Come prepared for all-weather camping. Pack a sleeping bag, tent, waterproofs, good shoes, insect repellent for the Scottish midges and above all your toothbrush – activist breath can be grim after several days of cider-soaked protesting. Familiarise yourself with a map of Scotland and our G8 Bulletin Board, essential travel companions. Travel with pals so you have a ready-made affinity group. Billy no mates? Then cling on to someone who can vouch for your whereabouts at all times. Don’t get isolated – exchange mobile numbers.

Once you’re in Scotland

Buy an A-Z and head to a convergence centre (see below). There you’ll find the essential info-point with alternative accommodation and protest news, like-minded souls and a cheap veggie bite from the activist-run kitchen. Most centres will probably close overnight but 24-hour info-points should be on hand for lost insomniacs.

Accommodation

Direct action-types should come to the rural, self-organised eco-village near Stirling shared by People & Planet and Dissent! groups. Edinburgh council will also provide camping space behind a Gleneagles-style fence (complete with security guards) for up to 15,000 people in Hunter’s Hall Park in the Niddrie estate. Places will be allocated and there could be a £10 daily charge so arrive early to avoid disappointment. Beware: official accommodation at past summits has been victim to police raids (tell-tale signs: security cameras, easy access for large people-carrying vehicles, hot showers).

Two, three, many mobilisations

There are three main mobilisations for the G8. Make Poverty History’s (MPH) reformist band of celebrities, NGOs, churches and the Treasury uses the magic power of white wristbands to make imperialist warmongers be nicer to the poor. Then there’s the Scottish-based G8Alternatives group, bringing together the Scottish Socialist Party with trade union branches, local NGOs and, of course, the irrepressible Socialist Workers Party in various guises. Finally, the leaderless Dissent! network of autonomous groups and individuals will oppose the G8 with direct action and a million websites.

The protests

There’ll be something for everyone in Scotland – literally. For those looking for safe, clean, family fun, check out the MPH stewarded march on 2 July in Edinburgh. This is not a protest; it’s a ‘welcome walk for the G8′. You’re asked to wear white T-shirts and wristbands to form a 100,000-strong human white band around Edinburgh city centre. Rumours persist that a ‘multicolour T-shirt’ bloc will seek to radicalise MPH’s message. For some light intellectual relief in between the melÈes, head to the growing number of counter-summits on 3 July (see G8 Bulletin Board).

Any unsanctioned action, no matter how fluffy it is, runs the risk of police confrontation and arrest. For those carrying wire cutters intent on penetrating the militarised ‘red zone’ of Gleneagles with its 12-foot high steel fence, police crackdown is obviously so unlikely. There’s even talk of a ten-mile radius of checkpoints. So watch out, all you autonomous hillwalkers and golfers.

For the tourist in you, G8Alternatives will try to march past the Gleneagles Hotel gates to a nearby car park where a team of crack-commando paper-sellers will descend from the Ochil Hills.

The most effective way to shut down the G8 is to blockade relevant hotels, roads, airports and train stations to stop the summit’s delegates, interpreters and workers even getting to Gleneagles. Our tip: move to Glasgow where 5,000 G8 delegates are expected to rest in the city’s finest two-star hotels.

But it’s not just the G8 summit itself that will be subject to mass civil disobedience. Take part in the non-violent blockade of Faslane nuclear submarine base on 4 July (30 miles west of Glasgow), or the solidarity demo at Dungavel’s nasty asylum detention centre on 5 July (40 miles south of Glasgow, 60 miles from Edinburgh).

Be the Indymedia

Make sure the world knows what’s really going on. Budding writers and those with bloody (good) pictures, track down an Independent Media Centre (IMC) to upload your stories, or call in reports to the telephone hotline. Volunteers are needed to form media teams and help run spaces. Edinburgh IMC is at The Forest CafÈ, 3 Bristo Place. For other media points in Glasgow and elsewhere, see www.indymedia.org.uk.

Police and the law: use protection

As Genoa veterans can vouch, anti-capitalists could face a police onslaught in Scotland – they’ve even been training on bulldozers, for Christ’s sake. Know your rights, Scottish law and police powers (check out www.g8legalsupport.info). Faslane’s legal support number is 0845 458 8369. Remember, if stopped by the cops, you have the right to remain silent, and if being searched under a law, they must tell you which one. Once you’ve given them the flick, inform the G8 Legal Support Group with every detail of what happened.

If you are at the receiving end of a pepper spray attack, the friendly Street Medics (www.actionmedics.org.uk) will be on hand to patch you up, while Activist Trauma (www.activist-trauma.net) can give guidance for your emotional needs.

Latest updates

By the time you read this, everything could be out of date. For regular updates, see www.indymedia.org.uk, www.dissent.org.uk and www.redpepper.org.uk. Happy protesting and stay safe.

But this is not a religious meeting. It’s a fundraising event and dinner for the anti-war electoral coalition Respect. On the platform sit Lindsey German and Abdul Khaliq, respectively Respect’s candidates for Newham’s West and East Ham constituencies, Oliur Rahman, the party’s first councillor (for neighbouring Tower Hamlets) and former Daily Express journalist and Muslim convert Yvonne Ridley.

The meeting is just one of a series put on by Respect in the lead-up to the general election; this one, like many others, is specifically targeted at the Muslim community. Word of the fundraiser spread through the Newham Muslim Alliance (NMA), a coalition of leaders from 25 local mosques, and the similarly and confusingly named Alliance, a political lobbying group made up of young, male, second- and third-generation Muslims, roughly half of whom are Respect members. Little other advertising was done.

As a result, the audience is overwhelmingly male, and mostly dressed in religious garb. There’s a smattering of familiar faces from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Even three Labour councillors have attended, and are invited to ‘cross the floor’. George Galloway, the former Labour MP and Respect’s A-list celeb, couldn’t make it, we are told, as his election campaign has taken him as far afield as Bangladesh.

For many present, this is the first time that any political party has reached out to them so directly, and not just taken their votes for granted. ‘Labour hasn’t done any meeting like this,’ remarks NMA coordinator MA Sheikh. ‘For a long time, they have ruled Newham and no one has challenged them. And they think – wrongly – they will keep on winning this way.’

Across the country, of course, Respect is still an Aretha Franklin song, not a realistic left challenge to Labour. Founded in January 2004 from an alliance of Galloway, the SWP, a number of independent leftists and anti-war Muslim organisations in an attempt to build a broad-based left alternative to New Labour, its first election results last June (local, London Assembly and European) were uneven. In east London, Birmingham and Preston its share of the vote was impressive. But not a single Respect candidate was elected anywhere; in the Euro elections across England and Wales Respect secured a paltry 1.7 per cent of the vote. Many on the extra-parliamentary left are dubious about how democratic, broad-based and politically serious it really is.

But sceptics from both left and right take note: if any party is going to beat Labour in Newham this May, it’s Respect. In the London Assembly elections it came a shock second in the borough with 21.4 per cent of the vote; the Tories and Lib Dems were a distant third and fourth, and have never really been a challenge to this Labour stronghold (in the 2001 general election, Labour secured more than two thirds of the vote).

Respect is in many ways the model of how a new party with little money can break into a system protected by electoral rules highly unfavourable to small parties. Much of its success in east London is due to its playing up its appeal to anti-war voters, and working with organisations with influence in the community (especially the local mosques). Newham is fertile ground for its message: in excess of 50 per cent of its inhabitants, including 60,000 Muslims, are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Soon after the Iraq war began, more than 10,000 people marched on Newham’s streets, the biggest ever demonstration in the borough. These people have not forgotten that the MP for East Ham, Labour minister Stephen Timms, betrayed a promise to them that he would not vote for war in Iraq without a second UN resolution. The Lib Dems, besides not having a single councillor in Newham, are considered fence-sitters. The war and its knock-on effects – Islamophobia, the anti-terror laws, the crackdown on asylum and immigration – touch this community deeply.

Since its inception, Respect has worked hard in east London, throwing in its biggest players and plenty of resources trying to connect with this disenfranchised community mainly through Stop the War networks.

‘The anti-war movement politicised a large number of Muslims and brought us together in a way that hadn’t been done before,’ says Alliance member Saddiq Khan. ‘The other parties don’t even acknowledge the problems in our community.’

Abdul Khaliq claims that at last count (three months ago) Respect had 250 dedicated workers in Newham (‘maybe double now’). He says: ‘We don’t have big financial backers who could help us get our message across to the wider community through advertising and the media. Our wealth is people, and word of mouth is more convincing than any flyer.’ Every two weeks, Khaliq and German do a ‘walkabout’ in key areas of the borough to give voters ‘personal presentation’.

Then there’s Galloway, whose prophet-like presence in east London cannot be underestimated. Although he’s not even running in Newham (but in pro-war MP Oona King’s Bethnal Green and Bow constituency) he’s a big pull for Muslim voters. Khaliq says: ‘I get my inspiration from Galloway – the way he speaks and stands up for his principles. He is the only MP who spoke for Muslims, and other ethnic communities as well. All the others, including those with ethnic backgrounds, are stooges of their party.’

Respect’s strategy in Newham seems to be working. Three teenage boys I speak to recall Respect visits to their school and seeing the party’s Saturday stalls; one student doesn’t even know who the Tories are. A recent Bangladeshi immigrant says that the restaurant where he works allows the party’s leaflets to be left at its door. Stallholders acknowledge the party’s support in fending off a council threat to knock down their ever-bustling market. Respect’s most recent localised tabloid calls for an end to ‘pensioner poverty’ and draws attention to local housing issues.

In appealing to the wider community, Respect plays down its socialist roots. ‘I don’t think of it as a radical party,’ says Khaliq. ‘We’re a democratic party, so we attract all kinds of people from any party.’ Perhaps this is the only way to build the mass base necessary to win in a first-past-the-post system. But it poses a problem even for progressive Muslims. ‘Respect has provided a voice for the Muslim community, but I don’t know if it is the best vehicle for that,’ says a young, female Muslim activist. ‘I’m not sure if Respect is reaching widely enough in that community. The NMA, for example, is mostly men, and mostly Pakistani.’

The waverers need to be won over if Respect is to sustain itself. Kevin Blowe, a longstanding local anti-racist campaigner, doesn’t know yet if he will vote for Respect. He says: ‘Respect is supposed to be a radical, progressive party. But it runs the risk of trying to mobilise a communal vote that is not necessarily radical. I don’t know how long-term a strategy that is. It needs to do a lot more than turning up at a ballot box to effect change.’

There is also fear that Respect’s dependence on the Muslim community could backfire. ‘The way I view Respect is that they sit on the Muslim vote way too much,’ says Newham restaurateur Zu, who still plans on voting for the party. ‘There’s a danger that it will have negative effects if people see it as solely Muslim, which it is not.’ Respect is trying to reach out beyond Newham’s Muslim constituency: last month it held a Ken Loach film night that packed out a local theatre. But if you remove its strong Muslim base, it does look very fragile.

A few miles to the northwest of Newham is Tottenham, considered the most ethnically diverse constituency in Europe. Respect has just announced longstanding justice and anti-racism campaigner Janet Alder, whose former soldier brother was killed in a Hull police station, as its candidate for Tottenham in May. Alder looks forward to challenging the Blairite local MP David Lammy for the traditionally safe Labour seat. ‘It has been nearly seven years since my brother died, and Labour hasn’t done anything about it. The same government has taken us into an unjustifiable war.’

Respect has little chance of winning in Tottenham, so it is not devoting too many resources to the constituency (just £8,000 for the general election). Last year, Respect stood Sait Akgul in the London Assembly constituency Enfield and Haringey (which includes Tottenham). He polled 5.5 per cent; the party got significant support from the local Turkish and Kurdish communities. Akgul is now Alder’s agent. So, why the change? ‘We were conscious that we weren’t getting a big black vote, and we were conscious that we were running against a black MP,’ says Simon Hester, Respect’s convenor in Tottenham.

It’s early days, but Alder has a lot of groundwork to do. Along Tottenham High Street, in community centres, the local college and shops, no one really knows what or who Respect is, never mind that the party is standing in Tottenham. The best we could muster up is: ‘That’s Galloway’s party in east London, innit?’ At a pub quiz fundraiser, the 20 people who turn up are mostly Respect members and ‘stalwarts of the left’; not a single one is from an ethnic minority, and many aren’t local. The pub’s punters are not enthused.

Although disillusionment with New Labour and the political system is enormous in Tottenham, it’s not easy to rally the electorate round another banner. Even those campaigning for an end to deaths in police custody are not necessarily supportive of Respect: knowing that Lammy will most likely retain his vice-like grip on his seat some do not want to rock the boat; there is a perception that council-funded projects would be financially punished.

Respect’s Tottenham activists have been trying to build links with existing campaigns to widen the party’s base, but mostly as individuals who do not necessarily wear their political allegiance on their sleeve. Members are working with campaigns like Haringey Against ID Cards and the local branch of Defend Council Housing. How their activities will change closer to the elections remains to be seen.

The problem with this approach is that Respect is perceived as a party working solely around elections. Jaamit Durrani, who campaigns on the issue of deaths in police custody, says: ‘I don’t see Respect as much more than an anti-war party. I don’t see a grass-roots party at all. I need to be convinced that it is a force for working-class people.’

It is not too surprising that the Green Party plans to contest most of the London constituencies in which Respect is standing, refusing to enter a local pact with Respect. ‘We have tried hard to do a deal with the Greens; we asked if they would stand down in Tottenham and in return we would work with them in Hornsey and Wood Green [where the Greens have a bigger base] but they won’t agree,’ says Hester, sighing.

A Green Party spokesperson responds to this by saying: ‘If you can’t convince the left of the Green Party, you’re not going to convince the rest of the party. There’s a perception that the Socialist Alliance fell apart because of the SWP, so it doesn’t give us confidence that Respect would be successful and democratic.’

In Newham, Respect is making a valiant attempt to break through and win; in Tower Hamlets, too. But in the process is it becoming a single-issue, almost single-constituency party? Questions remain about how far it can go beyond its anti-war mandate and still stay true to its main base of support – not least on the issues of gay rights, faith schools and abortion.

And what will it do beyond the general election? It does not have a strategy for replacing Labour on anything but a limited and localised basis. In Tower Hamlets, it even risks splitting the anti-Labour vote to make way for the Tories or Lib Dems, as the gap between Labour and the other two main parties is much smaller there.

In Tottenham, Respect’s individual members are trying to establish themselves more generally outside electoral politics, as well as inside. Perhaps this is a shrewd, long-term game plan. But if the party can’t raise its profile soon it risks ‘not seeing through the summer’, according to one member.

Respect also faces the issue of creating unity and trust across the left: it’s not the only player. It will be hard for it to replicate its success in east London elsewhere. To avoid Newham/Tower Hamlets being a more radical version of the Kidderminster effect, it has to address the problem of building trust among a wide range of independent campaigns and movements, and finding, along with the rest of us, a way of building a united democratic alternative to New Labour.

And then there was the politics. Former shop stewards Sheila and Robin Dyball, party members for 40 years, remember the heady days of the miners’ strike, when Norwich Labour Club twinned with the Nottinghamshire mining town Ollerton. ‘We really helped that village,’ says Robin fondly. ‘We delivered catering to the miners; we had a stall on the market everyday supporting them. Those were some of the best days.’

Fast forward nearly two decades to the historic second term of a Labour government, and Norwich Labour is in crisis. For the past 18 months the Labour Club building has been up for sale. ‘It’s just too big for our needs,’ says Robin. The main hall resembles a dilapidated school gym; the lights are out in the locked-up bar, a layer of dust coating the pumps. This winter staff worked at their desks with their coats on: the boiler broke down and never got fixed. The courtyard where Tony and Cherie once commended local activists is thick with weeds; the door leading to it jammed with cobwebs. In 1998 the unions walked out, apparently over ‘political differences with New Labour’. And the offices of Norwich’s two Labour MPs, education minister Charles Clarke and his tuition-fees adversary backbencher Ian Gibson, are about to move to the centre of town.

Norwich exemplifies how the Labour Party is dying at its grassroots. But in a traditionally staunch Labour city, with a strong working class rooted in shoe factories, engineering and agriculture, and left-leaning academics in the university, losing the club is only a hint of the local party’s decay. Norwich Labour’s general committee has shrunk from 150 to 25 members. The executive committee, responsible for the day-to-day running of the party, is having trouble filling positions. Over the six-month period ending July 2003, nine members of Gibson’s Norwich North Constituency Labour Party resigned; in Clarke’s Norwich South constituency 40 members resigned. Even the city council, dominated by Labour for 70-odd years, now shares power with the Lib Dems. And new Labour recruits are not forthcoming: the University of East Anglia’s Labour Society, once a seedbed for future activists, ceased to exist two years ago.

Members point to social changes to explain the club’s demise. The National Lottery has killed off the tote, and political clubs are rarely bustling with activity these days: their male atmosphere, cheap drinks and friendly but amateur bar staff seem from a bygone era. But they also admit that politics have played a major part. And not just Iraq and Thatcherite economic policies. They feel powerless to influence the Labour leadership, and complain about the ‘gutlessness’ of Norwich Labour’s general committee.

Robin says he stays in ‘to keep the right-wing sods out’. But the nature of his party activism has dramatically changed: he no longer works for the party in general, but to ‘get Ian re-elected’. ‘We want socialism to stay in Norwich,’ he says. One long-time Norwich activist described Labour as a ‘party in waiting; waiting for Blair to go’.

A similar tale is being told around the country. In Hartlepool, the lack of activists has meant that three quarters of the people campaigning for the Labour candidate in September’s by-election are paid staff, many of whom have been bussed in and put up in hotels for three months. Neighbouring Sedgefield, Blair’s constituency, could only find a car-load of supporters to help. Not surprising, though, when it was discovered that Labour Party head office had already designed election materials for its favoured candidate, even before the selection process had taken place.

Mike Watts, the Labour Party’s finance and personnel director from 1987 to 1993, is one of the disillusioned. ‘I would never join today’s Labour Party, but I was a member long before Blair came in, and I will be a member when Blair is just a bad memory,’ he says determinedly. ‘But I find it difficult to motivate myself to do anything to support the regime.’ Watts has instead thrown his energies into the left-leaning think-tank Catalyst, and also spends time campaigning for CND.

Nationally, Labour membership has hit a new low of 190,000 members, half of what it was when Blair came to power and the lowest it’s been since the party split during Ramsay MacDonald’s leadership in the 1930s. Trade union support for Labour is also beginning to crumble (see ‘Union wild card seeks to trump modernisers from within’). The remaining members are hardly representative of British society, or even Labour voters. In a recent study, political scientists Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley found that 60 per cent of Labour members were male and a high percentage were graduates aged over 40. ‘What worries me,’ says NEC member Ann Black, ‘is that the decline will carry on until we lose an election, and that’s when the party will collapse.’

Labour’s membership crisis is no secret. But it is not only bad news for the New Labour hierarchy, which needs foot soldiers to knock on doors and deliver leaflets for the forthcoming general election. It undermines the very essence of the party as a grand coalition of the left: what do the ‘Reclaim the Labour Party’ clutch of left-wingers have left to reclaim?

There have been numerous attempts to take Labour back from the modernisers: the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Labour Reform, the Ernest Bevin Society, Chartist, the Network of Socialist Campaign Groups, Socialist Appeal, Socialist Conference, Labour Left Briefing and Labour Against the War, to name but a few.

Recent initiatives have focused on removing Blair. Under current rules, however, he can only be deposed if a majority at conference demands a leadership election; this is something the longstanding Campaign for Labour Party Democracy is currently trying to achieve. Then there’s the cross-party campaign to impeach Blair, which has only one Labour MP’s signature so far, that of former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle, though 60 more Labour backbenchers have apparently expressed interest.

But while dozens of Labour MPs want Blair out, these efforts are dead in the water because of MPs’ increasing dependence on the party machinery for help in their own re-election campaigns given the absence of an activist base. ‘The first thing that MPs who are in marginal areas ask for is staff support,’ says a party insider, ‘and if Blair says “no canvassing for so-and-so” then there’s no support for them.’

Against this background, the two latest initiatives to reclaim Labour seem as doomed as their predecessors. Save the Labour Party (STLP), with backing from the likes of leader of the House of Commons Peter Hain and Home Office adviser Sir Bernard Crick, focuses exclusively on internal party structures and is open to all members of Labour’s left-right spectrum. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that if we were to talk about specific policies we would split up into small factions,’ says STLP chair Peter Kenyon. STLP is hoping to create a media frenzy by challenging the party’s top brass to hold a conventional AGM on the first day of conference. So far, Labour’s apparatchiks have not agreed to hold the meeting.

In contrast, the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) is a left-based body tackling the party’s neo-liberal policy programme head on. Founded this summer mainly by Socialist Campaign Group MPs, it aims to provide a new way by which ‘rank and file members and the trade union movement can re-engage in a much wider democratic debate and promotion of socialist policies and campaigns’. John McDonnell MP wrote in these pages that the whole purpose of the LRC is to be part of and fully connected with the much wider anti-neo-liberal and anti-war struggles (‘There’s life in the Labour Party, yet’, in our September 2004 print magazine). But membership of the LRC is only open to party card-holders and affiliates: talk of uniting the extra-parliamentary left is quashed on grounds that ‘we’ll all get expelled’. The LRC’s launch attracted fewer than 400 people, most of them white and white-haired, and no one talked openly of the resignations, the expulsions, the possibility of working with other parties and organisations.

More optimistically, for the first time in ages all the centre-left organisations seeking to reclaim the party are cooperating in an informal network. That network is trying to create a constituency liaison committee within the party to counterbalance the power of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the unions.

Critics say, however, that the Labour left has already missed its opportunity. Not a single pro-war MP has been deselected. Labour Against the War never achieved a mass following, even with the big rebellion in last March’s House of Commons vote on the motion opposing war in Iraq. Neither that rebellion nor the one over top-up fees led to popular campaigns.

In the meantime, most dissident MPs and party members refuse to contemplate damaging Labour’s electoral prospects. ‘The year before a general election requires maximum unity,’ Black argues. She tries to make the most of the current structures: at the party’s National Policy Forum at Warwick University this July, she submitted 29 proposals, ranging from tackling the gap between the rich and poor to ending selection in specialist schools; she withdrew most of them when it became clear that the unions, having cut their own deal with the party leadership, were not going to back them.

The main problem confronting the ‘reclaim the party’ groups is the same one Blair and co will face at the next general election: the decimation and disillusionment of the rank and file. Of all the people I talked to in Norwich, not a single one mentioned any of the ‘reclaim’ initiatives, except to say they were ‘too London-based’, ‘too inaccessible’ or ‘too sectarian’.

Outside of the party, a seismic shift is taking place, which the nostalgic Labour left seems quite unwilling to tap into. Witness the many thousands of people expected at the European Social Forum in London this month. But extra-parliamentary movements are forcing themselves onto the agenda: Blair’s second term will be remembered for the large anti-government demonstrations over Iraq and not much else; lively grassroots campaigns around specific issues have also ended up on the negotiating table: at the National Policy Forum, one of the few victories outside the trade union consensus package was that conference will debate a proposal to guarantee that council housing tenants will not be financially disadvantaged if they choose that their homes remain under local authority control. This was the result of an energetic campaign organised by Defend Council Housing (DCH), a broad alliance based outside the party but with support inside it (see ‘Pressure grows on government for council housing U-turn’ in our print magazine).

The experience of interacting with DCH provides a possible marker for the Labour left’s future direction: seeing social movements and single-issue campaigns as complementary to their work inside the party, and not as a threat. This way of working might contribute to making the left a coherent force, even if it meant supporting initiatives that already exist or that make only small gains: the party becomes a base but not the base for wider political struggles. Surely, the bottom line for any initiative is that it should be open to all.

Although hopeful that a post-Blair party could experience something of a renaissance, NEC member and former Tribune editor Mark Seddon believes that if Labour continues its slide down the US route, where political parties are shell operations fuelled by slick media campaigns and corporate donors, the left will need to look to US-based initiatives to fight back. One such example is www.MoveOn.org, which aims to bring ‘ordinary people back into politics’ through electronic advocacy groups around popular causes such as Iraq and media reform. It has a nationwide network of 2.5 million online activists who are too amorphous to be a political movement, but who come together to maximise their impact by backing progressive candidates at election time.

Seddon seems to be on the right track: the left that remains in the party needs to ask itself who it’s talking to. In Norwich there are a number of people hovering on the margins of the party, waiting for something to happen. Some of them have become armchair revolutionaries; others have vanished from the political scene entirely, too heartbroken to get involved; others still have put their energies into the city’s long-standing peace movement or campaigns about services or the environment, even joining the rapidly expanding Green Party. But none of these people are entirely satisfied with their new positions. Maybe they would do better to think of themselves as preparing a ‘party in waiting’, and to feel that what they were doing outside the party could influence those within. For Robin and the rest of the Norwich Labour gang, there’s hope yet that the city’s Labour Club will be filled once again.

The idea behind War Times/ Tiempo de Guerras is to provide the public, especially working-class, ethnic and immigrant communities who would be worst affected by George W Bush’s zealous jingoism, with a full picture of the war on terror. “If you were in the anti-war loop, you were filled with anti-war information,” says co-editor Max Elbaum. “But it was invisible in broader society, where we were being fed pro-war propaganda. We needed to give people the information, rather than requiring them to come to us.”

War Times distribution coordinator Jan Adams adds: “Much anti-war conversation goes on the internet. But the trouble with that medium is that if you aren’t looking for an anti-war perspective, you won’t find one. You can’t hand someone a website.”

And so the US’s largest anti-war paper was first put together in a warehouse in West Oakland, California, on 16 February 2002. From the outset the venture was endorsed by notable heavyweights like Noam Chomsky and radical historian Howard Zinn, and was supported by labour organisations and peace groups. Although only 7,500 copies of the pilot issue were planned, the demand was so great that now 100,000 copies of the free, eight-page, bilingual (Spanish and English) tabloid are distributed to every state in the US and also Puerto Rico roughly every six weeks. Says Elbaum: “People could take the paper to co-workers or relatives, which gave them a sense that they weren’t alone.”

The paper is active in the massive US campaign coalition United For Peace and Justice, and War Times managing editor Bob Wing sits on the coalition’s steering committee. But War Times claims its only political agenda is to draw attention to the injustices of Washington’s “permanent war”. Although the stories touch on a number of left-wing causes – from civil liberties to anti-racism campaigns – it’s designed to break out of the left ghetto. “For one thing, it’s too thin and the articles too short to be aimed at the left,” jokes Elbaum (articles never exceed 800 words). “It’s an entry-way – for people who were open to our message but weren’t already convinced.”

The pilot issue featured an interview with Hollywood actor Danny Glover, who denounced the 2001 bombing of Afghanistan and “the idea that the US is the judge, the jury and the executioner”. A more recent edition profiled both an American mother whose two sons were deployed to Iraq and a Baghdadi woman who lost her husband and children when they were shot dead by a US military patrol. “We put a human face on events,” says one contributor.

You”d be hard-pressed to find War Times in newsagents, and more likely to spot it at work, on a train – even at your dentist’s. It’s distributed in a novel way: willing volunteers send an email requesting the number of bundles (each containing 25 copies) they want. Many of them attach a cheque ($7.50 per bundle) to help cover printing and shipping costs, and individuals” donations make up two thirds of the $450,000 War Times has received so far. (But with an annual budget of $175,000, funding is a constant struggle.) A third of the 700 distributors are well-known peace groups, but a good proportion are “highly motivated individuals” who circulate the paper in their universities, unions, food cooperatives or churches. The paper is also enthusiastically used by Spanish and English teachers as an inspiring educational resource. To ensure that all copies printed get used, volunteers are emailed when a new edition is in production and asked if they want another bundle. “It’s not a huge commitment,” says Elbaum. “If you don’t want it, you don’t have to answer your email.”

Through its publication and distribution, the tabloid has built new networks and strengthened existing alliances. But it’s not a stand-alone effort. “War Times lends credibility to anti-war organisers by showing that it’s possible to produce something left and anti-racist without screeching about it,” says Elbaum. “But we”re dependent on the strength of the anti-war movement.” Although much stronger than in 2001, the movement in the US is still in its infancy. “Local initiatives are very important,” says Adams. “They use War Times because it is beyond their capacity to produce their own materials. We provide a tool in a situation where the political infrastructure is completely undeveloped.”

The 30-strong volunteer staff – predominantly 1960s activist veterans (“our biggest weakness,” says Elbaum) – are currently putting together issue number 18. They work from various parts of the country: there’s no permanent “office”, and not all the regulars have met. In the run-up to the presidential elections, they are determined to keep peace and justice in the public eye without backing any particular candidate, but they believe there will be a need for an anti-war and anti-racist movement whoever is elected.

War Times” job has been made a little easier by the shift in the US media inspired by Abu Ghraib, Falluja, US casualties and the non-appearance of WMD in Iraq. Even the founder of the conservative daily USA Today published an indictment of Bush, asking the cowboy president to “ride off into the sunset”. “To print ‘Bush lies’ is no big deal anymore,” says Elbaum.

The paper’s staff remain pretty low-key about their impact: with only one copy per 3,000 population, no single community gets blanketed. And owing to the limitations of its resources and the movement, War Times hasn’t been able to cross the 100,000-circulation threshold. But it’s got reason to celebrate. A distributor from a small, conservative town in North Carolina has just emailed for his next bundle. “We need our regular 25 copies. Amazing how sentiment in our neighbourhood has changed in the last year& War Times has certainly helped.”

The BNP currently has 17 councillors nationally. Against all the odds there are no BNP councillors in Oldham, however. Battered by the racial disturbances in 2001, the town just managed to keep the party at bay. Conditions for the neo-fascists to thrive in are in many ways as favourable as fellow Lancashire mill town Burnley, which now sports six (grossly incompetent) BNP councillors.

But on 10 June Oldham could lose its BNP-free status. The entire council is up for election (usually only a third of seats are contested at a time) following boundary changes, and this year electors will have three votes instead of the usual one. Labour councillors fear this might lead to “spread betting’: loyalists giving their first vote to Labour, but opting for other parties as a second preference. In some wards the Tories are not even standing a full slate. The BNP says it will field 100 candidates across the region – and 600 nationally. That would entail the party spreading its limited number of activists pretty thin, but in the last local elections it averaged 17 per cent in the wards it contested.

On top of all that, for the European elections the party has invested a lot in trying to get its leader Nick Griffin elected as an MEP for the northwest – even bringing over to England the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. With European Parliament seats being allocated in accordance with proportional representation, Griffin only needs 9 per cent of the votes cast. In 1998 he received a two-year suspended prison sentence when he was found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred, but success in June would give his party a frighteningly new political legitimacy and influence.

Although Oldham is only seven miles north of Manchester, the two places couldn’t be more different. While Manchester celebrates multiculturalism, segregation in Oldham is absolute. The latter used to be the “King of Cotton’, one of the UK’s main textile centres. Thousands of immigrant workers from Pakistan and Bangladesh came to work on the looms in the 1960s, and were settled in enclaves reinforced by council housing policy. While the textile industry has all but collapsed a system of de facto apartheid remains. One resident likens his town to Israel and Palestine: “Asians will stop attacking whites when whites stop attacking Asians. The tensions are terrible.’ Another local laments: “The vast majority of people don’t think twice about blaming “Pakis” for everything. Racism is engrained.’

The larger manufacturing workplaces are almost exclusively white. Pakistani shop steward and Oldham Trades Council president Imra Shoaib reckons that less than 0.5 per cent of workers in her BAE Systems factory are from ethnic minorities. “Twenty per cent of Oldham voted for the BNP in the last elections. That means 20 per cent of people at work could hate me and what I represent,’ she says.

Locals say it’s largely due to their hard graft that the BNP has been kept at bay. Besides Oldham United, there has been a variety of groups and individuals involved. Somewhat belatedly, the local Labour Party has run a hard, anti-BNP campaign. Labour councillor Mohammed Azam of the national, black-led Coalition Against Racism has made inroads in getting fellow Asians represented on the council and in mobilising the Asian community. Oldham Women Against Racism put out pamphlets in Urdu and Bangla on how to vote. And Oldham Trades Council has become a successful campaigning body against the party – a phenomenon being repeated by trades councils across the north.

“All the different groups involved bring something different to the table,’ says Shoaib. “We hit different types of people with different messages. And we cover more ground than other towns that only cover one or two groups.’

The focus of Oldham United is the local elections. But by exposing the fascists’ lies and establishing itself in the localities where the BNP is cashing in on people’s insecurities, it also hopes to undermine Griffin’s European chances.

The latest edition of The Failsworth Voice, the two-sided piece of A4 Oldham United is machine-gunning round today, reads, “well done Failsworth’. It congratulates the almost exclusively white neighbourhood for keeping out the BNP in the by-election that took place here last October. Nevertheless, being half Asian the BNP’s past success in the area makes me nervous: it collected 34 per cent of the vote in Failsworth West in last May’s local elections, and one Asian campaigner had sombrely told me to make sure I wore trainers in case I needed to make a quick getaway. But I’m pleasantly surprised. There are no high-rise council estates, graffiti or Union Jacks daubed with BNP slogans. The miles of terraced housing look clean and cared for – even gleaming in the unseasonable March sunshine.

Luft explains that the BNP’s vote doesn’t only come from white sink estates: in Failsworth it’s a combination of young, first-time voters, pensioners insecure about their future and people pissed off with Labour because of its current ineffectualness on the council. “We’ve got the second highest council tax in greater Manchester. Where’s our money going?’ he exclaims.

What the crime-fearing pensioner and the young football fan have in common is the feeling that the system has abandoned them. “People here are disenfranchised,’ says Luft. “They feel their vote means nothing, the political parties are not listening. The councillors put down people who ask questions.’

Into the vacuum swarms the BNP with its spurious radicalism: feeding on local concerns, but spiking them with a racial twist. Its task has been made easier by the way the right-wing press and the government have treated the tricky immigration issue.

Now that the neo-Nazis have kicked the big boots and crew cuts and are holding back from violence and provocative demonstrations, anti-fascist groups have had to develop a more sophisticated counter strategy. The personalised leaflet is just one example. “As part of the community, we can speak to local people about issues that concern them in a language they can understand,” Luft explains. “The BNP is a bunch of outsiders coming in to exploit the vote.”

He says that in the past the left has made the mistake of patronising voters. “[They] have come into the community acting as saviours. They use bullying language to defeat the arguments. It’s not about alienating a community by calling it racist. People are proud of their community: their reaction is, ‘if you’re going to call us racist, we’ll be racist’. The left needs to understand the locals have to be listened to, because if the campaign doesn’t work it will be they who suffer the consequences.”

The next step is to back up words with action. “We need to prove we care all year round,” says Luft. And it’s not just about overcoming the prejudices of white voters. Oldham United regularly visits Asian households to maintain good relations and “overcome stereotypical views they may have of white people”. It has also helped to create a drop-in centre for asylum seekers, and it’s involved in planning a full fortnight of activities for Oldham’s diversity celebrations this summer. There’s also mention of plans for living-wage and health and safety campaigns in the workplace.

The key to fighting the BNP, says Nick Lowles of the long-running anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, is to understand the ward the BNP is working in and emphasise community politics. “Every single bit of polling shows that crime and anti-social behaviour are always the dominant issues,” Lowles says. “Sometimes dog shit and broken street lights are more important than the war in Iraq.”

In the run-up to 10 June, 28 versions and 1.5 million copies of Searchlight’s “European election special” newspaper have gone out to different areas across the country. The Merseyside edition, for example, carries a story about a recent trip by local students to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps and a piece about local war heroes.

Another tactic is to identify people who are anti-BNP and get them to exercise their vote – a strategy often used by political parties in election time. Hence Searchlight has teamed up with Unison to telephone-canvass key voters in the wards of six local authorities that are most under threat from the far right. In Calderdale, Halifax, for example, where Labour is currently polling fourth, they have found 500 anti-BNP people who didn’t vote or voted for the Lib Dems (who came in a poor third) in the last local election. “We contact them regularly,’ says Lowles. “If we can get half of the “no votes” to vote, we would have enough to beat the BNP.” There’s debate about whether to endorse particular parties. Searchlight doesn’t do so; it asks electors to vote for who they think is best placed to defeat the BNP, or leaves it for the local groups to decide their position. Luft says: “If it was the case of having to vote for whoever could defeat the BNP, I would do it without compunction as a lifelong Labour voter.”

The problem with these strategies is that they require loads of local knowledge, human resources and money and they only affect a small area. But Oldham United and Searchlight are not acting alone. The BNP’s recent successes have led to a dramatic increase in anti-racist and anti-fascist activity across the country, much of it stemming from the labour movement. And by giving the anti-fascists an official boost and much-needed resources, the unions have won new credibility. “We have a real chance to broaden the role of trade unions in a way that the anti-war movement didn’t,’ says one union official. “We need to engage with young people. It’s a real challenge for the labour movement.”

In the northeast the unions have played a crucial role in reaching out to the young, working-class male – the BNP’s core voter, according to a recent study. Searchlight Educational Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust looked at exit polls of 539 voters and focus groups at by-elections in three northern towns where the BNP had potential or actual success last October. More than one in three men aged 18 to 25 voted BNP. “Political parties have all lost the young, working-class man,’ says Lowles. “These people would have been Labour voters 10 years ago, but the trade union movement is not the same as it was back then, and so they’ve never voted Labour.”

In Sunderland, Unison and the regional TUC are among the founders of the coalition North East Unites Against the BNP. Together with ANL and GMB, the coalition held a “Love Music, Hate Racism’ festival last month that became the largest ever anti-fascist event in the region. More than 15,000 people turned out to groove to the beats of Mad Professor and the Infidels, among others. North East Unites has also been handing out flashy gold flyers. “Imagine a Britain with no pizzas, M&S, Sol Campbell or Trevor McDonald,” they warn. “Pure… Pure evil. Use your vote. Keep them out.” Unison has also been holding anti-fascist training for its shop stewards. “We’re focusing on our membership,” explains a local branch secretary. “It’s essential that we acknowledge the problems and challenge the myths in our own organisation, and equip workers with the confidence and knowledge to address them.”

Back in the northwest groups are trying a slightly different tack to complement Oldham United’s localised campaign. Manchester Against Racism (MAR) and Azam’s Coalition Against Racism are closely modelled on the national campaign Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Launched in February UAF is an unprecedented alliance of veteran Anti-Nazi Leaguers, city hall anti-racist campaigners, and union heavyweights and MPs. Backed by Ken Livingstone and the TUC, it aims “to unite the broadest possible spectrum of society” to counter the threat of the extreme right gaining an electoral foothold.

UAF and its affiliates say they’re most worried about Griffin being elected as a Euro MP. They have thrown their resources into getting the vote out to prevent this. “Our focus is to involve as many people as possible and leaflet as widely as possible,” says MAR chair Colin Barker. The different coalition groups never say who to vote for. “It doesn’t matter as long as it’s anti-BNP. We don’t talk party politics in MAR: there are too many conflicting interests. Otherwise we’d probably back Labour,” says Barker, who is himself an SWP member of George Galloway’s Respect.

The coalition estimates that a turnout of more than 35 per cent is probably required to stop Griffin from getting elected. But this will be no easy task: in the 1999 Euro elections the turnout in the northwest was the lowest in the country – a measly 19.5 per cent. “What we want to do is use the votes of Manchester and Liverpool to counterbalance areas where the BNP is stronger,” says Barker.

MAR’s stretch is wide. At its launch rally in January at Manchester Town Hall 450 people came out from an array of backgrounds that included faith organisations, refugee groups, schools, political parties and so on. The coalition has already distributed at least 2 million leaflets. “I’ve never known anything like this,” Barker enthuses. “We have mosques and churches taking our leaflets and helping distribute them. It’s a scene not dominated by sectarianism.”

Back in Failsworth, Luft is pleased with Oldham United’s performance thus far. “We haven’t met much hostility compared with last year,’ he says. “People’s attitudes are changing. The BNP has been noticeably absent, but we’re not complaining.’ A young, mixed-race woman opens her door as we drop a flyer through her letter box. “The BNP… They’re like fascists, right? I won’t be voting for them.’ Something seems to be working. We won’t have to wait long to find out just how well.

But when she arrived, she was forced to sign a completely different contract and perform a £6.25-an-hour care-assistant job doing kitchen duties and scrubbing toilets in a private nursing home.

Other employees at the same home were made to do 60-hour weeks – without overtime pay – to pay steep rent and repay loans taken out in the Philippines. Flores was also horrified by her living conditions: her UK recruiter charged her nearly three times the normal rent to share a double bedroom and only one bed with four other nurses, and often walked in uninvited – threatening the nurses with slashed wages or deportation if their accommodation wasn’t kept in “proper order’.

Flores says: “Often I was given work the English staff wouldn’t do. I was even made to pay for my own second-hand uniform. When I applied to come to England I didn’t think for a moment that I would have to make loads of sacrifices to tolerate racism and exploitation.’

Flores’s case is by no means exceptional. Hundreds of highly qualified overseas nurses recruited to work in the UK pay as much as £5,000 to private agencies and employers to secure jobs. Once they get here, they find themselves working long hours in private nursing homes for low wages and denied the chance to complete the “adaptation’ courses necessary for them to work as registered nurses. Thus, they are trapped in appallingly paid, low-skilled jobs.

In February it was revealed that 30 Filipino nurses working at two hospitals in Glasgow were working on slave wages of just £8 a day; the agency that supplied them got an £800 “finder’s fee’ from the NHS for every nurse. Incredibly, the bulk of the nurses’ wages was being deducted at source by South Glasgow Universities Hospital Trust to pay for accommodation and high-interest loans provided by the recruitment firm and its associates.

Unison Scotland health organiser Jim Devine says: “We feel very disappointed. Our union was part of the welcoming committee when these nurses came over. They were the first batch of overseas nurses to come to Scotland. They are not unlike the exploited Chinese cockle pickers from Morecambe Bay.’

In Northern Ireland Filipino nurses have even had to put up with harassment by loyalist paramilitaries, who have been targeting them because most of them are Roman Catholics.

Like Flores, many overseas nurses are victims of “contract substitution’. They are given contracts approved by the state regulator the Philippines Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) before they leave the UK, but are then made to sign a new contract when they arrive. Generally, the second contract means Filipino nurses will be paid minimum wages and banned from joining a union.

Critically, many of the private homes the nurses end up working for are not approved by the UK’s regulatory body for nurses the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), so they can’t provide adaptation training. And even if they can, the training system is inherently susceptible to abuse. The adaptation courses are only really necessary for nurses from the developing world (nurses from places like Australia and New Zealand don’t need them). They are supposed to take three to six months to complete, after which foreign nurses must be paid the same as their British colleagues. But the NMC only offers guidelines on how employers should carry out the training, so the adaptation period can be strung out for much longer.

“It’s modern-day slavery by the back door,’ says Allen Reilly, a retired nurse who’s married to a woman from the Philippines and who heads a Filipino organisation in south London. “They can’t leave, and they can’t earn enough money to rent their own place. It’s a way for the employer to handcuff nurses to the company and isolate them from the general community. This prevents them from becoming informed.’

The staffing crisis in the health service hasn’t changed much since 1999, when the UK opened its doors to overseas nurses in a bid to solve the crippling nursing shortage in the NHS. The Royal College of Nursing’s (RCN) latest survey of UK hospitals suggests there are 25,000 vacancies at the moment and that one in nine nurses plans to quit over the next two years.

The recruitment of overseas nurses was never meant to resolve the shortage in the private sector, but independent nursing homes simply can’t employ enough local nurses. Reilly says: “Indigenous nurses are not interested in the low pay and long hours, and for the nursing home the profit margin would be too small. So, when the NHS announced that it would start recruiting from overseas, the private sector jumped in with two feet.’

In the year ending March 2003 nearly 25,000 overseas nurses applied to register with the NMC, with the majority of applicants from the Philippines and India. Only half of them were successful. A Unison spokesperson says: “It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that huge numbers are coming into the private sector.’

The exploitation begins in the migrant nurses’ home countries. Unscrupulous overseas recruitment agents charge money for placement, fares and documentation. In the Philippines the government actively encourages its population to work abroad as “modern heroes’: migrant remittances help prop up the domestic economy; last year, for example, Filipino workers in the UK sent home $236m, mostly to help pay for their families’ food and education.

According to the POEA, more than 13,000 Filipino workers were sent to the UK last year – 5,500 of them were registered as nurses. This is having a drastic effect on the Philippines’ ability to provide skilled staff for its own health service. The Philippine Nursing Association complained in November that foreign agencies were creaming off all their skilled nurses, leaving Filipinos in the hands of those fresh out of nursing school. Even Filipino doctors are training as nurses because of lucrative opportunities abroad.

When the POEA discovered that its Filipino nurses were having to pay so much in fees it informed the NHS. The POEA now bans Filipino agencies from levying recruitment fees and puts firms that do so on a blacklist. But blacklisted agencies simply reopen under different names.

David Rees, managing director of Global Recruitment Associates, an ethical agency recommended by Reilly, believes UK recruiters are equally, if not more, at fault. “We had no difficulty finding a highly ethical, well-organised recruiter in the Philippines, which doesn’t charge fees. The first people UK recruiters blame are the people in the Philippines. That is unjust and incorrect. The private sector in this country has been exploiting overseas nurses for years.’

Unison and the RCN are asking the government for more coordinated regulation in the private sector. Currently, overseas nurses who are recruited by the NHS are covered by the Department of Health’s (DoH) code of practice on international nurses, which aims to ensure no nurse is financially exploited in the recruitment process. The DoH also lists all compliant agencies on its website. But critics say the code is flawed because it ignores exploitation in the private sector, and is not legally binding.

There have been noticeable improvements in the way Filipino nurses are treated (both here and at home) since 1999, but only in small part due to government action. Filipinos have become much more difficult to target – thanks largely to the migrants themselves. Reilly says: “Over the past few years, the Filipinos have been organising themselves here. They have networks. So when they run, they have someone to help them.’

Reilly met Father Claro Conde, a Filipino Catholic priest, through the church – a central point of contact for the Filipino community. In January alone Conde received more than 50 calls from health workers pleading for help. “These newly arrived migrants are vulnerable because they are afraid of being sacked or deported,’ he says. “Their fear should not be underestimated. They need to send money home to pay off their debts and support their relatives. They’re also ashamed to go back and face their families and be seen as failures.’

Conde and Reilly called upon the experience of the Centre for Filipinos in west London, a voluntary organisation established in 1979 to help abused Filipino domestic workers. With Unison, they formed an action group to “rescue’ Filipino nurses from the private sector. “We disseminated information to local parishes, and we always ask new Filipino faces who they are, where they are from and if they are happy,’ Reilly says. “But the nurses need to make the first step by contacting us.’

This church connection marks an interesting departure for British trade unionism. “Father Conde was the first religious leader we have had speak at a conference, and we have given rosary beads to all our members at our Harrow branch,’ says Greater London Unison regional officer Michael Walker. “There are now a number of churches developing relationships with unions, and we have no hesitation in working with them.’

Since 2000 Reilly and Conde have carried out more than 500 “rescue operations’: relocating nurses from the private sector into the NHS. To begin with, they try to resolve the issue with the employer while the nurse continues working; otherwise the latter would be out of money and could face deportation. If it is impossible to work things out with the employer, the rescue mission goes about clandestinely arranging interviews for the nurse at NHS hospitals. Reilly has even rented out a safe house for the abused nurses, and Conde asks his contacts – who include single mothers, fellow nurses and the sick – to offer up living space. The process, from the interview to the receipt of the new work permit, usually takes two months.

But Conde says it’s no longer enough just to get the nurses out of the private sector and into the NHS. “The nurses need to accept they were exploited and be aware that this is not an individual problem but a result of globalisation, so they will confront their employers and help those who are coming in after them,’ he says. “This hasn’t really happened.’ Conde sees a need for more community-based unions as a way of really integrating migrant workers, citing the east London community-led alliance Telco and its spin-off South London Citizens as examples of what he has in mind.

The unions have admitted they have been more reactive than proactive. “The left in general has a really poor track record on migrant workers,’ says Walker. “It’s a bit ad hoc across the board. We are going to see a huge influx of workers from eastern Europe, and hardly any of the unions are geared up for it.’

It was Flores’s fellow Filipinos and the church that directed her to the RCN and a racial justice group, who eventually helped her. Flores applied for a position at her local hospital seven months into her nursing-home contract. A month later, she made the transition and is now a qualified NHS staff nurse.

But two years later, the agency that recruited her is still working for the care home and is continuing to charge extortionate placement fees and provide sub-standard housing for its nurses. It also started collecting £100 a month in bond money to stop nurses breaching their contracts. The nursing home remains accredited by the NMC.

“We don’t have the time or resources to take every case to court,’ laments the Centre for Filipinos’ coordinator Maria Gonzalez. The centre is lobbying the Philippines government for better pre-departure seminars advising nurses to be aware of the pitfalls of working in the UK.

In the meantime, the agencies have begun preying upon new victims. They have targeted overseas workers in allied professions, such as midwifery and physiotherapy, to work as carers. They have also shifted their attention to more rural areas of the Philippines and to other countries, where workers are less aware of the system. As the floodgates are being shut in the Philippines, they are opening in India.

“Unlike the Filipinos, Indians have nowhere to go,’ says Reilly. “We’re finding that Africans and Indians are more abused than the Filipinos.’

Flores knows she is lucky. “There are nurses in the Philippines who are so desperate to come here. I pray that because of our experiences they are more aware of their rights.’

“Joy Flores’ is an alias used to protect the real identity of the person interviewed

But the judges who made the ruling realised the wide public importance of their decision and immediately granted Liberty the right to appeal. The case is expected to be heard early in the new year.

Section 44 (S44) of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows police commanders to authorise officers to stop and search people and vehicles for articles that could be used in connection with terrorism in areas they believe to be high risk – whether or not the police have grounds for suspicion.

There is widespread concern that under the current political climate, the government is putting concerted pressure on the courts – making it difficult for them to rule against the anti-terrorist powers.

Some activists saw the ruling as part of the extra security measures that were put in place to protect George Bush on his three-day state visit to Britain last month. All police leave was cancelled in London, and armed US bodyguards and special agents were brought in to patrol the streets of the capital.

-If Liberty had won, it would have dealt a great blow to Bush’s visit,” said Simon Underwood, a Camden Stop the War activist who was stopped at the DSEi arms fair. “I wonder how much the outcome was linked to the need for police to control the protests over the state visit.”

The Home Office said that the ruling “reinforces our message that the protection of the public and national security is the responsibility of our government and the police, and that neither can take risks”.

Pennie Quinton, one of the protesters who brought the legal challenge, said: “The judgment was a shame. The case proved the anti-terrorism powers weren”t used to target terrorists, but to intimidate protesters. The police will continue to use S44 to harass, target and threaten protesters, and to gather intelligence on activists during searches.”

The Metropolitan Police welcomed the High Court’s endorsement of their use of S44 powers, but recognised the need to ensure the powers were not abused.

Pressure is mounting among protesters for a more high-profile campaign against this expansion of the powers of the state. “We need to plan our actions in challenging this in the courts, and draw links with young people who are being stopped and searched because of their race, or for antisocial behaviour,” said Underwood.

Authorisations allowing the police to stop and search any member of the public at any time have been in force for the Greater London area continuously since February 2001. Between April 2001 and April 2002 more than 7,500 people in London were searched under S44.

These incidents accounted for 75 per cent of all the searches that took place in England and Wales in the period. But S44 has been used by almost every constabulary in the UK, and is routinely invoked to stop peace protesters outside the RAF base in Fairford, Gloucestershire.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said: “Ultimately, the judges gave deference to the police and home secretary in national security issues. We will do our best to defend people’s right to protest without fear of being branded -’terrorists-’.”

Welcome to the new face of the anti-war movement. Far from disappearing, it has taken root in the most unlikely places. And with the latest national demo drawing tens of thousands compared with the million who marched on 15 February, the local groups have become the movement’s heart and soul.

The continuing bloody occupation of Iraq, the disintegrating road map in Israel and Palestine, the threat of future wars, the lack of WMD and the public’s distrust of the government following the Hutton Inquiry all provide impetus to the local anti-war groups. Dorset Stop the War Coalition (STWC) organiser Lucy Carolan says that while some groups affiliated to the coalition packed up at the beginning of the summer “new ones are starting up as we speak”.

“Now,” says Carolan, “it’s about ending the occupation and addressing issues at home.” During the Labour Party conference Dorset anti-war activists gathered outside the Bournemouth convention centre to heckle unsympathetic delegates. Just before Blair’s big speech, they toppled a Saddam-style statue of the prime minister and performed a funeral march in the street.

Individuals who have met through Dorset STWC have gone on to campaign together against the BNP. Some stood as anti-war candidates against the fascist party in May’s local elections.

What’s happening in Dorset is a telling example of the continuing creativity of the anti-war movement on the ground. The challenges then become: how does the national movement harness this energy, what should its strategy be to prevent future wars and how can it campaign against the ongoing occupation?

From its outset, the STWC has played a major role in galvanising a diverse group of people – many who otherwise would not have been engaged with activism at all – and has brought them together as a united opposition. Along with CND and the Muslim Association of Britain, the STWC organised the largest demonstrations in British history and has made it almost impossible for the UK to remain committed to Bush’s war on terror.

Just Peace, a group that promotes Muslim participation in the social justice movement, was formed immediately following 11 September and became part of the STWC steering committee. Just Peace chair Shahed Saleem says the group benefited from the coalition’s experience and its quick formation: “The achievement of the STWC is that it enabled a stratum of people not previously politicised to channel their new radicalisms. For such groups, like ours, a stable STWC leadership with a clear focus, with resources and with experience in political organisation was essential. If a lack of democracy in the first 18 months was the price of this stability, then I think it was necessary.”

But Saleem says we”re in a different phase now. “It may now be the time to start unpacking the STWC, perhaps because its very success threatens it with institutionalisation and ineffectiveness. If for the anti-war movement to remain meaningful means that it has to be opened up and handed over to a more diverse array of groups, then that should be allowed to happen.”

Saleem has hit on a major dilemma: although the anti-war movement has moved on, the STWC’s national structures and strategies haven”t always kept up. The coalition was successful at mobilising, but what happens now?

There is a debate underway which is of wide significance and needs public airing without weakening the underlying unity of the movement. At the heart of it are questions fundamental to how the left opposition to New Labour pulls itself together as a coherent force. What is the most effective and most democratic relationship between local and national organisation? And how can we build a genuinely pluralist alliance in which everyone restrains their desires to be in control?

The activities of the STWC tend to be largely events-based. Right now, for example, it’s preparing for George W Bush’s stay in Buckingham Palace later this month. Maybe this is the specific job of a national organisation. But then what about the kind of work that needs to be done regularly and is beyond the capacities of any single local group? One resolution at an STWC people’s assembly expressed the need to “disseminate information about the realities of life under the occupation” and to “support and participate in Occupation Watch” (an international organisation based in Baghdad that monitors casualties and the activities of the occupation forces).

These kinds of things are important. At present they tend to fall by the wayside. This is partly because the national coalition is overwhelmed by the work involved in organising national demonstrations (-no one should underestimate the amount of work required,” says STWC officer Jane Shallice), and partly, some would argue, because they do not conform to the approach of the dominant political grouping in the coalition – the Socialist Workers Party.

With direct action, too, it is the local groups that have taken the lead. Critics have charged the STWC with a lack of imagination and variation in its tactics. STWC officer Asad Rehman realises with hindsight that the national coalition should have organised military base demonstrations to try and stop US B52s from flying, or at least given strong support to the local groups who did organise such action.

At present the STWC’s national officers keep in touch with local organisations through the exceptionally high number of meetings they attend (they speak to four or five groups a week) and the hundreds of emails and letters they receive. They largely gauge what action to take through these activities. One of those officers is Andrew Murray, who points out that it’s impossible to act on every single idea that the coalition receives, and that most events are not centrally organised by the coalition. “The coalition will evolve. It’s not a hierarchical thing; we don”t control what local groups do and don”t do.”

Many people feel that there would be even less hierarchy if more was known about what was decided at meetings and who attended them, and if there was more support given to local groups attempting to organise with each other. Some STWC affiliates and other individuals, for example, are currently setting up Grassroots Opposition to War (Grow). The impetus for Grow came from the perceived need for bottom-up structures through which local activists could meet up and share ideas that they could then take back to their respective communities. Grow organiser Jesse Schust says: “It’s a way for local activists to speak with each other so it’s not the same people talking.”

Schust argues that Grow complements the STWC. At an inaugural conference to discuss Grow’s future there were workshops on subjects like “anti-war campaigning in the dead times” and “anti-war electoral action”. Collectively decided actions will be posted on the network’s website. The conference would have been better attended if the central STWC had publicised it as a supplement to the national demo that happened the same weekend and circulated the details to its extensive email list. Grow’s organisers insist that no matter how difficult it is to practise democracy, it’s critical to have a group that supports what its members are doing, gets them together on a regular basis face-to-face, enables them to build relationships and share ideas, and provides a means for them to feel that they are part of the movement. Only then can the movement go forward.

Bush’s visit will be an important test for the anti-war movement. Much has been achieved, but the movement needs to build in the democracy it so yearns for and demands from other institutions. Otherwise, it will lose an extraordinary opportunity to shape the political landscape and 15 February will become a distant reminder of what could have been.

Most members will agree that it doesn’t matter whether you’re in or you’re out of the eurozone: of far greater urgency are the need to make the EU institutions more accountable and the question of how to defend public services. So the SSP, strengthened by its recent local achievements, has looked at the bigger picture – and has turned to its European counterparts to form a common solution. The party is a member of the recently formed European Anti-Capitalist Left (EACL), which will try to get a shared platform for next year’s European elections.

In the alliance, the euro debate takes a back seat – most member countries have been using the euro for some time already, whereas in Britain the issue is only just hotting up. Instead, the EACL plans to provide “a European anti-capitalist formation that would constitute a credible alternative to the social-liberal left in government” (a dig at the Social Democratic, Socialist and Labour Parties in Europe).

Along with the SSP, the EACL includes parties from 15 different countries, including such bigwigs as Italy’s Rifondazione party (PRC), the Red-Green Alliance (RGA) from Denmark, France’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and Portugal’s Left Bloc (BdE).

With recent legislation that would almost certainly allow for – and fund – all European election campaigns, the EACL has agreed to work on a shared manifesto that centres on saving public services, opposing privatisation and deregulation in the workplace, and working against racism in solidarity with asylum seekers.

The EACL’s attraction is that it gives small parties a presence in a big group. The SSP needs to get 13 per cent of the vote to send just one elected rep to the European Parliament. “Some people will ask, ‘What’s the point of having one MEP from the SSP?’” admits Alan McCombes, who recently represented the SSP at the EACL conference in Athens last month. “But it’s different if MEPs across Europe link up.”

The EACL’s manifesto will be modelled on the SSP’s successful electoral strategy of having “core” pledges. Although not set in stone, some proposals include renationalising industries and allowing subsidies to continue, a just, publicly funded pension system, a 35-hour work week and an increase in the minimum wage. The alliance is also opposed to a European defence force, that is, in the words of McCombes, “an attempt to control US imperialism with European imperialism”. He argues instead that “we should be calling for demilitarisation”.

At the same time, the EACL promises future battles over the powers of the European Central Bank, the Council of Ministers and the European Commission. While there’s anticipation that the new constitution will call for more democratic structures and more power to the EU parliament – such as directly electing the head of the commission, most bodies remain unelected. They make most of the decisions, while the EU parliament only has the ability to comment and take a position on legislation – it cannot initiate legislation independently.

In the short and medium term the EACL, says McCombes, will try to get a strong, united left in the European institutions ‘to fight for every democratic advance that is possible to achieve, and to counter every attack launched on democracy or workers’ living standards”. EACL’s vision is to one day have a social, federalist Europe of nation states driven from the bottom-up, perhaps with integrated resources, which bears little resemblance to the EU we have now.

The idea of a socialist Europe seems far off, especially when there are important gaps in the alliance – no parties have joined from Sweden, nor from the central and eastern European countries that are not yet part of the EU (but may find themselves being exploited as an easy way in to the European market or as a source of cheap labour).

And the EACL acknowledges it still has a long way to go. “There are issues that really divide us,” says McCombes. “Some of the left parties in the South are more pro-Europe. They see the EU as a levelling up of public services. But parties in the North, such as the Danish Red-Greens, want to withdraw from the EU completely because they see it as a threat to their welfare state. For now, we’re just trying to raise agreement on a few key issues that we can put to the electorate, and to focus on changes at the local, regional, and national levels.”

Canada’s largest city was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief when the ban was lifted just a week later – the outbreak appeared to be on the wane. But not before the damage was done. To fight the faltering tourist economy – the city’s hotels sat two-thirds empty, causing losses of CAN$125m and thousands of layoffs – Sars-Town became a bargain-shopper’s paradise.

But despite all the discounts – including cheap petrol (only in Toronto was gas 50 cents a litre just weeks after the Iraq war), tax-free weekends, and $1 baseball games (we still lost), despite Ontario premier Ernie Eves and Toronto mayor Mel Lastman beaming at you from every television with the news that Toronto was a safe place to visit, Sars has come back with a vengeance. At the time of writing, five people have died in the new outbreak and more than 7,000 people are in quarantine.

Sars is not as scary as you might believe. Granted, it’s unsettling to know that there’s no test, no cure, and it can kill you. But more people die from the flu, or from falling down the stairs than from the mystery virus. Globally, cases can still be counted in four figures.

In Toronto, the number of deaths hovers around 30 and the average age of death is a ripe old 71. Most people who died also had an underlying illness, like the 99-year old woman whose age may have played a role. You only needed to listen to my nurse mom wearing her Sars gear – the beekeeper visor, mask, disposable gown, and gloves – and droning on about how more than 3,000 children die each day from malaria – to know there are more devastating diseases out there, and to feel assured that we’ll beat this one.

But hey, this is the West, and boy, do we ever hate to be reminded of our vulnerability, or even worse, to be put in the same category as those poor Chinese.

What’s more frightening is why the rest of the industrialised world could prevent Sars from spiralling out of control and Ontario couldn’t. We prided ourselves on not being China – but now officials say that the numbers were deliberately lowballed and we let our guard down too soon, perhaps in an effort to restore Toronto’s tarnished image. We knew that all it took was some simple quarantine and health measures to kiss the virus goodbye.

But when Sars seeped into our system in March, our political leaders at all three levels of government laid low at the golf course or outside the province, ignoring all criticism. We were left in the dark to harvest our paranoia. Asian businesses and restaurants were reduced to ghost towns. The disease became linked to Asians rather than Ontario’s very own hospitals, but there weren’t any leaders around to correct the false association until it started to hurt the economy at large.

When the governments finally acted, they seemed to be solely motivated out of the desire to be seen doing something. The Tory government may promise pots of money, but it’s slow in coming unless you count the flashy ad campaign and photo ops. Toronto has a bill of $10m in public health and ambulance costs that has yet to be paid. Health workers have yet to see compensation promised to them by the province for lost wages because of time off in quarantine. Meanwhile, our prime minister remains to be convinced that Sars merits the $717m he freed up to deal with the 1998 ice storm.

The real reason Sars appears so damaging is that it has illuminated the steady erosion of Ontario’s health care system and our blasé approach to public health.

After all, it was Ontario’s conservative government (that incidentally, is on the verge of calling an election) that caused this crisis with their cuts to the public health system in the past few years. The Tories downloaded public health to our cash-strapped cities – it is now the joint responsibility of the municipal, provincial and federal governments but there’s little communication between the three. Just look at the way different parts of Canada dealt with the fatal disease. British Columbia quickly controlled the spread; the province warned doctors about a worrisome flu outbreak in Hong Kong as early as January. Ontario’s doctors received no such warnings.

Infection controls in hospitals are underfunded and remain in a shoddy state. As Sars has shown, our hospitals are what’s killing us – most of them don’t even have epidemic response plans. Many operations, some of which could have saved lives, have been cancelled as hospitals struggled to cope with the Sars outbreak – again.

Then there’s the nursing shortage, thanks to a Tory decision in the mid-1990s to close hospitals and lay off thousands of full-time nurses because they were ‘redundant’. Health minister Tony Clement admitted that it took the Sars outbreak for him to realise that 15 per cent of our nurses were employed on a casual basis, which means that many of them work in multiple hospitals to make ends meet. But when Sars hit, nurses were restricted from moving around in an attempt to contain the virus. Burnout was the next big headache, and hospitals have been forced to rely on private agency nurses who get paid up to five times as much as staff nurses.

It’s time for the governments to forget the PR fuss. They need to pull the plug on their self-congratulatory advertising. What we really need are substantive policy changes to our health system. As for Sars, disbelieve all the hype, hop on that plane while it’s still cheap and take in some real Toronto culture. There’s no better time to explore the city sans Americans and on a shoestring. It’s yours to discover – just stay away from the killer hospitals and pray that you don’t fall ill.