It isn’t hard to see why. Austerity is devastating Britain. While the Conservative-led government is giving tax breaks to the richest individuals and biggest corporations, it is driving the most vulnerable people in the country deeper into poverty with public service cuts and the bedroom tax, which tragically claimed its first victim when Stephanie Bottrill committed suicide because she could not afford the £80 a month charge. Labour’s response to the Tories’ ideological assault on the poor has been weak, and its abstention on workfare a betrayal. The need for a new party to represent the interests of the working class, which have been ignored far too long by the three main parties, has never been greater.
On Saturday, Left Unity held its first national meeting, bringing together around 100 elected delegates from many of the local groups that have sprung up over the last few weeks in answer to Loach’s call. Some came from small towns where groups had only a handful of members. Others, such as the delegates from Brighton, spoke of vibrant and big meetings – Brighton already has a signed-up membership of more than 200 people.
Sitting in the same room together, these were no longer names on a signature sheet, but passionate activists from a vast range of left-wing traditions. Many of the familiar old alphabet soup far-left groups were represented. But there were also young campaigners from Occupy and UK Uncut, anarchists, Greens, trade unionists, disaffected Labour supporters and dozens who had never been involved in any party before, but wanted to change the world all the same.
With such a diverse group coming together for the first time, there were inevitably going to be disagreements. It proved too difficult to agree a statement of principles in such a short space of time, for example. But the meeting voted to move towards a founding conference in November and overwhelmingly supported the idea that a new party of the left should not be a patchwork coalition of far-left groups hastily thrown up as a temporary electoral front, but should be an active campaigning organisation built around the basic democratic principle of one member one vote.
‘We have been through some bitter experiences and we need to learn from the past,’ Loach said to the meeting. ‘We absolutely need to be a democratic party and I support the principle of one member, one vote. We’ve had groups trying to take projects over, we’ve had manipulations behind closed doors and we don’t want that again.’
‘Just like we don’t want one dominating group, we don’t want any charismatic leaders,’ he added, clearly expressing his desire not to be an unaccountable figurehead for the new party. Indeed, despite Loach’s appeal, much of the hard work has been done by the local groups, which have grown organically with their own ideas and ways of working, and Left Unity has been built from the bottom up. This must continue over the coming months as Left Unity moves towards its founding conference and the beginning of a vital new party of the left.
For too long the left has been divided and weak, its energies exhausted on sectarian splits. And absolutely no one in the real world cared. If, as Loach said, Left Unity is to learn from the mistakes of the past, it must be transparent, open, inclusive and democratic. If, as so many people at Saturday’s meeting said, we want to make a difference, we must first put aside our own differences.
The time for Left Unity is now.
leftunity.org
www.salmanshaheen.com

Ogman argues that the anti-national campaigns rightly broke with more traditional left-wing attitudes towards the nation. They were questioning of notions such as ‘the people’, and instead grappled with the problem that broad sections of the population had been complicit in supporting and even enacting nationalist and racist ideology. For Ogman, this is not just a matter of history. His point is that we can find lessons for the Anglophone Left today.

Raphael Schlembach is an Associate Lecturer at The University of Central Lancashire
@RaphSchlembach

Brighton and Hove City Council hit the headlines this week after the workforce at their Cityclean department stopped working for two days. This action followed the announcement of proposals to make changes to pay and allowances which will see some employees standing to lose up to £4,000 a year.

In January 2013 the council announced that they would seek to introduce a new pay and allowances system for staff. Importantly, they have provided no proper legal rationale for doing this, and have refused to say what has changed since 2009 when agreements were made which were certified as legally sound at the time.

The council’s framework for implementation of the proposals was contained in a pay modernisation paper submitted to the Policy and Resources committee. The document recommended delegating responsibility for the negotiation and implementation to officers rather than elected representatives.

Councillors present voted by a majority to accept the recommendations of the paper, with Green and Conservative councillors voting in favour and Labour councillors against. This decision was concerning for a number of reasons. GMB felt it was wrong, as councillors were not prepared to face the workers they were treating badly and there was also controversy over whether councillors knew what they were voting for. In the webcast of the meeting (at 03:10) Green Cllr Shanks states that she would be ‘concerned that this is not going to hit our lowest paid workers unfairly…that needs to come back again.’ This statement would seem to indicate that she thought that the final decision would return to elected councillors.

This view was substantiated by Green councillor Alex Phillips who when asked on Twitter ‘Why is Jason (Kitcat) saying that the majority of Green Cllrs supported it?’ responded by saying ‘Because he led them to believe that officers would take their decision to group to be voted on. This was not the case’.

Jason Kitcat is convener of the Green Group of councillors and leader of the City Council. Cllr Phillips’ statement confirms that he misled his own councillors in advance of the vote. This is not the first time he has faced such allegations. In April Kitcat had to apologise for making misleading statements about the effect of the proposals on staff after being challenged by GMB branch secretary Mark Turner.

After the Pay Modernisation Report was passed, council officers began negotiating with recognised unions. Councillors were told not to comment on the negotiations, presumably so as not to undermine their officers’ negotiating positions.

During the negotiations the council issued a press release indicating that the Cityclean Service would operate on bank holidays. They also briefed ward councillors on a planning application to allow this to happen. This is significant, as the effect of doing so means the loss of ‘make up pay’ for employees taking on the additional work and hours after a bank holiday, which is paid if strict conditions are met. This action highlights a blatant lack of meaningful consultation as it is clear a decision had already been made.

As the negotiations progressed it was clear to see that the council were not prepared to budge and that little was to change between their initial proposal and what would became their ‘best and final’ offer. A large number of GMB members would still stand to lose up to £4,000 per year, and 260 members at the Council’s Cityclean department were to be particularly badly affected, with an average loss of £2,000 rising to £4,000 for many.

As such GMB launched a campaign to highlight the affect that such substantial cuts would have on members. We launched a petition on our website, that thousands of members of the public have now signed and we made a video of GMB members at Cityclean talking about the implications of the proposed cuts.

On 8th May the council held a mass meeting with Cityclean staff to brief them on their best and final offer. Staff refused to work for two days, and the value of their work was quickly seen as the city’s streets descended into rubbish-strewn chaos. Staff went back to work on 10 May, on the basis that GMB would conduct an official ballot for industrial action, and formal notice of this ballot will be sent to the council early next week.

The action taken by the workers, while not endorsed by GMB, brought the matter to a head. The Green Party had held a meeting the previous night were they voted by a large majority to support staff and campaign against any cuts. A number of Green councillors also spoke to the workforce and stated that they opposed Kitcat’s proposals and would resign if necessary. The Green MP for Brighton, Caroline Lucas, also visited the workers to express her support, and condemned any measures that would reduce take-home pay.

As a result Cllr Kitcat’s Green administration is now acting in direct violation of his party’s own democratically decided policy and against the position of many of his own councillors and the Green Party’s only MP. His position has become untenable and as a result of his actions in misleading the public, his own councillors and our members, GMB no longer have trust and confidence in him to continue in his role.

Given the situation the Green Party must act. Whilst support is appreciated, they cannot protest against Kitcat’s actions while still allowing them to happen. We are willing to try to resolve this dispute but the Green Group must play its part too.

It is also important that Labour councillors stand up and be counted. Whilst it is noted that they voted against the proposals in January, they must now speak out, and also support any measures by Green councillors who seek to bring the decision back under democratic control. As for the Conservatives, they shouldn’t get away scot free, but at least we know what to expect with them.

I’m sure there will significant developments in the coming weeks, but in the interim Councillors may wish to consider the case of Aberdeenshire Council. They faced exactly the same dispute in January 2013 and withdrew their proposals when agreement could not be reached.

Rob Macey is a GMB Senior Organiser for Legal, Political and Campaigns. You can find updates on the dispute and sign our petition at www.gmb-southern.org.uk/bhcc / twitter @gmbsouthern. You can also follow the workers on twitter on @gmbcityclean

Everywhere you look on the web today, there are appeals for solidarity with GMB union council staff in Brighton & Hove, some of whom face the prospect of huge pay cuts. It seems to be a bizarre situation. How is this possible with a Green-led council that has campaigned harder than any other council in the country against public sector austerity in general and for fairer pay for the low paid in particular? The council was after all one of the first to be accredited as a living wage employer, and just this week became the first council to pledge officially there will be no evictions resulting from the bedroom tax.

It’s a long story and one that is difficult to write for lots of reasons. Let me start by saying unambiguously that I oppose and have consistently argued and campaigned against the stance taken by some senior officers who advise the Green-led council on this pay issue. So has Caroline Lucas, our local and the UK’s only Green MP. So has the local Green Party itself. And so have almost half the local Green councillors, including the deputy leader Phelim McCafferty. But at the same time, it is not as ‘black and white’ as it has been painted in the progressive/left media.

The background

Brighton & Hove City Council was formed in 1997 from the merger of Brighton borough, Hove borough and parts of East Sussex county council. Pay and conditions had to be harmonised. Pay was eventually sorted out, but the allowances have not been. In addition, like dozens of councils up and down the country, Brighton & Hove has had to assess past pay and condition settlements in the light of more recent equal pay legislation. Many councils have found themselves facing bills running into tens of millions of pounds – Birmingham famously faced an £800m+ bill. Almost every council has now sorted out the mess of past settlements but previous Tory and Labour administrations of Brighton & Hove had failed to do so – fearing the financial consequences, and threats of industrial action.

Into this situation came the new Green Party-led council, elected in 2011 – the first ever council with Greens at the helm. It was keen to clear up the mess left behind by previous administrations and to look at past deals the previous councils had struck with the local trade unions.

Note the Greens are a minority administration, as they were elected with 23 councillors out of 54. They can’t simply decide on measures without consulting with other parties. I understand that there are some legal deadlines for sorting out these issues that means the core agreement needs to be signed by autumn 2013. So far, so good. But then, senior council officers intervened, and since then it seems to have gone off the rails, as the council leader Jason Kitcat has accepted at face value – naively in my view – the advice that officers have provided. So what happened?

I do not know exactly the content of council officers’ advice to councillors about what they found about the existing pay and conditions packages at the council – because that advice has remained a closely guarded secret. And the council’s legal advice was that councillors should say absolutely nothing in public about it. Personally, I think this advice was fundamentally wrong. And it has led to councillors being unable to explain what the dispute is about – with disastrous consequences, especially for staff morale, and allowing the media to manipulate the dispute.

My interpretation is that Brighton & Hove council probably found, like most other councils in the country, that some past allowances were at least questionable under the new equal pay laws. Its officers probably found that the sums involved to put things right were huge, and could bring the council to the verge of bankruptcy, adding to the existing budget pressures that the council was already facing due to the government’s cuts in council grants. With looming legal deadlines, and understandably hoping for cross-party support for a solution on such a crucial matter of staff pay, the council leaders passed over responsibility for negotiating a deal with the unions to senior officers. Apparently, this was done with no brief from the Green group of councillors, and no commitment to bring back any offer to councillors for approval before being submitted to staff. I think this was a big mistake.

Green Party members in Brighton & Hove are rightly proud of the council’s achievements on the living wage and its commitment to reducing the gap between the highest and lowest paid. They understandably assumed that any change to allowances would mean levelling pay up with no losses for other groups of workers. It soon became clear that officers were pursuing a different tack – trying to pay for upgrading those whose allowances historically had been too low by reducing those whose allowances had been ‘too high’. This had the effect of pitching one worker against another in a one-off change rather than introducing them over a longer period of time.

There can be little doubt that the sums of money are very high and the temptation for officers to strike such a deal was strong. Rumours suggest that upgrading the allowances would add £30m to the annual council wage bill. Some councillors have voiced fears of ‘financial meltdown’. But I think it was a mistake to let senior council officers take this approach. And it was a huge mistake not to let council staff and others in the city know what the real motivation was for the changes being proposed.

The role of the unions

Frankly, the local trade unions have not exactly covered themselves in glory either in this dispute. Of course, unions rightly fight for their members’ best interests. But much of the publicity and campaigning from the unions has been deliberately misleading and in my view has taken on a politically partisan pro-Labour and anti-Green bias.

The unions have portrayed the dispute as the Greens wanting to reduce the pay bill by cynically attacking the lowest paid. Indeed that is what many of the rank and file staff now sincerely believe – partly because the council has been so useless to communicating with them. But it isn’t true. Equal pay is entirely absent from the union’s narrative. So is the fact that it is low paid women workers who will gain the most from any settlement. So is the fact that the council’s wage bill will go up, not down, as a result of the proposed settlement. The GMB is playing a crafty game with Labour locally, who have pulled out of the initial cross-party consensus trying to resolve the issues.

However, none of that changes the view held by myself, Caroline Lucas and the local Green Party that the stance of the administration is wrong and very damaging.

What has been proposed

A ‘final offer’ – which has never been approved by councillors! – has been put to staff. Nine out of ten staff are unaffected. Some low paid, mainly women workers in Unison, stand to gain significantly. And a few hundred manual staff, mainly male GMB workers in the refuse and street cleaning department, stand to lose. The amount varies – for most it is less than £25 a week. But for a few it is much more.

A compensation package has been proposed which offers for example someone who loses £1,000 per year around £3,500 in a lump sum. The text of the offer is not entirely clear but it seems to imply that if it is not accepted, that the council will impose it – presumably by sacking staff and re-employing them on the new conditions.

The local Green Party has held two packed general meetings of its members to discuss this issue. This is a sovereign decision-making forum for the local party. The arguments of the council leader and his supporters were roundly defeated at both.

The first meeting opposed any attempt to sack and re-employ staff on worse conditions. The second meeting condemned the offer to staff for including significant pay cuts to low paid workers. Myself, Caroline Lucas and around half the Green councillors supported the stance taken by the local party. We have argued that any settlement cannot include threats to sack staff and cannot include pay cuts to low paid workers.

The issue now has become critical for us. Our candidates in last week’s elections were asked why some of our councillors were attacking the low paid. Allies and supporters locally and nationally are deeply troubled by what the council may be doing. And local Green Party members are wondering what they have to do to get councillors to follow national and local Green Party policy, and to withdraw the ‘final offer’ and the sacking threat.

By all means send your support to the GMB workers threatened with pay cuts. I have. But please note that the story is more complicated than it first appears. And it looks increasingly like the story that has been played out in many radical parties here and abroad; it is a conflict between those who want to manage the system better, and those who want to change the system altogether. The story is not yet over.

As Cape Town, the country’s second most populous city, hosted the World Economic Forum on Africa, hundreds of shack dwellers pledged their determination to occupy land needed for their homes. These homes have been repeatedly destroyed by government agents at a settlement named Marikana, in a growing township between Nyanga, Mitchell’s Plain, Khayelitsha and Philippi.

The settlement in Philippi East is called Marikana in tribute to the 44 people shot dead by police – most of them miners working for the UK-registered multinational Lonmin, during a strike for a living wage last summer. It was given the name because the residents are also ‘organising ourselves peacefully and are willing to die for our struggle’.

‘They pull these people out like dogs’

Since the shacks were built and occupied on vacant land, the authorities must observe South African law which requires a court order to evict them. Yet, despite lacking such documents, day after day police and law enforcement officers arrived and demolished their houses, shot at residents with rubber bullets, dispersed them with pepper spray and arrested four people.

Abahlali (also known as AbM or the red shirts) is a shack-dwellers’ movement and campaigner Cindy Ketani says ‘When they come to destroy these shacks, they show us no court orders or papers. They just pull these people out like dogs’.

Activists complain the authorities are abusing their power, knowing residents have no access to legal support. So much for progress, with South Africa becoming the world’s second most unequal nation since apartheid ended. Its constitution proclaims that every citizen has a right to a house. But millions continue to live in settlements, often denied proper sanitation, water supply or aqueduct, electricity or telephone services.

Testimony to the risks involved without electricity came when three recent shack fires left 83 people homeless in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township. Abahlali has campaigned on this issue, demanding, among other things, the electrification of shacks, and connected thousands of people to electricity. Nonetheless, in South Africa, there is a daily average of ten shack fires, with someone dying in a shack blaze every other day. Meantime, the accommodation backlog in Cape Town alone is estimated at between 360,000 and 400,000 homes. Even so, the city’s rulers spent half a millon pounds (8 million rand) setting up its Anti-Land Invasion unit to pull down shacks.

White people take home six times more pay than their black compatriots

Forty per cent of South Africa’s 50 million population live below the poverty line on less than one pound (13 rand) a day, while more than one in three of the mega-rich earn over £14,000 (200,000 rand) a month. In addition, the TopEnd survey into the country’s most affluent individuals found that one in ten boast a household income of at least £35,000 (500,000 rand) a month. The average value of their property with continuing worth is above £443,000 (6.5 million rand). And amid the starkest and most poignant contrast, four in ten own more than one home, and three per cent six or more.

Almost 20 years on from South Africa’s first democratic elections, the first census in a decade exposed the disturbing fact that white people still take home six times more pay than their black compatriots. Another report, by Statistics South Africa, warned that two-thirds of the country’s youth live in poor households, with a per capita income below £47 (650 rand) a month. More than one in seven South Africans are unemployed, and the young are worst affected, with half of 18-to-25-year-olds jobless. The labour federation, cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions), says no other middle income country around the globe suffers from such high unemployment.

Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu’s general secretary, says: ‘We call it a ticking bomb. We think that one day there may be an explosion. Seventy-three percent of people who are unemployed in South Africa are below the age of 35, and a lot of them have been to universities’.

Lack of work, money and secure homes threaten to exact a corrosive effect on South Africa. But the spirit of people that resisted separate development based on colour now confronts the rich-poor divide. One of those forced out of their Marikana housing was Zoe Zulu, a mother of a one-month-old son and a five-year-old daughter. Like the other residents of the 126 destroyed homes, Zoe had nowhere to go, insisting she would rebuild her shack and not leave Marikana until she has been given a home.

Caroline Elliot is international programmes officer at War on Want

Berenice Celeita, Director of human rights charity Nomadesc, explains ‘The more high ranking the military officer, the higher the level of danger to the victims. That is one aspect of the mechanisms of impunity in Colombia: the intimidation and murder of witnesses.’

Last year, seven soldiers were convicted of the murders. Since the court case began in 2010, Alfamir, President of the Women Sugar Cane Cutters Committee, and her family have been subject to persecution, attacks and repeated death threats. This situation has left them in a permanent state of terror.

War on Want is campaigning for the Colombian government to take immediate action to protect the lives of Alfamir and her family and they urge you to write to the Colombian embassy in the UK.