Since the news broke of three women, a 57-year-old Irish woman, a 69-year-old Malaysian and a 30-year-old British women, being rescued, following a series of clandestine phone calls to the Freedom Charity from a flat in Brixton, there has been a catalogue of increasingly bizarre headlines and revelations that, rather than clarifying the events surrounding the case, serve to further confuse and obstruct our ability to understand the strange case of ‘comrade’ Bala.

It does not require a very radical starting point to expose the Daily Mail’s attack on Ed Miliband through the medium of a thoroughly nasty and very poorly argued hack-job on Ed’s father Ralph. The Daily Mail piece was so unpleasant that top Tories rushed to condemn it, and it emerged rather rapidly that the Mail had ‘shot itself in the foot’ with this one. If the paper had hoped to whip up a new panic about ‘Red Ed’ following Miliband Junior’s announcement, at the Labour conference, of a plan to freeze energy prices, it mainly succeeded in directing the fire on itself while simultaneously embarrassing the Conservative Party.

As austerity bites and capitalism shows its teeth in its relentless quest for profit and for ways to offset its crisis onto the working class, the recent revelations of the explosion in so-called zero hour contracts have filled the newspapers and our television screens. Signing up to a zero hours contract is a condition that can mean no wages or little wages at the end of the week. In the hope of gaining some employment many workers wait at the end of a phone for whatever an employer or an agency offers.

Parliament’s rejection of the government’s motion supporting military intervention in Syria was seen by many as a reassertion of democracy, Labour showing a bit of backbone at last and Cameron being cut down to size. Indeed, the vote in Parliament attracted a lot of attention not only in the media but also amongst the population. Faced with the terrible slaughter in Syria many are deeply concerned about what is going to happen in Syria and the Middle East. However, the vote in parliament was not the manifestation of the ‘popular will’; rather it graphically illustrated the impasse of British imperialism.

The revelations about the extent of cyber-surveillance by the capitalist state – the result of the whistleblowing by former National Security Agency operative Edward Snowden – have been piling up in the last few weeks. All the major internet servers, search engines and communication programmes – Windows, Google, Yahoo, Skype, etc etc – are more than willing to put any information required by the state in the hands of the NSA or other state surveillance bodies. Emails, phone calls, encryption codes – none of it is private; and the technology of surveillance is so sophisticated that even without the compliance of these corporations the American state can tap almost any form of electronic communication, whenever and wherever it wants.

Ukip, we are told, is outside this stale establishment, it’s a party of protest, and Nigel Farage is supposed to be a good bloke who likes his ale and a laugh down the pub. But the idea that a party which stands for the ‘independence of Britain’ is outside the political status quo is patently ridiculous: Farage can say "sod the lot" to the three main parties, but when push comes to shove he's with them all the way down the line.

When Margaret Thatcher died we were told that, as in life, her death had polarised and divided Britain. On the one hand there were the parliamentary tributes, the claims for her greatness as a woman and principles as a politician, and a funeral with dignitaries arriving from all over the world. Against this there were the street parties celebrating her death, the singing of “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead”, and the outpouring of vitriol against ‘Britain’s most-hated Prime Minister’. More than twenty years after she left power Thatcher was still able to play a role in the false ideological alternatives of different factions of the ruling class.

The defeat of the miners and printers in Britain did not bring the wave of class struggles of that decade to a close. 1987 saw a nationwide strike of British Telecom workers. In February 1988, there was a real wave of struggles involving car workers, health workers, postal workers, seafarers, and others. Internationally the movement also continued, with important struggles in the education sector in Italy and among healthworkers in France.

These movements showed a number of signs of a process of maturation in the working class. The struggles in Italy and France, for example, saw the emergence of general assemblies and revocable committees to coordinate the struggle, and in several cases members of revolutionary organisations (the ICC and others) were elected as delegates.

There was also a small but potentially important development of organisation among unemployed workers. WR 92 (March 1986) contained reports of our participation in meetings of unemployed committees in France Germany, and the UK.

David Cameron has had a busy start to the year. In early February he visited Libya and Algeria. A couple of weeks later he was in India with the largest trade delegation ever assembled by a British Prime Minister. Before that he had given the long-awaited speech on Europe in which he finally promised a referendum after the next election. What does all this tell us about British foreign policy?

The 1980s was a period of important working class struggles in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe and the world. The ‘Thatcherite revolution’, capitalism’s response to the inability of Keynesian economics to deal with the economic crisis, was a means of ruthlessly culling unprofitable industrial sectors and involved a brutal assault on workers’ jobs and living conditions. The classic expression of this policy was the decision to decimate the UK mining industry, which provoked the year-long Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. This struggle was a focus for the whole working class in Britain, but although its defeat came as a bitter blow, the effects of which would make themselves felt even more strongly in the longer term, it did not bring an end to the wave of struggles in Britain. Between 1986 and 1988 there were widespread movements involving printers, BT workers, teachers, health workers, postal workers and others.

The decay of capitalism however has brought to light the role of religion, as part of the state apparatus, as one of the prime movers in the organised trafficking and sexual abuse of children. But it is by no means the only part of the state to be involved in this violence against children, as recent and more historical events have shown.

The furore over the oil tankers’ dispute shows what workers are up against in today’s capitalist system. The workers are fed up with the working conditions imposed on them by the oil companies and the contracting agents they use to hire them. They frequently have to work extremely long hours, which is a dire threat not only to their own safety but the safety of many others given the volatile nature of their cargo. There have also been serious attempts to cut their wages.

Thousands of teachers are striking in London on 28 March against the governments pension ‘reforms’.  We have published a statement and leaflet.

leaflet

This is an extract from a text prepared for a recent internal meeting of the ICC’s section in Britain. The article clearly shows the increasing level of attacks that workers are faced with.

For 5 months electricians have been demonstrating and picketing in order to build resistance to the new Building Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA) conditions, involving a deskilling and reduction of pay by 35%. Yet in spite of their effort the sparks are more and more frustrated that the struggle isn’t developing, knowing that the present level of action is no-where near enough to defend their current pay and conditions.