To vote or not to vote…

That indeed is the question that millions will face when the local elections in England are held next month. In the good old days you only had to produce your voting card to cast your vote. Now voters will have to prove who they are at the polling station with an approved list photo-ID card. Anyone who cannot confirm their identity with a passport or an ID from the Government’s list will be simply turned away.
    Now this won’t be a problem for the overwhelming majority of the electorate who never bother to vote in local elections. For those who do it won’t be much trouble for the elderly who only need to produce their free bus passes to get their ballot papers. But for the rest – particularly those who don’t have a driving licence or a passport the only alternative is to apply at least a week in advance for a photo-ID “Voter Authority Certificate” to cast their vote. This clearly will deter many young people from voting.
    The Government say they’ve done this to combat electoral fraud. But the scale of this abuse of the voting system is miniscule. A total of 193 cases of alleged electoral fraud were investigated by the police during 2022 when local elections were held in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The police issued one caution in relation to a case of alleged electoral fraud and court proceedings were initiated in relation to one other case.
    Many suspect that what really lies behind this move is a Tory belief that most young voters lean towards Labour and anything that deters them from voting can only benefit the Conservative & Unionist Party.

Struggling for peace

Campaigning to end war isn't an easy thing to do these days as the supporters of No2Nato are finding out when they try to book rooms of halls for anti-war events. The hidden hand is working overtime to ensure that all venues are closed for George Galloway and Chris Williamson in England, Scotland and Wales while a whisper campaign is underway to divert or demoralise the growing number of workers and students who’ve been drawn to the new anti-imperialist campaign,
    Some say No2Nato should just join the Stop the War campaign. Others that it will simply become another political platform for George Galloway and Chris Williamson and the left social-democratic parties that they head.
    Though only launched in February No2Nato has already held a number of street meetings while work proceeds to build national campaigning network. The union conference season, which kicks off in a few weeks’ time, is a golden opportunity to reach out to the activists and counter the torrent of propaganda on Ukraine that’s being pumped out on the mainstream media by the bourgeois lie-machine on a daily basis.
    Merging with moribund movements is a recipe for disaster. Stop the War and the almost forgotten Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are dead in the water. They do nothing apart from providing a refuge for the has-beens and also-rans of the labour movement these days. As for where No2Nato is going – that largely depends on us and all the others who want to see a genuine anti-imperialist and anti-war movement take off in Britain.

For a just and lasting peace

Trade unions are being urged to support the Stop the War conference in January specifically aimed at mobilising working people around “every effort... to pursue peaceful relations between countries through negotiations and disarmament". The World at War conference that is open to all trade unionists takes it lead from the resolution passed at this year’s RMT national conference which rightly said that “workers have no interest in war with China, Russia, or any other country. Every effort should be made to pursue peaceful relations between countries through negotiations and disarmament”.
    But sadly the first call of the Stop the War coalition is not the immediate ceasefire call of the pacifist community but a demand for the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian troops – which is precisely what NATO wants as well.
    We are in the middle of a hate-campaign not seen since the dark Cold War days of the McCarthy era, We’re being swamped with hysterical anti-Russian propaganda to justify more and more sanctions on Russia and more and more military aid to the Ukrainian fascists.
    The gurus of the mainstream media fill their columns with the usual stories of Russian atrocities to justify Britain’s deepening involvement in the anti-Russian offensive. The Tory government can count on the full support of the other bourgeois parties in parliament. Starmer and his Blairite clique openly embrace NATO and US imperialism while the fake lefters who pose as socialists essentially argue that peace is only attainable on imperialist terms.
    The Blairites and the self-styled “communist” and “trotskyist” movements drum up support for NATO’s war within the labour movement and the anti-war campaigns in the name of bogus Ukrainian leftists while ignoring the very real plight of the genuine communist and left languishing in Zelensky’s jails under Pinochet-style laws designed to crush all opposition to the puppet regime.
    Parroting imperialist demands in pseudo-leftist babble only spreads confusion amongst the millions who want to see an end to the conflict which could set the whole of Europe ablaze and possibly even trigger a nuclear war.
    These sinister forces within the labour and peace movement have long acted as cheer-leaders for NATO and neo-colonialism. Some are dupes who actually believe the nonsense in the bourgeois press. Some believe, with some justification, that it will pave their way to the top of the labour bureaucracy and others are simply hired hands of the intelligence services that monitor and influence working class opinion in Britain.
    Ultimately all these people serve the war lobby within the United States – the so-called “deep state” that represents the most venal and aggressive sections of the American ruling class that seek to dominate the entire world in the name of “globalisation” and the “new world order”.
    Now, more than ever, is the time for a clear call from the anti-war movement for an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the rights of the Donbas and Crimean republics to join the Russian Federation as well as equal rights for all the peoples of the regions of the Ukraine.

Enough is indeed Enough!

Huge rallies. Halls packed with students and young workers. Platforms headed by Mick Lynch, the leader of the RMT transport union that is taking on the railway companies and the Tory government head-on over pay, and over 450,000 people signing up to a campaign to fight the cost-of-living crisis.
    Under the slogan “It’s time to turn anger into action”, speakers are calling on the labour movement to close ranks and lead the fight-back against the austerity regime. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has shown his support for the campaign and his followers are already comparing the launch of the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign to those heady days when hundreds of thousands of people rallied to the Labour banner when Corbyn was at the helm. Whether this new campaign takes off in the same way remains to be seen.
    The RMT has thrown its weight behind the campaign. So has the Communication Workers Union (CWU), whose own battle with Royal Mail, BT and the Post Office began this month. Zara Sultana, the Corbynista Coventry MP, and a number of other prominent Corbyn supporters have also signed up. But no other Labour MP has yet come forward to join her; and Unite and Unison, the giant union that dominate the TUC, have still to show their hand.
    No-one on the left would disagree with Enough’s programme. A rise in the national minimum wage, substantial pay rises for all, increases in pensions and benefits, a return to the pre-April energy price cap, the nationalisation of the energy companies and a massive council house building programme. These are all modest demands we can all agree on – the sort of thing even Gordon Brown could endorse on a rainy day at the Stock Exchange. But we want much more than that.
    Past efforts such as the People’s Assembly have petered out because their demands were far too modest to maintain the enthusiasm and commitment needed to sustain a serious campaign to end austerity.
    The restoration of the NHS and a standard of living for working people worthy of a country whose economy is still the sixth largest in the world – all these things are possible.
    The railways along with the energy and water industries are clearly public services that should naturally be kept in public hands. But we have to campaign for the renationalisation of the entire public sector that existed in this country until 1979, to use their profits to restore the NHS and the welfare state that we once enjoyed.
    Although public ownership can fund much-needed public services it cannot, in itself, lead to socialist advance. Fascist Italy’s public sector was, for instance, second only to that of the Soviet Union before the Second World War. But Mussolini’s “Third Way” couldn’t solve Italy’s unemployment problems. It was only a prop to maintain the power of the land-owners and industrialists who propelled him to power in the first place.
    In the imperialist heartlands workers face mass unemployment and economic stagnation. But ending sanctions on Russia, cutting military expenditure and closing all foreign bases would go a long way to reversing decline.
    Stop the War and CND do next to nothing these days. So as the guns blaze in Ukraine, we have to build the resistance to the Labour leaders who crawl to the Americans and we must lead the fight-back against the union bureaucrats who defend the Ukrainian fascist regime.
    Public ownership is meaningless without a socialist agenda to empower working people and pave the way to revolutionary change. And fighting for peace goes hand-in-hand with that struggle.