Jez he did!

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election will change the face of politics in Britain. His campaign focused the angry anti-Tory, anti-austerity feelings shared by millions.

In the article below Sean Vernell assesses the significance of the victory.

 

Jez he did! Corbyn’s victory brings with it ‘a new kind of politics’.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s successful bid to win the leadership of the Labour Party has sent shock waves through the political establishment. His victory was overwhelming and gives him a huge mandate for the anti-austerity policies he put forward during the leadership campaign.

Corbyn’s first act as Labour leader was to speak out against the Tory Trade Union Bill and to join tens of thousands on the “Refugees welcome here” protest in London.

Despite the virulence of the attacks on him, his success in the election, with almost 60% of the first preference votes, was unequivocal. The significance of this victory is enormous. For two months all the political pundits, media hacks and the three other candidates have tried to make sense of his growing mass appeal not just with party members but also with a new generation that has, in the past, been turned off from official politics.

This election campaign has revealed just how out of touch the political establishment are with the true feelings of working people.

They used terms like ‘Corbynmania’ and ‘hysterical’ to describe the tens of thousands that his campaign attracted across Britain. The establishment pundits could only rationalise his popularity by putting it down to some form of mass neurosis.

They cannot understand why working people have such a profound sense of rage and injustice towards those at the top of society who continue to get wealthier whilst they get poorer. They fail to understand the frustration and anxiety that working people feel everyday as their work/life balance firmly tilts towards work – resulting in them having no time to spend playing and watching their children grow up.

They fail to understand the young.

A generation that has been brought up in an education system where developing the capacity to think and be critical has been replaced by ‘employability’, targets and tests. They have made it more difficult for children from working class backgrounds to access further and higher education by scrapping EMA and raising tuition fees. This is a generation that has been demonised by the press and blamed for successive governments’ failure to provide them with decent secure employment.

It is this discontent and these fears that Corbyn’s campaign gave voice to.

His campaign attracted 300,000 new members to join the Labour Party. At the core of his campaign lay an army of 16,000 volunteers who built the rallies and made the calls to get the vote out.

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The offensive begins.

The campaign against Corbyn will no doubt start from day one. The media and the right within the Labour Party will try to portray Corbyn and his supporters as being out of touch with the electorate and who couldn’t possibly win a general election.

There’s nothing new here. This was exactly the excuse that Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair used to ‘modernise’ the party in the 80’s and 90s. They argued that the Labour Party (ie the left) had lost touch with the centre ground of British politics and needed to reconnect with the electorate.

For them that meant moving to the right and embracing the market, privatisation and ‘humanitarian’ wars.

Behind the Blairites’ political strategy lay an acceptance that working people are instinctively right wing and had lost any notion of a collective response to society’s

problems. They had, the Blairites believed, swallowed the individualist, ‘there’s no such thing as society’ politics of the Thatcher era. They concluded from this that rather than challenge these ideas the ‘modern’ Labour Party had to mimic the Tories if they were to win office again.

But it was always mistaken to believe that working people had simply accepted these ideas. Social survey after social survey throughout the 90s showed that on key Tory policies like privatisation and taxes most people were to the left of the official Labour Party.

What the Corbyn campaign proved is that by fighting on a principled, anti-austerity, anti- privatisation, anti- war platform and by putting forward alternatives based on collectivism he could attract people into engaging with official politics again.

But, of course, this is precisely what the establishment fears. After their hacks have spent hour after hour writing column after column complaining about the apathetic working class and tut-tutting at their refusal to turn out in elections, they are now faced with the potential of all those ‘chavs’ turning out to get actively engaged in politics.

The narrative will now change to complain about how Corbyn’s ‘new kind of politics’ is ‘too simplistic’ and that his supporters are not qualified to really understand the complexities of running a modern dynamic economy like Britain’s. The Press, employers and the right within the Labour Party, who are a part of the establishment, will collude to do everything that can to destabilise and undermine the Corbyn leadership. They will be relentless.

That is why trade unionists and activists need to rally support for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti- austerity stance and his democratic right to lead the Labour Party.

 

Corbyn’s victory: A real boost to every campaign

Refugees welcome here banner-1000336

Corbyn’s victory will lift the confidence of all those who wish to fight back against austerity and injustice. Every trade unionist will feel more confident to take on every bullying manager knowing that their views are not extreme – we are now the mainstream.

He has long been a friend to trade unionists in struggle and to those fighting to defend educational provision. He is on record as proposing a National Education Service (like the NHS), opposing free schools and academies, supporting lifelong learning (to be paid for by a 2 percent increase in corporation tax), scrapping tuition fees and reinstating grants, and abolishing the charitable status of private schools. Clearly these policies will be enthusiastically supported by all those who work and are taught within the education sectors.

Every anti-racist and anti-war activist will feel more confident knowing that the leader of the Labour party is for scrapping Trident, pulling out of NATO and will oppose sending the poor and unemployed of one county to go and kill and maim the poor and unemployed of another.

There will be pressure, no doubt, even from Corybn’s own supporters to seek compromise with those who are hell-bent on destroying him. We will need to resist those pressures.

The real power to defeat austerity and prevent the new moves to war in Syria, for example, lies in building a mass austerity movement in the workplaces and on the streets. This means seizing every opportunity to block the Tories’ plans in the coming weeks and months. It means building on the mass solidarity in support of refugees and migrants and against racism which has mushroomed in the last few weeks.

The main defence against all those forces that seek to undermine Corbyn’s mandate is the movements that gave birth to Corbynism in the first place. As long as we are clear about this and continue to build the movement against austerity, war and racism then the excitement and enthusiasm for a new kind of politics ushered in by the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leader of the Labour Party, could be the harbinger of real hope and change for the left in Britain.

Next stop Manchester, Sunday 4th October.

The week after, on Saturday 10th October, the UCU Left conference, which could hardly be better timed, ‘Education in the front line: how do we fight the austerity agenda?’ will take place in central London. You can register for this by visiting the UCU Left website, www.uculeft.org, where there is also a downloadable flier.

Sean Vernell, UCU Coordinating Secretary City and Islington College and FE national negotiator.

Refugees and migrants deserve support, not brutality and hypocrisy.

Over 300,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year. 2,500 have died attempting to do so. Lindsey German, Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and UCU member argues that it is the continuous bombing and wars that have created this refugee crisis.

The West’s Wars: Creating a refugee crisis.

It seems barely credible that the summer of 2015 in Europe has been marked by the biggest refugee crisis that most of us can remember. It seems even less credible that the daily horror stories about refugees across Europe have not been met with a humanitarian response from European governments but rather with high levels of brutality and disregard for human life.

According to the UNHCR more than 300,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, compared with 219,000 for the whole of 2014. Of those arriving this year, 200,000 have travelled to Greece, with another 110,000 landing in Italy. It is estimated that 2,500 people have died this year in the course of their attempts to reach safety.

Every week, we hear of people drowning, suffocating in the overcrowded holds of ships or in container lorries as they are smuggled into Austria or Germany. Young children have been baton charged and tear gassed as they try to cross borders. Wire fences are out in place to secure borders in the same country, Hungary, where 25 years ago people were applauded for leaving. Thousands are in terrible conditions in a camp in Calais wanting to cross into Britain. I personally witnessed, recently in southern Germany and northern Italy, police harassment of young black men, probably refugees, at railway stations as they tried to travel north.

This is the biggest European refugee crisis since the Second World War, when millions of Europeans were displaced as a result of six years of conflict. Then it was recognised that these people needed help for resettlement. Today the attitudes of governments across Europe are reminiscent not of 1945 but of the 1930s. Then, Jews and other refugees from fascism were treated appallingly by governments such as Britain’s, often refused entry and some perishing in the course of their desperate attempts to find safety. When war broke out many of those who had opposed Hitler were interned as enemy aliens.

Today we are witnessing an onslaught against the new generation of refugees. They are denounced as Economic migrants, even though they are clearly escaping from deadly situations. Indeed the repeated use of the word migrant to describe them is itself designed to treat them as people who somehow don’t have the right to be in countries such as Britain.

On the contrary, they have every right under international law to be allowed to seek asylum. Britain also has a much greater responsibility since in fact large numbers of the people now seeking this status are refugees from war.

The most pressing plight of refugees is that of those from Syria. After nearly 5 years of civil war the country is in ruins, and there is little prospect of safety, let alone a decent future, for the vast majority of its citizens. Millions of people are externally or internally displaced.

Yet this is the same country being bombed by the U.S. supposedly to destroy ISIS. Britain joins in this bombing in Iraq, as do its pilots on US sorties in Syria. David Cameron wants another vote in parliament to extend this bombing.

It has been a failure in containing ISIS precisely because the wars have not weakened terrorism but have increased it. Some western allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also funded and aided ISIS. The bombing in addition has an impact not just on those who it is supposedly aimed at but on the whole civilian population.

More generally, war creates refugees. People flee from the threat of destruction: they fear death and injury, but also lose their homes in fighting and bombing, can no longer grow and harvest crops, have shortages of food and water can no longer work or go to college. His is the reality for millions of Syrians today, and supporting those who can get to Europe should be an absolute priority for western governments.

Destruction of infrastructure leads people to desperate measures, as we see from the people climbing into dangerous boats or lorries from which they might not emerge alive, or clinging to trains to get them through the Channel.

But the wars and the refugees are not just about Syria. In recent years the highest number of refugees have been from Afghanistan and Iraq – the two centres of the global war on terror launched by George Bush and Tony Blair. At one point there were 4 million refugees from the Iraq war alone. Even today, the largest numbers of refugees are in Pakistan, many from Afghanistan. Most refugees never get close to the rich countries, but are in neighbouring often very poor ones.

David Cameron was a leading instigator of the bombing of Libya in 2011. More than 30,000 were killed in that conflict, and many more became refugees, mostly within Africa. Today Libya has two rival governments and is locked in a bloody civil war. It is one of the centres of people trafficking, denounced by western governments but a consequence both of their foreign policy and of their Fortress Europe approach to some of the most suffering people in the world. Conflicts and repression in countries such as Sudan and Eritrea also swell the numbers who make their way to the Mediterranean Coast.

Those of us who campaign against these wars makes these links, and recognise that one major outcomes of war is the suffering of those displaced and damaged by it. It is one major reason to oppose war. The demands of the media that the People traffickers should be dealt with misses the point. Of course these are despicable people who profit from misery, but they are acting according to a grotesque market in human lives. It would not exist without the policies which restrict migration and at the same time scapegoat migrants.

Europe is the richest corner of the world. It can easily afford to let refugees in to the 28 countries within the EU. Free movement should mean just that, not free movement for those with white skins, or those with money. All the evidence suggests that Europe has always benefited from migration and that today, with an ageing population, it needs young people to work.

It is often said by governments and politicians that they are acting according to the wishes of their citizens, and that there is strong anti immigrant feeling, as witnessed by the attacks on refugee hostels in Germany or the demonstrations against them in Italy. But governments and media should confront this prejudice not exacerbate it as they have been doing. It is obvious that there are many people who do not demonise those fleeing from war; indeed many are involved in practical help and support, and some have helped the lives of those in danger.

There is a political battle on this question. Those within the trade union movement should stand up for refugees and migrants.

 

UCU_left_Lindsey_G_article_on_Refugees

Lewisham Southwark College occupation: solidarity needed!

Lewisham Southwark College Camberwell campus has been occupied in a protest against sell-off and closure.

Twitter: @Lewishamoccupy

Facebook coming soon

The occupation began Monday. Come down if you can, anytime after 8am.

Address: Southwark College, Camberwell Campus,

Southampton Way,

Peckham,

SE5 7EW

Reject the 1 percent HE pay offer

Delegates at the recent HE sector conference were scathing about the inadequacy of the 1 percent offer from UCEA. We need to make sure it is heavily rejected by members in the e-consultation that is about to start, and then move to an industrial action ballot and a campaign for a decent pay rise in the sector which reverses the recent severe declines.

Here is a leaflet calling for rejection:

vote to reject pay offer

Outrage as injunction stops FE pay strike

The AoC employers, via the Principal of Westminster Kingsway College, were granted an injunction this afternoon by Justice Mitting to block the FE pay strike called for Tuesday 14th October.

Our statement on this outrageous and draconian ruling can be found here: UCUL Injunction leaflet

This Friday’s FEC meeting will consider its response to this hypocritical attack by the employers. There will need to be an immediate re-ballot to put the pay campaign back on course.

This injunction is all the more reason UCU activists need to come together at the UCU Left conference ‘Education, the Market and Resistance’ on 25th October to discuss building the fight back and the union’s profile in defence of education.

You can register via the post at the top of this page.

 

FE branches to join October 14th pay strikes!

Last Friday’s Special Further Education Committee meeting voted to call on FE branches to take part in the one day national strike for decent pay already planned by various public sector unions on 14th October following rejection of the latest AoC offer of 1% in an e-consultation.

Targeted strike action is to follow in November, and dates for further action including another strike and a mass lobby of parliament will be decided at the next FEC meeting on 17th October.

A full report of the FEC meeting can be found here: FEC report 12-9-14