups which occupy separate portions of the globe, and claim most people’s primary allegiance”. But anthropological research does not bear that out, he says. Even in tribal societies, ethnic and cultural pluralism has always been widespread. Multilingualism is common, cultures shade into each other, and language and cultural groups are not congruent. Moreover, people always have a sense of belonging to numerous different groups based on region, culture, background and more. “The claim that a person’s identity and well-being is tied in a central way to the well-being of the national group is wrong as a simple matter of historical fact,” says Slattery.

According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy. Dictatorships exacerbate ethnic strife because their institutions do not promote citizens’ identification with the nation. In such situations, people fall back on trusted alliances based on kinship. Insecure governments allied to ethnic groups favour their own, while grievances among the disfavoured groups grow – and the resulting conflict can be fierce.

People self-segregate. Humans like being around people like themselves, and ethnic enclaves can be the result. Communities where people are well mixed – such as in peaceable Singapore, where enclaves are actively discouraged – tend not to have ethnic strife. Larger enclaves can also foster stability.

Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, using mathematical models to correlate the size of enclaves with the incidences of ethnic strife in India, Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia, found that enclaves 56 kilometres or more wide make for peaceful coexistence – especially if they are separated by natural geographical barriers. Switzerland’s 26 cantons, for example, which have different languages and religions, meet Bar-Yam’s spatial stability test – except one. A French-speaking enclave in German-speaking Berne experienced the only major unrest in recent Swiss history. It was resolved by making it a separate canton, Jura, which meets the criteria. Ethnicity and language are only part of the story. Lars-Erik Cederman of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich argues that Swiss cantons have achieved peace not by geographical adjustment of frontiers, but by political arrangements giving cantons considerable autonomy and a part in collective decisions. Cederman’s analysis confirms that trouble arises not from diversity alone, but when certain groups are excluded from power (The US set up just such a government in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.) Bar-Yam’s and Cederman’s research suggests one answer to diversity within nation states: devolve power to local communities.

“We need a conception of the state as a place where multiple affiliations and languages and religions may be safe and flourish,” says Slattery.

“The future structure and exercise of political power will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one,” Jan Zielonka of the University of Oxford says. “The latter is about concentration of power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity.” Neo-medievalism, on the other hand, means overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and governing institutions, and fuzzy borders.

Now that the nation’s time may be drawing to a close, the World Socialist Movement advances the concept of world socialism, a planet without borders and without the State. We argue for forms of free associations of producers and world-wide federated communes. 

Solidarity

Verizon have made $39 billion in profits over the last three years—and $1.8 billion a month in profits over the first three months of 2016.

"More and more, Americans are outraged by what some of the nation's wealthiest corporations have done to working people over the last 30 years, and Verizon is becoming the poster child for everything that people in this country are angry about," said Edward Mooney, vice president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 2-13. "This very profitable company wants to push people down."

Up to 40,000 Verizon workers from Massachusetts to Virginia will go on strike at 6 am on Wednesday, 13^th, unless the company "reconsiders its shameful, and I do mean shameful, demands," CWA president Chris Shelton has warned. Unionized cable splicers, line technicians, call operators and others represented by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers made the strike call which will affect workers and customers in New York and New Jersey, as well as Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Verizon said it had trained thousands of non-union scab strike-breaking workers to carry out "virtually every job function handled by our represented workforce," in the event of a strike.

“We’re standing up for working families and standing up to Verizon’s corporate greed,” said CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor. “If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom.” http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/11/protesting-shameful-greed-40000-verizon-workers-set-strike-wednesday

But after trying for ten months to reach a fair contract, "we have to take a stand now for our families and every American worker," explained Myles Calvey,  International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 2222 business manager and chairman of T-6 Verizon New England.

Verizon is "attempting to make devastating cut backs" even after "significant worker concessions on healthcare," including:

1) Offshoring and contracting out even more customer service work to Mexico, the Philippines and other locations.

2) Cutting job security for all workers.

3) Requiring technicians to work away from home for as long as two months, without seeing their families. For anyone trying to balance work and family life, this is impossible.

4) Refusing to negotiate improvements to wages, benefits and working conditions for Verizon Wireless workers, who formed a union with CWA in 2014.

5) Freezing pensions at 30 years of service and forcing retirees to pay extremely high health care costs.

6) Slashing benefits for workers injured on the job.

RICH B’LEADERS! (weekly poem")

RICH B’LEADERS!

The leakage of the Panama Papers from Mossack Fonseca

has confirmed what some of us have known all along.

The secret’s out, our b’leaders are,

In it for their own good;

And like cold Iceland’s former ‘Guv’, (1)

When hands are peeled of each white glove, (2)

They’ve fingers in the pud!

And Cameron blows hot and cold,

Sidestepping when he can;

No doubt afraid of being sussed,

About the secret offshore trust,

Set up by his ‘old man’.

Three-hundred K from dad and now,

Two-hundred from his mum;

Will Cameron reveal this week,

The findings of another leak,

And that there’s more to come? (3)

The fact is that the great and good,

Have neatly stashed away;

In their own tax-avoidance haul,

The wealth created by us all,

Who they see as mere prey.

No doubt they’ll say without their lead,

We sheep would soon be lost;

The truth is quite the opposite,

So give each b’leading hypocrite,

A digital riposte!

And wake up voters everywhere,

You’ve no more an excuse;

Take every rich blood-sucking louse,

Our b’leader to the lion house,

And set the buggers loose!

(1) Iceland’s P.M., Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, resigned after it was discovered

that he’d transferred his offshore company’s millions to his wife for £0.70p.

(2) In China, a ‘white glove’ is a fixer who acts a front to hide the real owner.

(3) Channel Four hints that there are more details to come.

© Richard Layton

Cosmetic surgery - 'Profit before people'

The General Medical Council that regulates UK doctors is bringing in new guidelines for cosmetic procedures to stop rogue practitioners who put profits before patients.

New rules are coming into force in June for private clinics and the NHS, make it clear that patients must not be rushed or cajoled into having surgery. Promotional tactics like two-for-one offers are banned. The surgeon or practitioner who is carrying out the cosmetic procedure - be that a breast implant, face lift or botox injections - must fully explain the risks of any procedure and should make sure patients know who to contact if they experience any complications, say the guidelines.

A review of the industry in 2013 by Prof Sir Bruce Keogh found few safeguards for patients, particularly for those undergoing non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as dermal fillers. "In fact, a person having a non-surgical cosmetic intervention has no more protection and redress than someone buying a ballpoint pen or a toothbrush," his report to government concluded.

The Royal College of Surgeons of England is launching its own set of professional standards for cosmetic surgeons. The RCS is also calling on the government to introduce new legislation at the next Queen's Speech in May to make sure surgeons are certified to carry out cosmetic operations. It is hoped the measures will put an end to botched and unethical procedures.

Victoria Ashton, who had breast implants in 2008 that were later to be found faulty with a high risk of rupturing in the body is now part of a campaign group for the 47,000 UK women similarly affected by the PIP implant scandal.

"Think twice," she said. "Profit before people is basically our experience of the cosmetic surgery industry. They are all lovely to you in the process of having your operations. "As soon as your operation is over and done with and you are out of the period in which they look after you, they don't really want to know."