Recent election results in India have been worrying for the left to say the least, with the successes chalked up by the BJP, a party that combines a form of religious (Hindu) fundamentalism that frequently expresses itself as bigoted and chauvinistic against Muslims and Christians alike, with an equally zealous commitment to neo-liberal economics.

One particularly bright ray of sunshine however has been the inspiring Communist-led movement of farmers demanding relief from the crippling effects of this neo-liberalism.

From today’s Morning Star,

“MAHARASHTRA state Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis threw in the sponge today when tens of thousands of small farmers facing penury marched to state capital Mumbai to demand support.

“He said that his government was “sensitive and positive” towards their demands, which included loan relief and increased minimum prices for their products.

“Small farmers have been driven to the wall by neoliberal policies adopted by the Hindu-supremacist BJP central government led by Narendra Modi and carried through by his supporters at state level.

“Countless numbers have committed suicide after being unable to meet interest payments on loans raised to buy seeds, fertiliser and animal feed.

“In a protest last year in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, many carried the skulls of farmers who had killed themselves due to unpayable levels of debt.

“The Maharashtra farmers belong to the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the small farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which reports that 1,753 debt-ridden farmers have killed themselves since last June and demands full implementation of recommendations by the 2004-6 Swaminathan Commission on sustainable farming.

“So angry have they become at indifference to their plight that about 50,000 of them have marched more than 100 miles in recent days in temperatures of 40°C to turn Mumbai into a sea of red.

“They demand unconditional and complete relief on loans and electricity and a minimum support price of one-and-a-half times the input cost for farm produce.

“The farmers also want compensation for crop losses due to February’s unseasonal rain, hailstorm and attack by pink bollworm.

“AIKS secretary Ashok Dhawale said: “We want the state government to stop forceful acquisition of farm lands in the name of development projects like the super highway and tracks for bullet trains.”

“The protesting farmers made clear that, if they were ignored, they would “gherao” the government, which would entail surrounding the state parliament and not allowing anyone to leave until they had satisfaction.

“BJP MP Poonam Mahajan said: “I respect these farmers, but what bothered me the most is that these farmers are holding communist flags. I hope farmers will not be used for political agendas in the future.”

“His was an isolated voice as even hardened BJP supporters accepted the need to meet farmers’ needs.

As they marched into Mumbai, local people lined up to greet them with water, dates and biscuits.

“Mr Fadnavis authorised his ministers to meet Mr Dhawale, AIKS state secretary Ajit Nawale and CPI(M) assembly member Jiva Gavit to discuss the farmers’ problems before announcing his full acceptance of their demands.”

CEREN SAGIR

 A WHOPPING gender pay gap means that the average woman worker starts getting paid for the year today — on International Women’s Day.

TUC research revealed that women work for free for more than two months of the year, when their wages are compared with those of men.

The gender pay gap for full- and part-time employees currently stands at over 18 per cent.

But in some industries, women have to wait until April or even May for their “Women’s Pay Day.”

In education, the gender pay gap is currently more than 26 per cent, so the average woman effectively works for free for over a quarter of the year and has to wait until April 7 to start earning the same as the average man.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “Nearly 50 years since the Ford machinists went on strike at Dagenham, the UK still has one of the worst gender pay gaps in Europe.

“Women in the UK will only start to get paid properly when we have better-paid part-time and flexible jobs. And higher wages in key sectors like social care.”

Ms O’Grady said the best first step for women worried about pay was to join a union as “workplaces that recognise unions are more likely to have family friendly policies and fair pay.”

Shadow work and pensions secretary Debbie Abrahams said: “On International Women’s Day and the year in which we mark 100 years since some women were first allowed to vote women still face unacceptable pay disparities.”

Unison Wales also revealed today that 70 per cent of 150 women polled did not believe equality in the workplace had been achieved, with more than half having witnessed or experienced sexism.

Unison Wales women’s officer Jenny Griffin said that there’s so much pressure on “women to look good, be the perfect wife, the perfect mother and bring home a salary. Men are not judged in the same way and the expectations and aspirations we ask of them are much lower.”

Shadow women and equalities minister Dawn Butler said: “Today we celebrate how far we have come in the fight for equality, while also recognising how far we still have to go.

“It is time to address these deep-rooted inequalities. The next Labour government will introduce radical reforms to tackle the structural barriers facing women across our society.”

Women’s rights campaigners across Britain are taking part in protests today to mark International Women’s Day.

Over 250 people across the country are joining a 24-hour “freedom fast” today in solidarity with hunger strikers locked up in Yarl’s Wood immigration centre.

The Home Office has refused to meet demands of the strikers as the protest reaches its second week, responding by threatening to accelerate deportation.

A demonstration along with the freedom fast will be held outside the Home Office this afternoon at 3pm, and at 5pm in Carfax, Oxford, in support.

And Global Women’s Strike is organising a protest in support of Sisters of Rohingya outside the Unilever offices in London.

With over £430 million invested in Myanmar, Unilever is one of the biggest foreign firms there. Myanmar’s military is committing ethnic cleansing, systematic rape and torture against the Rohingya.

And an International Women’s Day march will be held in Glasgow at 4.30pm at the La Pasionaria statue.

The demonstration will be joined by #Solidarity4Repeal campaigners to raise awareness about access to abortion.

From Morning Star Thursday 22nd February 2018

MARY DAVIS explains the historic significance of Sylvia Pankhurst and the East London Federation of Suffragettes

This year we celebrate the centenary of the Representation of the People Act when women over 30 with a small property qualification were enfranchised, even though the 1918 Act gave all men over 21 the vote.

Sylvia Pankhurst casts her vote.

For some reason there appears to be a greater preference to mark the 1918 anniversary than 1928 when, at last, all women over 21 were enfranchised.

We need to re-examine suffrage history.

We are accustomed to thinking that the historic demand for “votes for women” meant votes for all women. At the time it was formulated in the late

1860s, the demand was that women should obtain the vote “on the same terms as that agreed or may be accorded to men.”

However, the 1884 Reform Act only enfranchised 40 per cent of adult males. Thus, this formula excluded most women, despite the fact that all the suffrage societies including the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) adopted it.

Criticism of the limited demand — although not the issue — came from working class women since suffrage on this basis would not enfranchise them.

Within the WSPU Sylvia Pankhurst became critical of this long accepted women’s suffrage demand, which had been drafted by her father. Hence we can witness, on the most fundamental strategy of the suffrage campaign, a tension between class and gender politics.

This tension is indicative of something much more than personal differences. It captures the complexities of the competing loyalties of class and gender.

Given the limited provisions of the 1884 Act, it was not unreasonable for socialists and others to wish to remedy the obvious democratic deficit in the male suffrage entitlement.

However, such a seemingly logical demand took on a controversial aspect during the period in which the campaign for women’s suffrage was at its height since it could be, and often was, counterposed to women’s suffrage.

This said, however, insufficient attention has been paid to the pro-feminist supporters of adult suffrage, who undoubtedly exercised a strong influence among working class women.

Ada Neild Chew, an organiser for the Women’s Trade Union League in Lancashire, opposed the traditional limited suffrage demand on

the grounds that such a bill if introduced would be “a class and property Bill and we have enough property franchises already. A vote for women by all means, but, when we get it, let us see that the working women, the women who earn their daily bread by their daily toil…. shall be considered first and not last.”

Sylvia Pankhurst’s writings suggest that she regarded the limited demand as a profound tactical error from as early as 1906 for two reasons.

First, because the women’s movement’s rejection of adult suffrage fuelled the rift between it and the labour movement. Second, she regarded the precise nature of the women’s suffrage “magic incantation” as “no longer appropriate after 1906” since it was undemocratic and exclusive.

A bill based on the traditional demand would give votes only to “propertied spinsters and widows.”

Much later, reminiscing on how the vote was won, she expressed an even more forthright criticism of the traditional suffrage demand.

She wrote: “In those days no-one dared to ask for the vote for every woman. Right up to the end the suffrage societies, with the sole exception of my own East London Federation … worked for little bills to enfranchise less than 10 per cent of us, and at many stages they actually proposed to exclude married women altogether.”

For her therefore the issue of the women’s franchise was a class question and meant that it had perforce to be an issue for the labour movement and vice versa.

She viewed with alarm the growing coolness shown by the WSPU to the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). This was all the more shocking to Sylvia in view of her family’s previous longstanding connections with the ILP.

In 1907, Christabel Pankhurst issued a press statement formalising the WSPU position which asserted that the WSPU made no distinction between the Tory, Liberal and Labour Party. She ignored the fact that the ILP, since 1905, was committed to women’s suffrage.

The rift between the WSPU and the labour movement, including the ILP, was complete and final in 1907.

Sylvia Pankhurst’s decision to form a suffrage organisation in the East End of London was not motivated solely by her frustration with the WSPU but more positively by her desire to create a mass women’s movement.

This, she said, would be accomplished “not by the secret militancy of a few enthusiasts, but by the rising of the masses.”

She chose the East End because “it was the greatest homogenous working class area accessible to the House of Commons by popular demonstrations.”

She was aware that the WSPU had become a predominantly middle class organisation and that its hostility to the Labour Party was deeply resented in working class areas.

She wanted working class women to be fighters on their own account, free from the patronising attitudes of middle class women which, however well-intentioned, served to place women workers in the role of victims thereby undermining their potential to liberate themselves.

The outbreak of the WWI in 1914 propelled the WSPU away from feminism in favour of patriotism. It suspended its activities on suffrage to focus attention on the war effort, leaving the East London Federation as almost the only active group in the suffrage campaign.

In 1914 Sylvia and her organisation, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), were expelled from the WSPU. Throughout the war, in contrast to the parent body, the ELFS distinguished itself in maintaining its commitment to its original purpose — the fight for women’s suffrage.

Given the vast array of other activities in which it was involved, it would have been easy to lose sight of this. T

he issue of human (adult) suffrage now emerged as an important campaigning demand, attracting support from the Labour left. This wider support increased during the course of the war when the ELFS moved steadily in a socialist direction.

The left trend in the ELFS and its weekly paper The Women’s (later ‘Workers’) Dreadnought mirrored the leftward turn within the working class movement generally.

This development was due to the growing opposition to the war after the introduction of conscription in 1916, the strength of the shop stewards and workers’ committees and the impact of the Russian Revolution. All these issues and campaigns were supported, and in the case of the Russian revolution led, by the ELFS.

In 1917, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation (as the ELFS was now called) stated that no measure was acceptable unless it provided for complete adult suffrage.

The government’s Franchise Bill, introduced in 1917, was, of course, unacceptable to the WSF and to all socialists since, although, for the first time women were included in its provisions, it proposed to enfranchise only women over 30 on the basis of a small property qualification.

It was a shabby all-party compromise which explicitly rejected the principle of equal suffrage in favour of the safer bet of enfranchising older women on the presumption that they were likely to be wives and mothers.

The terms of the Bill serve to demolish the oft-repeated argument that women gained the vote as a reward for their war work. It was younger, single women who were the most directly active in this regard as workers in munitions factories or as nurses in the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD). Such women were explicitly excluded.

Sylvia was almost the only feminist voice in opposition to the Franchise Bill. However, its anti-egalitarianism was not the only reason for her antipathy towards it.

She saw that the government’s motive was to take the sting out of any further agitation on the question by leaving it “in the hands of the ladies he had seen” — that is the “well-dressed” women of the “respectable” suffrage societies who contributed to the patriotic fervour during the war.

This conveniently excluded the wartime “diluted” labour of working class women who had taken over men’s jobs.

From this time onward there is little mention of the suffrage question in the Workers’ Dreadnought or in the minutes of the Workers’ Suffrage Federation despite the fact that the Bill, enfranchising women over the age of 30 gained Royal assent in February 1918.

For Sylvia this was not a great victory for women and not a matter for rejoicing.

She pointed out that “less than half the women will get the vote by the new Act … the new Act does not remove the sex disability; it does not establish equal suffrage.”

In the first general election in which women could participate, 17 women stood as candidates, one of whom was Sylvia’s sister Christabel who stood for her newly formed and very short-lived Women’s Party. No women were elected.

Ironically, Emmeline was later adopted as a Conservative candidate, for an East London constituency. The only women elected in 1918 was the revolutionary Sinn Fein candidate who had fought in the 1916 Easter Rising, Countess Constance Markiewicz. She refused to take her seat as a protest against British rule in Ireland.

During the suffrage campaign, the strategic issues that Sylvia Pankhurst and other socialist feminists faced have great resonances for all women activists today as we struggle to reconcile the class/gender divide when it resurfaces with uncanny regularity in the continuing campaign for women’s equality.

It is this present struggle that has fueled our long campaign to erect a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst which will soon grace Clerkenwell Green and represent the neglected role of working class women in the fight for the vote and true equality.

With her kind permission, we reprint here a piece from the blog of UCU activist Jane Elliott:

As a UCU member and the union representative for my department, I am taking part in national industrial action and will be on strike for 14 days in February and March. On non-strike days we will be working to contract, which means scaling back our labour hours to the stated maximum of 37.5 per week. The strike has been called in response to the proposed dismantling of our pension fund based on a goal of individualising risk and a discredited financial model that has declared a healthy pension fund to be in crisis.

Although I care very much about not living in poverty in my old age, for me the strike is more centrally about the future of higher education in this country. For the past 20 years, we have seen a sustained push to change university education from a public good that is free for students to a private product that each student is responsible for purchasing.

If we lose this battle over pensions, I believe that the government and university management nation-wide will take their victory as a mandate to go full steam ahead with marketisation, from raising tuition fees further, to relying more and more on part-time or ‘casualised’ lecturers who do not have permanent contracts, to increasingly treating students as passive consumers instead of citizens of a community that they co-create. Certainly this seems to be exactly the approach reflected in Theresa May’s proposed tuition review: one of the four priorities of the review is to discern ‘how to incentivise choice and competition right across the sector’.

If we win, however, our victory could provide momentum for change in the opposite direction. Less than 20 years ago, university was still free in this country. Just over five years ago, it was 1/3 the cost of what it is now. The changes that have been made need not be permanent; the vision of a privatised future is not inevitable. The university doesn’t have to be just another corporation and students just another set of consumers. It can be otherwise. For me, that is a possibility that is worth fighting for.

If you want to get involved, follow the campaign on facebook or twitter, donate to the strike fund, and if you are local, visit the picket lines and attend the teach-outs happening at King’s and universities across London.

in solidarity,

Jane

LINDSEY GERMAN looks back to when millions hit the streets of Britain and around the world to say no to imperialist invasion

THERE had never been a moment like it in protest history. Millions of people around the world joined in public demonstrations on every continent.

Across different time zones, protests were taking place over two days around February 15 2003, involving an estimated 30 million.

In Britain, the Stop the War Coalition, with its partners in CND and the Muslim Association of Britain, organised the biggest protest in British history.

The focus was the upcoming war against Iraq, enthusiastically demanded by president George W Bush, aided and abetted by his partner in crime, Tony Blair.

The movement against the Iraq war was a unique phenomenon. It was an international protest movement, co-ordinated by grassroots organisations from below.

Unlike most anti-war movements, it developed to a mass size before the war and invasion. For those who demonstrated, it was often a very strong personal statement of opposition to the war, coupled with a real belief that sufficient numbers on the streets would be enough to stop it.

In any genuine democracy that would and should have been enough. An opinion poll carried in the Guardian showed that at least one person from one out of every 25 households in Britain marched on that day — that puts the number at 1.5 to two million.

A YouGov poll in the Telegraph calculated that 4 per cent of the population had marched on that day — around two million people.

An urban geographer calculated that well over two million marched. Whatever the exact numbers, it was unprecedented in British history.

It reflected a well of opposition throughout society — school students walked out on strike, the Muslim community mobilised, retired army officers turned up at anti-war meetings, actors performed the anti-war play Lysistrata, and two Aslef train drivers refused to move equipment connected with the war.

But Blair was determined to go to invade Iraq. And so he set in train a series of events which continue to have grave and destructive consequences today.

He was not the only one. Bush, Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and the Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi were all determined to press ahead with the war, despite the misgivings of other European governments including France and Germany, and the opposition of the UN.

The response of protesters, especially in Italy, Spain and Britain, was spectacular. These countries hosted the largest demonstrations. Britain particularly stands out, however, since it had a Labour government promoting the war, whereas in Spain and Italy the main left parties were in opposition to it and to their right-wing governments. It was a remarkable achievement to mobilise such numbers when Labour was divided on this issue.

It was done by a combination of mass grassroots campaigning through the Stop the War Coalition — involving, school students, trade unionists, community and faith groups and political organisations which managed to unite a wide-ranging movement.

It comprised the left and the trade unions, the traditional peace movement around CND, and the Muslim community. While Labour was divided, its left figures, notably Tony Benn, George Galloway MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP did everything that they could to oppose war.

The different sections of the movement all managed to mobilise constituencies some of which had never worked with one another before.

This movement was well under way from the summer of 2002, as it became clear that Bush and Blair were determined to use any excuse to overthrow Saddam Hussein and launch a war and invasion.

The main justification for the planned attack was that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction which he was hiding from international weapons inspectors.

Blair’s government issued a dossier in September 2002 which was lapped up by the right-wing press but did nothing to sway the growing numbers of opponents of the war.

Instead they became more determined to oppose a path which was clearly not justified given the paucity of evidence and the alternatives to war which existed.

The Stop the War Coalition delegation to a mass European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002 took the historic decision to organise an international day of demonstrations across the continent and this intuitive spread.

By February 2003 the whole world was seeing demonstrations in opposition to this war.

It was a tragedy for the world that these calls were ignored. Iraq has suffered devastating losses and destruction, wars have spread across the Middle East, terrorism has grown.

The world is a much more dangerous place because of the actions of Bush and Blair 15 years ago.

Looking back after all this time, what conclusions can we draw?

First, the movement was massive but to stop an imperialist war machine would have required even higher forms of action, particularly strike action to hit the government where it hurt.

While many of us argued for this sort of action — and while there were many instances of strikes and walkouts on the day war broke out, as well as the courageous stand of the school students — we were not capable of winning this on the mass scale which would have been required.

The second point is that the movement has had long-term consequences in terms of British politics. While the movement failed to stop the war, to the bitter regret of millions, it did change public opinion in this country, with growing numbers of people opposing interventions, culminating in David Cameron being defeated in Parliament in August 2013 over the proposed bombing of Syria.

The movement was also a major contributing factor to the election of one of its major figures, Jeremy Corbyn, as leader of the opposition.

It is a great source of pride to those of us who organised the demonstration that it will go down as a historic moment. But it also makes us more determined to continue organising. Many of those who demonstrated for the first time then have gone on to demonstrate over other wars, over Palestine, and a range of other issues.

Many have made the connections between war, neoliberal economics and the system of imperialism which dominates the globe.

Donald Trump’s special relationship with Theresa May has come under some strain in recent months, but never forget this is a desperately close military and political alliance which is a threat to the world.

Governments strain every sinew to dress their interventions up as humanitarian, as helping the poor and beleaguered of the world.

They are anything but, with these decades-long wars contributing to worsening the lives of the people they are supposed to help.

With the war in Syria threatening to turn into a much bigger inter-imperialist conflict, with growing numbers of deaths in Afghanistan, and with the Saudi war in Yemen aided by British arms and military trainers, there is more reason to protest against war than ever.

That’s why the Stop the War Coalition is campaigning for an anti-war government, as the beginning of developing a foreign policy which isn’t based on occupation and war.

Lindsey German is convener of the Stop the War Coalition and was one of the main organisers of the march against the Iraq war on February 15 2003.

The Stop the War Coalition is organising a national tour of meetings on Why We Need an Anti-War Government. Tonight, February 15, it has meetings in London and Cardiff. See our website for details www.stopwar.org.uk.

_________________________________________________________________________

Published in Morning Star 15th February 2018

Originally published in the Morning Star.

Written by John Foster.

Last summer’s international seminar organised by the Institute of Employment Rights brought together trade unionists from Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Germany and Britain in London’s Marx Memorial Library to discuss the EU.

The publication of its proceedings reminds us, in timely fashion, that a progressive and pro-worker outcome to Britain’s current negotiations is not just vital for us in Britain but for workers across Europe.

But, as Steve Turner of Unite notes in his foreword, this is not what is currently on offer. Both options being canvassed by the Tory government are dangerously neoliberal and reactionary.

That being pushed by Theresa May and her allies will incorporate all elements of EU law into British law, including competition law, in a bid to secure preferential access terms for big business, particularly the City of London.

The other, the “Singapore model” offered by Boris Johnson, would seek trade deals modeled on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

John Hendy QC graphically demonstrates the problems posed by the two alternatives. “No-one can doubt that free trade agreements (FTAs) present a complete surrender of parliamentary sovereignty to multinational corporations. But the EU is not an alternative to FTAs.”

He instances the threat posed by EU law as applied in the recent judgement in favour of the Norwegian-Danish-owned firm Holship against Norway’s dock labour scheme, won by Norwegian workers 40 years ago to end casualisation on the waterfront.

Norway is not a member of the EU. But it is a member of the single market and comes within the jurisdiction of EU-based law. It was this that doomed its dock labour scheme.

In December 2016, Holship was able to secure a judgement in the European Free Trade Area court that the scheme infringed the “right of establishment”, which in EU law gives primacy to the rights of business to set up subsidiaries and employ labour without hindrance. This Holship can now do in Norway. Union opposition has been ruled illegal.

Hendy goes on to underline the wider problems facing the trade union movement within the EU, a warning amplified by the contributions of trade union representatives Mauricio Miguel from Portugal and Pavlos Kalosinatos from Cyprus.

The biggest threat is not so much EU laws as the EU treaties on which they are based and the policies which result.

EU law does defend basic minimum rights for workers on an individual basis. But EU policy, derived from the Lisbon Treaty, sees collective bargaining itself — the direct exercise of power by trade unions in wage setting — as detrimental to the operation of the free market.

The 2012 EU policy statement on labour market developments in Europe spelt this out and its implementation, through Troika bail-outs and more generally, has resulted in a precipitate decline in the proportion of EU workers covered by collective bargaining.

In 2008, 1.9 million Portuguese workers were covered by collective agreements. Now the number is less than 225,000. Elsewhere the fall has been equally sharp. And, as any trade unionist knows, legal rights mean very little without the collective strength to enforce them.

Hans Modrow, honorary president of Germany’s Die Linke, underlined the consequences of this social and political reversion. The destruction of hopes and expectations driven by the EU’s austerity policies and its neoliberal, pro-business solutions to crisis, is directly associated with the “weakening of the social struggles of the community at large”, opening the way for the right.

This is why what happens in Britain is so important for workers across Europe and Modrow spells out the real alternative: “The Labour Party has gained new support from many sections of the public based on principles of working-class collectivism, public ownership and social solidarity. This result has opened up new hopes for working people across the whole of Europe.”

The challenge for us now, Modrow asserts, “is to place these principles as the top priority in the negotiations on the future of Britain’s relations with the EU … whereby Britain would not be subject to the neoliberal competition policies of the EU but instead would base her freedoms on the principles of economic and social solidarity.”

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the victory of Soviet forces over the Nazi invaders as Field Marshall Paulus finally surrendered to the Red Army defenders, marking the virtual inevitability of the victory against fascism, including the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz just under two years later, marked now as Holocaust Memorial Day.

Historians generally see the victory as having more political than military significance given the failure of the German forces to take Moscow in the winter of 1941-2, but in terms of heroism and utter human suffering, Stalingrad is rightly seen as one of the most epic battles of the 20th Century.

Long live the memory of those who fought and died in the war against fascism!

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th Century, when the forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF) launched audacious attacks against the US occupying forces in South Vietnam and their Vietnamese puppets.

Probably the most iconic moments was when a unit of the NLF took control of the US embassy in Saigon, a huge propaganda victory but paid for with the ultimate sacrifice of the courageous fighters who participated.

Although the war dragged on for far too many years afterwards, these events told anybody in the USA who was prepared to give it any serious thought, be it the government, the military or the mass of the population, that the war could not be won.

Coincidentally a bit like the events of almost exactly 25 years before in the ruins of a city on the Volga in Russia.

More on that later.

The pending collapse of this PFI giant has huge implications.

As Rebecca Long-Bailey MP has tweeted,

“The collapse of #Carillion could provoke a serious crisis. The Government, must stand ready to bring these contracts back into public control…”

It does of course raise a whole number of issues.

One, as an aside, is the question of why Vince Cable, leader of a minor party, is considered by some of the main sections of the media to be the person to be quoted first and foremost rather than Ms Long-Bailey, the main opposition spokesperson on industry. Some might make the outrageous suggestion that there is a culture of sexism within the establishment broadcasting media. Surely not!

It also should remind us that as a movement we are still living with the legacy of the Blair years, when PFI was extended further and further into the public sector.

But fast forward a bit to the present, the inevitable questions that will be asked include,

• Why did  a company that should have been known to be in trouble, continue to be awarded public business in so many crucial areas?
• What will the reaction be if tax payers’ money is thrown at this company to save its shareholders?

Clearly jobs have to be saved, and equally clearly crucial public sector construction work has to continue, but if one positive comes out of this crisis, hopefully it will be demands that such work be taken in-house by the state and local government, that a failing giant that relies on public sector work be itself taken into public ownership.

Finally we should look at their record as an employer, something which has been covered a few times on this blog over the years.

Labour should be bold on these issues, and so should the trade unions. Unite, for example already has a strong policy on the question of public sector contracts.