The Public and Commercial Service T Union (PCSU) is the main am.
Service union with 280,000 members. Although members have elected Mark Serwotka, a Socialist Alliance supporter as General Secretary, the union's National Executive is still controlled by Blairites in the 'Moderate faction.
However a ballot is under way to elect a new National Executive, and the Moderates may lose control to the 'Left Unity' group.
"Left Unity' is supported by a range of left wing organisations but has been dominated by the Socialist Party (formerly the Militant). All socialists should campaign for a Left Unity victory in the National Executive elections as the Moderates' seek to prevent any fight back by union members against Blair's attacks on the public sector.
In the new Department of Work and Pensions (the DWP was created by the merger of the Benefits Agency Employment Service) PCS members require the full support of the union to fight
series of battles with government/employer.
Recently the PCSU backed Matthew Thompson, a member in Manchester
Mark Serwotka opposing the Department's new dress code. As a result of his success at an and Employment Tribunal, members of staff
need no longer wear a collar and tie at work. the Too often in the past Moderate NEC's
have turned down funding for important legal cases or strike action necessary to defend members' terms and conditions. ness and disciplinary policies. dispute). (15 percent of its Estate). estate.
In May PCSU representatives from the DWP will be meeting in Scarborough for Jobcentres their annual Conference to plan a response to the government/employer offensive. The have to Government has directed Departmental Managers to impose draconian new sickThe employer is also seeking to wriggle now mostly unscreened). out of an agreement with the union over health and safety in new Jobcentreplus offices after a protracted industrial dispute. Management have been trying (and so far failing) to victimise union reps (most notably Chris Ford, who led the health and safety
Furthermore, the Government wants to cut 20,000 jobs in the Department over the next few years and shut many local offices
The Government claims it is spending Servants and claimants. loads of money refurbishing Jobcentres, however it is actually making savings through the jobcentreplus programme by closing offices and selling off its remaining dynamic of people
To make a new claim for benefit under Jobcentreplus you cannot just simply turn up to an office and collect a form, you need now to ring a call centre to get it posted to SKie you. Also claimants for a variety of benefits
expense are compelled to have regular interviews at
The new system means the vulnerable
wait longer to get paid. resolve. Jobcentreplus is a worse service for claimants and there is an increasing number of violent incidents in offices (which are
PCSU representatives in London held a lobby of Parliament over Jobcentreplus staffing cuts in March, as part of a campaign to 'keep the social local'. A national campaign on a similar line should be launched through the Scarborough Conference.
However with a deteriorating industrial relations climate in the Department it is probable industrial action will be necessary in order to stop staffing cuts and other attacks made by the Government on Civil
will.
Seasoned activists in the PCSU know many Left Unity candidates for the National Executive elections are not the most
However there is no doubt a Left Unity Executive will democratise the union and help members resist a Government bent on destroying the civil service and welfare Labour:
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war based on lies has led to a fraudulent A
"peace", based on the fiction that a new, democratic Iraq can emerge from the wreckage of a ferocious military invasion.
In reality a new barbarism has begun to emerge, symbolised by the petty pilfering and looting of government buildings, shops, museums and hospitals - soon to be followed by the grand-scale multi-billion looting of the country's precious oil reserves which was always an underlying reason for the onslaught, and which will be carried out under the armed might of the USA.
It was a war based on cynical lies about Saddam's now obviously non-existent 'weapons of mass destruction, unproven claims of his links with terrorism and even the September I1 events, and evidently ridiculous assertions that Saddam's bankrupt, sanctions-crushed state with its demoralised conscript army, obsolete tanks, and a handful of feeble, inaccurate and short range rockets, represented a 'military threat' to the region.
It was fuelled by a relentless barrage of lies from PR-trained military officers, backed up by troupes of "embedded" journalists who gamely retailed to uncritical presenters the few partial details they were being fed, or the stage-managed events they were allowed to see. By contrast independent journalists who refused to tow the line have faced what John Simpson has described as a "hammering", bringing the deaths of IT's Terry Lloyd and at least 14 others, many from so-called "friendly fire".
Time and again the nalists lent their names to what proved to be spurious events repeated "discoveries" of alleged chemical weapons: the mythical uprising in Basra; the capture of an Iraqi "general"; the "torture chamber" that turned out to house victims of the IranIraq war; the Al Quaeda training camp manufacturing ricin and other poisons in Kurdish Iraq...
And the war effort was egged on by the blatant lies of Bush, Blair and a retinue of cynical British and US politicians, boosted by a largely pathetic and prostrate US and British media desperate to prove their loyalty to "our boys" by disregarding the truth.
From the outset the war was an illegal US-led war of aggression - the "supreme international war crime" according to the judges at the Nuremburg trials after World War 2. Yet the pro-war media have claimed it was "treason" for George Galloway to suggest that, in line with the Nuremburg verdicts, British troops should disobey "illegal orders": ( = Iraq faces a and just two brave soldiers have
taken a stand as conscientious
objectors - and now face
court martial and jail.
The weasel words in a
new lexicon of modern warfare were aimed not to inform but to distract the wider western
public from the illegality and
horror of the events. The AngloAmerican invasion force with no UN mandate was consistently and falsely described as "coalition forces" to hide the that Australia from the claimed 35new barbarism strong "coalition of the willing" had sent military assistance.
* Newly invaded sections of Iraq were described as "liberated", despite evidence that the Iraqis no more wanted US control than they wanted Saddam.
* Iraqi soldiers who resisted the invasion using guerrilla tactics, and wearing civilian denounced as "terrorists", despite the fact that this tactic has a long and honourable history going back through the French and Russian resistance fighting the Nazis to the Americans in the War of Independence. * The aerial slaughter of thousands of Iraqi troops in their bunkers by US bombers was described as "softening up".
*While single casualties or deaths were reported on the invading side, decimated Iraqi tanks, emplacements and whole units that had been blown to pieces were gleefully described as "degraded".
But if the western media shrank from reporting B
the horrendous Iraqi military death toll in this totally one-sided "war", there has been even less reportage of the wholesale slaughter and maiming of civilians, the brutal reality of the use of cluster bombs and rockets against towns and cities, and the long-term toll of cancers and deformed births that will follow the bombardment with uranium-tipped shells bombs, and bullets. The civilian casualties swamped the hospitals, which in any case had little if any drugs or equipment as a result of the sanctions imposed at the insistence of the US and
Soclalist re repression. clothes were to fob off the survivors. American plans. began to take shape. Britain. International aid agencies warned within the first few days of
sive opposition. occupation and by repression. through 12 years of sanctions 2ard yet to come.
Stance May 2003 3 This has been no liberation: it has been a bloody imperialist invasion, now followed by occupation and by the dangers of malnutrition and dire shortages of wate as the invaders took control: but the imperialist forces bent upon subduing Iraq ignored this.
They talked of delivering "humanitarian aid" - but even after all resistance had been crushed only pitiful, token amounts arrived. Billions were on hand to fight the war, a few million only for the subsequent aid effort,
The only priority was to secure the oilfields and the infrastructure to resume oil exports, so that the Iraqi people can be forced by the USA - through the laughably ill-named "oil for food" programme - to foot the bill for the war and for the reconstruction of their ruined country, using US contractors and following
When as the military conflict ground to a halt, and the looters ran out of portable items to steal, the political crisis created by the war
With most left-wing forces long ago slaughtered or driven into exile by Saddam, and many of the US-sponsored exiles lacking any support or discredited by their past corruption or links with Saddam's regime, a motley bunch of fundamentalists, warlords and stooges are being arbitrarily selected by retired US General Jay Garner for a role in an 'interim government'. Garner knows little and cares less about Iraq, its people and its politics: his job is simply to put a lid on the situation and allow a partial withdrawal of troops.
But US troops have already gunned down protestors in Mosul and Baghdad, and clashed with repeated mass demonstrations by the Shia muslim community against continued US presence in Iraq. But the prior commitment to maintain the country with its religious and ethnic divisions as a single state sets the scene for further clashes to come, not least with the Kurdish forces in the north who for the moment control key oitfields.
The religious leaders who have been the first to challenge US rule may be opposed to imperialism - but they are equally opposed to socialism, to women's rights and to a secular Iraq. There is not only no obvious government for the country, but little in the way of a progresThis has been no liberation: it has been a bloody imperialist invasion, with conquest followed now by
The war will not bring democracy, food, water or medicines to Iraqis. It was never intended to. In toppling Saddam, Blair and Bush have wrecked or seized those bits of the country they had not already devastated
They have sown the seeds of a new upsurge of nationalist anger in this part of the Arab population.
As both leaders bask in the glow of victory, socialists must continue the fight to expose the real face of this new barbarism, to fight for the withdrawal of all imperialist troops from the region, and to seek ways of offer. ing solidarity with the Iraqi working dass in the struggles
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4 80 ice May 2003 in relation to war with Iraq so fragile that from Libya to pay off his personal mortgage nium from Niger; these were based on fab.