Building On Protest

FINALLY, we have the chance to bring over 14 years of Tory government to an end,

Those years have been marked by brutal austerity measures, the run down and privatisation of public services, the deliberate underfunding of public housing, public transport, health and care services, education, child care services, public infrastructure and by pay cuts for working people across all sectors.

We can’t just hope for a better future, we must secure it.

In recent years working people have been forced go on strike in defence of pay, conditions and services. Earlier this year, we stood together when 150,000 workers took strike action for improved wages, better working conditions, and in defence of public services.

The industrial action illustrated the power and the potential of working people  and labour movement –the majority of the population.

This election gives us a unique opportunity to consign traditional voting habits to history and to translate them into a united, anti-sectarian voice for working people uniting working class people, young and old, from all backgrounds.

Workers Party candidates in this election will stand against division and base our politics on the proud tradition of the labour, socialist and trade union movement.

We are opposed to all cuts in health, education, and other public services, and oppose privatisation. We support working class people in their struggles for better wages and conditions and the right of everyone to live a life free from discrimination, harassment, and violence.

Now is the time for class politics to make that change and turn protest into political power.

http://www.workerspartyni.org

Violence against Women

Kathryn Parton is the 19th woman to be murdered in Northern Ireland since 2020. Her recent murder is further evidence that violence against women and girls in Northern Ireland is a critical issue. Reports indicate that almost 98% of women surveyed have experienced at least one form of violence or abuse in their lifetime.

The disproportionate impact of violence against women and girls is demonstrated by the available statistics on sexual crime, domestic abuse and harassment cases. The exponential growth in cyber gender-based violence through sextortion, cyber bullying, online grooming, cyber stalking and image-based abuse adds another dimension to the problems confronting women and girls. 

Violence against women impacts on all aspects of their lives including their health, education and ability to work.

While it is vital to raise awareness, provide support and demand an effective strategy to create a safer environment for women, it is essential to locate the sources of women’s oppression and exploitation within the capitalist system, a system which not only fails to address the root causes of women’s issues but also directly contributes to their oppression.

Public expenditure for services combating violence against women and domestic violence has been cut and women are frequently denied the practical assistance which they require.

The emphasis on traditional “family roles”, the devaluation of childcare and domestic work, the commodification and objectification of women and their bodies, violence, sexual abuse, murder, rape, trafficking, prostitution, exploitation, misogyny, harassment, social barriers, precarious employment, reduced job security, inadequate child care support, insufficient funding for women’s services, failure to ensure bodily autonomy and abortion and healthcare services are just some of the realities defining women’s lives in the current social order.

Gender inequality remains rooted in class inequality and the economic structure of society is central to an understanding of the oppression of women and the struggle for women’s emancipation. Violence against women must be tackled and the emancipation of women is a class issue. 

Sectarianism doesn’t occur in a vacuum

This week we once again witnessed the pious wringing of hands, following the sentencing of two men for a brutal sectarian attack on a young woman, traumatising her and her child and forcing her to leave her Craigavon home,

The sentencing was followed by a chorus of righteous condemnation by the great and the good. While the vile actions of the criminals who were involved were rightly condemned many of the commentators bemoaning the horrific acts seemed oblivious to the reality of sectarianism, or perhaps it was a case of deliberately ignoring how the tribal interests in our society cosset and encourage sectarianism because it is to their advantage.

This same week analysis from the Department of Education suggests there are not enough places at integrated post-primary schools to meet demand in several areas of Northern Ireland. In effect, the provisions of the 2022 Act requiring the Department of Education to “encourage, facilitate and support” integrated education have been ignored.

Our society is more divided than it was at the time of the Belfast Agreement. Divided housing and segregated schooling, more walls dividing the community and the prioritisation of cultural identity, tribal symbols and community background over jobs, health and social progress together with sectarianism built into the very structures of government frame the political conditions in which sectarian acts take place.

Sectarianism is not the preserve of drunken individuals or extremist groups. It is not an aberration within a normal society. It is a sickness at the heart of our political system carefully fostered and sustained by a political narrative advanced by the tribal political parties to maintain a power base and endorsed by a compliant media.

It’s time to join the dots. Sectarian acts do not occur in a vacuum. Northern Ireland needs political change to eliminate sectarianism. The Workers Party has long advocated this. Only a commitment to working-class unity, secular, socialist and class-based politics offers a solution.

Covid Inquiry: exposing Northern Ireland’s sectarian landscape

The beginning of the Covid Inquiry hearings in Belfast have already begun to lay bare the deep malaise at the heart of Northern Ireland politics.

As the people of Northern Ireland suffered and died and as health workers risked their lives, the tribal forces fought it out at Stormont. 

The Inquiry has had difficulty securing the release of important material from the Executive Office.

It is now clear that there is a hidden record behind the official record.

The approach of the Ministers and senior civil servants, including deleted text and WhatsApp messages and missing phones, together with the revelation that Sinn Fein ministers and special advisers wiped their phones before returning them to Stormont, indicates the contempt in which ordinary working people are held.

Democratic accountability should be a crucial aspect of a political system which claims to represent its citizens and ensure their health and safety. Capitalist systems lack transparency and Northern Ireland is no different where tribal politicians who preserve that system prioritise their own interests and the interests of the capitalist class over public welfare and working peoples’ rights.

It is unlikely that this Inquiry will provide any real answers or effect any demonstrable change.

The sectarian political landscape in Northern Ireland and the unquestioning deference to capital over the rights and lives of workers and their families will remain until there is fundamental social, economic and political change and that will only come about when working people control their own destinies in a socialist society.

Commemorating May Day

In recent months, the Workers Party has actively campaigned against privatisation; the introduction of water and services charges; the reduction of welfare benefits; proposals to remove free travel for older people; attempts to make working people and their families pay to see a doctor; payment for prescription charges; and payment for essential public services.

Next week we celebrate May Day, the workers’ holiday. Socialists, trade unionists, workers and labour activists will come together across the world to commemorate and celebrate our common struggles. Some will do so under circumstances of severe repression, brutality and war. Our Party, the Workers Party, will stand with them.  

Belfast has a proud tradition of celebrating May Day. Next week, our Party will attend the annual Rally in support of workers’ freedoms and workers’ rights. We will highlight our determined opposition to the attacks on education, public housing, publicly funded services, the arts, libraries, museums, leisure centres and parks which have become targets for the withdrawal of funding or the introduction of charges.

We will continue our solidarity with the trade union demands in support of workers’ rights, pay and conditions and those workers who have been harassed and victimised for asserting their rights.  

Earlier this year, the Workers Party supported the historic events of industrial action organised by the labour movement in Northern Ireland when workers came together to demonstrate their power. The May Day Rally will be a further demonstration of that power, but we must now take a further step.

Our segregated and bankrupt political system which serves the interests of the tribal politicians, and the exploiting capitalist class, must be challenged.

Workers need to create a viable and effective electoral mechanism to defeat those interests and must take immediate steps to unite in a struggle in the interests of their class. Only an anti-sectarian, class-based, united workers’ struggle can deliver our objective – workers’ power and socialism.

Protests over rising childcare costs

Recent protests over rising childcare costs refocus working people’s concerns on demands to prioritise childcare and provide immediate supports for struggling parents.

There is no scheme in place for free childcare in Northern Ireland. The Workers Party has continually raised the necessity for the state to urgently implement an effective early learning and childcare strategy for Northern Ireland.

While the Northern Ireland Executive talks the talk it puts forward a multitude of excuses for its failure to act. Stormont has not been in business for a large part of its existence and, when it is, tribal squabbling seems more important than addressing the needs of working-class families.

NI has the highest percentage of low–paying jobs of any UK region and the highest percentage of children living in long–term workless households. Child poverty is endemic. Public services have been devastated by expenditure cuts. The lack of a proper childcare strategy is destroying lives.

When Sinn Fein and the DUP talk of budgetary constraints, they should be reminded of the waste of public funds through the sectarian divvying up of resources through the perpetuation of separate structures, institutions and facilities which could be redirected towards the provision of free childcare.

By providing free childcare, the state can encourage more parents, particularly mothers, to work, this encouraging gender equality for women; investing in early childhood education and care has demonstrable positive effects on children’s cognitive and social development; free childcare can reduce the cost of early childhood education and care for working-class families.

This is not rocket-science. It involves a commitment to genuine equality which our social system does not allow. Cuba and other socialist states long provided state-sponsored childcare. The German Democratic Republic prioritised education and childcare, guaranteeing access to high quality early learning and education. 

While recognising that only a socialist system can ensure full equality in which the needs of children and working-class families can be fully met, the Workers Party demands immediate action from the Stormont Executive to implement an effective early learning and childcare strategy for Northern Ireland.

Nationalism: contemptuous, divisive and toxic

This week we witnessed two very similar examples of nationalism and the path that it inevitably follows. Both were in the outcomes of Coroner’s inquests: the first into the abduction and murder of Sean Brown in Bellaghy in 1997, the second into the sectarian slaughter of ten workmen at Kingsmill in 1974.

Too often ‘nationalism’ is accepted as a legitimate political opinion with equal standing and legitimacy alongside other ethical views. It is not.

Nationalism, British, Irish, and every other strain, is not only a backward political philosophy, it is a toxic one

Nationalism, British, Irish, and every other strain, is not only a backward political philosophy, it is a toxic one. It seeks to divide and exploit difference. It blames others and otherness. It is a political cancer that deliberately subverts progressive politics and attempts to thwart the development of class politics – often viciously and violently.

This week we saw two examples of nationalism’s contemptuous disregard for the families of victims of the ‘Troubles’.

The British government deliberately blocked access to files and information which could prove key to establishing the facts, the sequence of events and the nature of the relationships of all those involved in the abduction and murder of Sean Brown from Bellaghy. In refusing to release the required information, they cited reasons of ‘national security’, which really means, ‘we did what we did, the way we wanted to do it… and it’s none of your business’.

Nationalism ‘protects’ the ‘national interest’ even when that means withholding inquest details from families and loved ones and riding roughshod over legal practices.

We also witnessed the conclusion of the inquest into the murder of ten workmen in Kingsmill in January 1976.

It was nationalist gunmen that stopped, selected and slaughtered those ten workmen outside the Co. Armagh village. It was nationalism that refused to accept responsibility for what happened nor for the  pain and suffering inflicted on the families for  past 48 years. It was nationalism that turned its back on the inquest, offering neither apology nor information.

Nationalism, Irish or British, never blames itself, never questions its actions nor reflects on its own behaviour. In the world of nationalists and nationalism someone else is always at fault, but never them.

The next time we encounter nationalism, in whatever form, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it represents a political poison that stands in the way of uniting working people.

Progressive forces must strive at every turn to combat it, and we must never give an inch in our struggle against it. We have seen time and again where nationalism’s destructive path leads.

Wringing of Hands – but still enabling Genocide

As recent days have shown, the lives of foreign aid workers are valued more than those of the 30,000 plus Palestinian people, the majority of them women and children, murdered by the Israeli  Defence Forces in the past six months.

Since the murder of the World’s Kitchen aid workers pressure has been mounting on the Biden administration with Democratic Party senators in the United States calling for a suspension of arms to Israel.

Mounting Pressure 

There are further calls for an end to Israeli airstrikes. Even a number of Tory MPs are demanding a temporary halt to the UK’s supply of war materials. Countries around the world are also adding their names to call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Public outrage against the genocide in Gaza is mounting.

Even the mainstream media is having to revise the way in which it has been reporting Israel’s actions. It may be that we are witnessing a new era in which the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are now simply too great to for main stream media to deflect and conceal as they have been doing in recent months.

Distractions and Cover Ups 

That does not mean that there are not places for Israel, its allies and supporters, including the mainstream media, to hide, or spaces they will create to cover up their ongoing genocide.

Already, Israel and others are attempting to shift the focus of public opinion to the opening up of aid channels, as if an increase in the trickle of food, water, medicine and supplies is an answer to the continuing air and land bombardments.

It would be naïve to think that either the Israeli government, the US administration, the UK, the EU or NATO are on the brink of halting the slaughter.

Naïve 

The revulsion and rejection of Israel’s campaign is genuine and politically held amongst many millions of people and protest groups throughout the world. It is even a genuine expression of opposition from some governments and individual politicians. However, it would be naïve to think that either the Israeli government, the US administration, the UK, the EU or NATO are on the brink of halting the slaughter.

The reality is likely to be that Israel, with the backing if its allies will simply attempt to ride out the current crisis and continue with ‘business as usual’, as soon as it thinks it can get away with it.

Despite their public statements, their concerns, their internal investigations and the pressure from genuine humanitarians, the reality is likely to be that Israel, with the backing if its allies will simply attempt to ride out the current crisis and continue with ‘business as usual’, as soon as it thinks it can get away with it. The main stream media will quickly follow suit as if nothing had happened.

International Court of Justice 

While the US, the UK, Germany and others continue to arm, supply and underwrite Israel’s assault on Gaza and the Palestinian people they continue to be enablers of genocide. In the very near future, they must be summoned to the International Court of Justice to explain their actions.

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BEHIND THE MASK: GENOCIDE AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

The public perceptions of life in Gaza and the Palestinian Territories is being shaped by television news footage of aid ships being loaded up with humanitarian supplies, reports of US engineers building emergency docking piers, dramatic aerial footage of  food, medicine and supplies being dropped by parachute from the back of US cargo planes.

The political headlines are being led by calls from the US, the UK, France and others for  an immediate ceasefire.

But, behind all the window dressing, the reality is that Palestinian people, men , women and children, continue to be murdered by the bombs, arms, ammunition and technology supplied by those very countries.

While the US projects its ‘humanitarian’ response to the genocide in Gaza, it continues to supply and resupply the Israeli war machine. Its latest contribution has been 35 F35 attack aircraft and 2,000 blockbuster bombs, all of them destined for towns, villages, schools, hospitals, clinics and refugee camps.

For the beleaguered people of Gaza this spells further death and destruction, but the BBC described this latest arms supply as ‘ a sign of a thaw in strained ties’ between the US and Israel.

The United States, the UK, France, NATO the EU and other apologists for the Israeli campaign of genocide, continue to disregard international law. They withhold funds from UNWRA which could help starving people. 

In January the United Nations International Court of Justice delivered an interim ruling in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza.The US, the UK, France and NATO are still providing financial support, political cover and armaments allowing Israel to pursue its genocidal campaign.

Legal advice to the UK Government warning it that its continued military support to Israel places it in breach of international law, remains unpublished and therefore unacted upon.

Behind the manufactured headlines and the public relations campaigns they hope will cover their tracks, the funders and suppliers of Israel’s murder machine continue their contemptuous disregard for real public opinion, for international law and for the Palestinian people.

Protesting and highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza is only one part of the campaign supporting the Palestinian people. As much effort needs to be applied to the disinformation, double talk and contempt for people and the humanitarian law that provides the cover for the funders and suppliers of Israel’s mass murder machine.

UN Resolution Signals Israeli Isolation

For the first time since Israel began its air and land assaults on Gaza and its people, the United Nations Security Council has passed an immediate ceasefire resolution. It also calls for the release of hostages and emphasises the need for more humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza.

The decision by the United States to abstain rather than veto the resolution marks a significant shift in its relationship with the Netanyahu government and the Israeli Defence Forces.

Protests Changing Public Opinion

The devil will, of course, be in the detail, but we should not underestimate the role of the protests and demonstrations, locally and across the globe and how they have contributed to helping to change public and international opinion and bring political pressure that only a few months ago seemed improbable.

Israel has repeatedly gotten away with flouting UN resolutions in the past. The US will not stop arming the Israeli Defence Forces and the Biden administration will not support any form of sanctions if Israel ignores the UN.

At home and abroad, we should now increase the pressure on Israel to end its campaign of genocide, highlight the early signs of Israel’s isolation on the world stage and persuade those who still remain unconvinced of the need for an immediate ceasefire, humanitarian aid and compliance with international law.