Much to report since they returned? Nah, not really – and so this post is late this week. Indeed only one or two pieces that really caught my eye and so I present the newer slimline version of Back at the Seanad for your consideration… Yes, less truly is more…
Month: April 2010
The Struggle in Greece: English-Language Information
As Greece gears up for a general strike on May 5th, here is a link to the English-language website of PAME (All Workers Militant Front) [but not an image of their May Day poster because it won’t work properly].
PAME is a Trade Union Front. It is open, democratic, unifying and it pursues to have among its members the most active, fighting forces of the trade union movement. It has got panhellenic characteristics and focuses on every working field and production branch, in the Public and Private Sector, with no exceptions.
PAME was founded on April 3rd 1999, through the Panhellenic Meeting, held at the Piece and Frienship Stadium , Faliro, Athens, with the participation of 230 trade unions, 18 branch and peripheral associations and 2.500 elected union members.
It also places a strong emphasis on internationalism.
PAME is based on the proletarian internationalism and solidarity principles. Nowadays, in the conditions of the temporary ruling of imperialism we live, the need to Coordinate and Work Together with movements in other countries is strong.
Capitalists’ forces, Socialdemocracy and Opportunism are coordinated through the mechanisms of the Confederation of European Work Unions (SES) and of ITUC. These organizations work for and work with Capitalism.
Facing all these, PAME takes actively part in the attempts to rebuild the class-oriented trade union movement in Europe. We have successfully held, with the cooperation of other union members and trade unions, European trade union meetings in Turkey, in Greece, in France, in Italy and elsewhere. We are going to go on with these efforts because we firmly believe that the situation in Europe affects negatively the whole world. The difficulties the trade union movement faces, do not lay only in fighting capitalists and governments. The union movement has got to fight also some leading groups in CGT France and CCOO Spain and their dirty role in all these.
UPDATE: There is a Facebook Group called Solidarity with the Working People of Greece and Jim has provided a link to a different viewpoint in the comments. As indeed has Mark P.
John Waters champions the status quo…again
JW is in fine fettle this morning about pensions. He’s decided to turn his rage once more on journalists… and sure why not?
And in doing so he asks a very good question and then… well, comprehensively blows it.
What gives highly paid journalists the right to accuse politicians of being far removed from normal income levels?
Continue reading “John Waters champions the status quo…again”
This week from the Irish Election Literature Blog…
Another fine round up from AK and the IELB… As AK notes “…its a bit of a bumper week this week, with a distinct Northern hue” and look what is that we start with? And what is the last piece of contemporary literature on the list below? Hmmmm…
From the Current UK election campaign a Gerry Adams leaflet from West Belfast. It’s interesting to see Sinn Fein as a party in government as opposed to a party of protest as they are in The Republic.
From last weekend, An Éirígí ‘Smash NAMA’ Leaflet, advertising the protest at Anglo Irish Bank.
An Sinn Féin Leaflet from the 1998 Assembly election campaign. The parties aims in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement contrast a little to the 2010 Adams leaflet above.
A 1977 Green Cross Christmas card and a Release All our Political Prisoners one too.
From 1993 a Democratic Left Freesheet ‘Euro-Dub’ producd by then MEP, Des Geraghty.
Two Leaflets from the Good Friday Agreement, both in favour. (I’ve a number of other GFA leaflets to post over the next few weeks).
A Northern Ireland Women’s Coaltion Yes to the Good Friday Agreement leaflet.
A Progressive Unionist Party Yes to the Good Friday Agreement Leaflet.
And finally!
My Grandfather Worked in Mines your family owned them!
A small thought or two on reading David McWilliams
I was reading David McWilliams latest appeal in the Sunday Business Post to us to consider the notion of the Greek government defaulting on its debt (and the problems the Greek face, and by extension the euro and EU seem to increase almost hourly. Incidentally, there’s a quote in there by the head of the OECD, Angel Gurria, who likens the Greek situation to the Ebola virus, suggesting that when one has Ebola one’s only recourse is to chop off the affected leg. Er… not correct as far as I can make out given that Ebola is a systemic disease that affects blood vessels throughout the body and the ability of blood to coagulate, but I guess whatever works to justify what happens next – eh? Thank God he’s not a doctor, or that he has to talk about anything important like … er… er…) – and obviously by extension perhaps ourselves at some point soon, not least given the small but not insignificant fact that our own deficit is larger than theirs.
And I think he’s got a point. Indeed I’m intrigued reading the last but one issue of Prospect magazine to read a not dissimilar thesis…
The arithmetic is horrible. If Greece is to start paying interest on its debt – rather than rolling it into new loans – by 2011 the government would need to run a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of nearly 10 per cent of GDP. This would require roughly another 14 per cent of GDP in spending cuts and revenue measures, ranking it among the largest fiscal adjustments ever attempted.
Worse still, these large interest payments will mostly be going to Germany and France, further removing income from the Greek economy. If Greece is ever to repay some of this debt it will need a drastic austerity programme lasting decades. This would cause its GDP to fall far more than Ireland’s. Moreover Greek public workers should expect huge pay cuts, which, in the country’s toxic political climate is a sure route to civil strife.
And…
European leaders are wrong to think that greece can achieve a solution through a resumption of normal market lending. it cannot afford to repay its debt at rates that reflect the inherent risk. The only means to refinance its debt at an affordable level would be to grant long-term, subsidised loans that cover a large part of the liabilities due in the next three to five years.
The alternative being?
… for [it] to manage its default in an orderly manner. Reckless lending to the Greek state was based on European creditors terrible decision making. Default teaches creditors – and their governments – a lesson, just as it does the debtors: mistakes cost money, and your mistakes are your own.
The authors of this radical proposition? Well, one, Simon Johnson is a former chief economist at the IMF while Peter Boone is a principal in Salute Capital Management.
In our own situation the Sunday Business Post has taken in its editorial to calling for exemplary actions against bankers… and couched in quite similar language to the above when discussing pension top-ups and such like…
‘The flip-side of accepting massive payments in the good times must be taking responsibility when things go wrong’.
Or… here’s a thought, why not make those massive payments just a little bit – or quite a lot – smaller by taxing them more? After all, it is the SBP itself that argues that:
… taxpayers are being asked to pay for the failures and greed of bankers, in simple terms by sacrificing their standards of living.
And there’s the disconnect. A small number of individuals can through their own actions force a situation where they can immiserate many many others. What possible sanction is appropriate? Imprisonment seems to small, other punishments simply pointless. If any of us have ever wondered at the gulf between the actions of war criminals and the justice meted out to them, well, wonder no more.
All that can be done, bar the obvious recourse to law, is to ensure that this process can never happen again.
As it happens Richard Bruton makes the cogent point in the same edition of the SBP that Anglo should fall because… well… that’s what happens under capitalism. It’s an unusual day when I find myself agreeing with Bruton precisely because of his defence of capitalism, but there we have it.
And this is where I point you to a phrase of McWilliams…
As discussed two weeks ago in this column, history argues that the bailout will be unsuccessful, Greece will implode anyway and the bailout money will be wasted. The reason for this is that the financial markets need to believe that Greece has changed fundamentally. This means that it is not good enough to stump up sufficient to stem this crisis; the EU has to stump up enough money so that Greece never flirts with bankruptcy again – or at least in the foreseeable future.
Recapitalising a country is a bit like recapitalising a bank [shades of Swiss Tony there – wbs]. You need to make sure that you inject enough money into the bank – not so much to ensure that it doesn’t go bust now, but that it never goes bust again.
But how could we be sure that the situation in this state has changed – that all is being done to ensure we will not see a reprise of this, if not tomorrow then in ten or twenty years time? The pension fiasco suggests otherwise, suggests all too much – as noted by the SBP editorial – that it is business, and a highly profitable one for various individuals, as usual with government playing the role of bystander (and speaking of sleight of hand – notable how Maire Geoghegan Quinn had to take the bullet by proxy as it were for the sins of the government in not seeing through the Bank of Ireland mess with any conviction. I mean I hold no candle for the ludicrously inflated pension provision for Oireachtas members, but that seems to me to be a different discussion). And what happens if, or more likely when, this happens again? What’s going to be left for the state, or again more likely us, to fund a private sector that has comprehensively failed given the hill we all have to climb now to pay back that which others dumped upon us?
Gordon Brown speaks out! And they do love that Nick Clegg in the US… but why wouldn’t they?
Well. What to say? I always took the line that Brown was a bit strange, spun by no end of Blairites, with a pinch of salt (The End of the Party sits on my bookshelf as yet, bar the Introduction, unread). And thing is that he’s really not that strange at all. But… inept? Or at least thoughtless. Or at least caught inside a bubble for too long? Yes to all of those. But when one reads the transcript he actually dealt with the issue, reasonably – although not brilliantly well. There was no reason for the post-discussion critique. He made his case, she appeared at least reasonably mollified. Indeed the tenor of the exchange improved markedly as time went on.
Indeed I’d argue that, as with almost all such ‘errors’ in politics, it’s not the initial act/words that cause the problem, but the walking back. Brown could have phrased subsequent comments on this – even after the ‘bigoted’ comment – in a way which remained true to his thoughts as he had in the actual discussion and remained reasonably graceful to the woman concerned. But no. Damage control slips into action and we’re left with ‘I misunderstood her comments’. No he didn’t. None of us reading the transcript could misunderstand them. Few enough I’d imagine would find it difficult to rebut them as he did. And he dealt with them, as I noted, reasonably well at the time.
How this changes the issues I do not know. Some pretty volatile polling returns out there at the moment. I’d think though that this would help the Conservatives more than anyone else.
Ah well.
Meanwhile, what of the bould Nick Clegg and those fans of his in the US media?
Okay, Anna Applebaum does… No, no, come back. It’s not just Anne Applebaum. And even if she does mention the Clapham omnibus – natch – let’s not ignore or dismiss some thoughts that the current love in raises.
Actually, hold on a second, because Applebaum makes a most peculiar comparison.
Here is a riddle: What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British, privately educated, and had once worked as a ski instructor in Austria?
And the answer…
It would look like Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democrats—and possibly the beneficiary of the biggest British voters’ revolution in decades. For those who don’t follow these things, the Liberal Democrats are Britain’s historically insignificant third party. In its current incarnation, the party dates from the late 1980s, back when the Labor Party was a near-Marxist monolith, the Tories were the party of Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of space in between.
It bloody wouldn’t you know. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of the Liberal Democrats, and I’ve pointed here to some aspects of them that from first hand living in the UK I found troubling. But to compare them to the Tea Party movement is an absolute absurdity [as noted in the comments, Michael Tomasky of the Guardian dealt with this – unbeknowst to myself in a good piece – wbs].
Ideologically, sociologically and structurally there are no comparisons between the TPs and the Liberal Democrats. One is a centrist embedded political party, the other appears to be a semi-populist response to the Obama Presidency from more conservative Republicans. Unless Applebaum is arguing that every response to Gordon Brown is equivalent to the Tea Party then she’s not comparing like and like.
Curious thing is that if you think about it surely the Liberal Democrats make a much better fit with the US Democrats. Ideologically, sociologically – although blue collar isn’t a word that readily springs to mind with the Lib Dems, in many ways they’d appear a much more congenial partner. That is bar one thing that the Liberal Democrats have not possessed, well, since they were Liberals.
Power and access to power.
And it’s that that makes Applebaums piece, and a really overly complimentary piece on ForeignPolicy.com appear, so curiously detached. At best the Liberal Democrats look likely to come out of this with perhaps 100 MPs. At best they can hope to form a coalition government. That’s at absolute best.
But it’s interesting to me to see that Clegg’s appeal has stretched even that far across the Atlantic.
The General Election in Northern Ireland: A Look in CLR’s Crystal Ball
The nominations closed last week, and we have 108 candidates for the 18 constituencies. In the absence of The Workers’ Party and other left groups like the Socialist Party, there is just one candidate unambiguously from the left, Eamonn McCann, standing for People Before Profit in Foyle. In terms of other candidates that identify as neither nationalist nor unionist, Alliance is running in every constituency, and the Green Party is running four candidates (and the areas in which the Greens are running suggest something about the class nature of their support). There is also 19 year old Martin McAuley (whose election agent easily has the greatest hair in Irish politics), who is running on a platform of cross-community and cross-class unity in north Belfast, and Ciarán McClean in West Tyrone, who comes from a left background, but who is running on a non-sectarian, enviromentalist platform. There is also John Stevenson in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, an independent candidate who states “Those with vested interests have never and will never succeed”, the founder of engineering firm Titanic Rebuilt 2010, said. “We are one people and we all have one future. It is a future equally shared. I am absolutely confident that our people will make the right decision on May 6.”
And that’s it. Less than a quarter of the candidates. None of these candidates, despite Alliance trying to talk up Naomi Long’s chances in east Belfast, has much chance of taking a seat, and many of their votes will be very low. The simple numbers tell us something about the weakness of those seeking to build a united community alternative, never mind a left alternative, to the tribal politics of unionism and nationalism. Even the numbers themselves are deceptive, over-representing the non-communal electorate, and the organisational strength of those involved. If you look at the Alliance candidate profiles, a lot of their candidates are standing in areas to which they have little connection. Although Alliance can get the required numbers in each constituency to sign the nomination papers, it seems that in some areas there is very little in the way of an organisation on the ground, and so candidates are being drafted in from areas in Belfast and parts of Antrim and Down where they are stronger. Next year’s elections for the Assembly and local government, where there are fewer than 10 members of the united community group, and no left members (the PUP’s Dawn Purvis probably being the most left-wing MLA), will see more candidates representative of non-sectarian and progressive politics, but without much hope of success. Eamonn McCann would be in with a strong chance of taking a council seat if Derry, but I’m not sure if he will stand for the council, and if the reform of local government goes ahead, cutting the number of councils to 11, the left’s task would become even more difficult. If the candidates committed to the united community group maintain their seats, that would probably be a good result, although the TUV’s presence may make it some gains more likely. We’ll have a better sense of that after the election.
As for the mainstream, it’s an interesting election for several reasons. The scandals surrounding the DUP, the emergence of the TUV, and the Tory-Ulster Unionist alliance make this a much less predictable election for unionism than at any time since the 1970s. I highly recommend Splintered Sunrise’s Know Your Constituency series of posts, especially the one for North Antrim, where Ian Paisley’s seat may be lost by Ian Jr to the TUV leader Jim Allister. The Ulster Unionist Party, which for 50 years ran a one party-state in the north, is seriously faced with the possibility of having no MPs. Reg Empey may be in with a chance of unseating Willie McCrea in South Antrim, and they have some hopes for Trevor Ringland in East Belfast (Peter Robinson’s seat) and for Mike Nesbitt in Strangford (formerly Irish Robinson’s seat). The DUP, which cannot expect a repeat of its vote in 2005 due to the emergence of the TUV and increased signs of life in the UCUNF, will be seeking to hold all its seats while minimising the amount of voters who defect to the UUP and TUV. The UUP needs to win at least one seat, and beyond that will have an eye on consolidating for the Assembly elections. The TUV is pushing hard to take North Antrim, and to a lesser extent East Londonderry, where former UUP MP Willie Ross is battling the DUP’s Gregory Campbell, and again will have one eye on the Assembly elections.
The only nationalist seats in danger are those in Fermanagh/South Tyrone and South Belfast, which has raised the issue of electoral pacts once more. Although Gerry Kelly has been trying to talk up his chances in North Belfast, it is highly unlikely he can unseat the DUP’s Nigel Dodds, and I don’t really see any unionist seats being under threat from nationalists. His party’s joint priorities will be to hold on to Fermanagh/South Tyrone and to gain the most votes overall. The SDLP will be hoping to hold all three seats, with South Belfast the most difficult, and, as with the UUP, to gain back some ground across NI with the aim of securing their seats and possibly gaining in the next Assembly election.
So to stick my neck out, at a time where the balance of forces within unionism in particular might change, and make predictions. I think the SDLP will hold its three seats. I think the DUP will hold all its seats, though with sometimes greatly reduced majorities. South Antrim may fall to Reg Empey, but at the minute I think McCrea will narrowly hold on. It was a difficult seat for the DUP to win, and they have worked hard at trying to keep it, and the Tory link-up hasn’t had as transformative an impact as the UUP hoped. The TUV vote is again a difficult factor to judge, but I think their impact might be balanced by broadly pro-agreement unionists who shifted to the DUP between 2005 and 2007. Slyvia Hermon should hold North Down easily as an independent unionist. Which leaves us then with PSF. They should hold four out of their five seats easily. The vulnerable one is Fermanagh/South Tyrone, where I’m guessing that enough nationalists will be angry at the unionist pact to switch from the SDLP to push Gildernew over the top, and so save the seat for the incumbent. So basically, I’m predicting no change, apart from the UUP being wiped out by Herman’s resignation, which is the case now anyway. The predictions for South Antrim, South Belfast, and Fermanagh/South Tyrone are made without any great degree of confidence.
Whatever happens, this has been a bad election for the left, and a bad election for the prospect of removing sectarianism and creating what we now seem to be calling a shared future. Anybody who doubts that should have a look at the election manifestoes. With the exception of the SDLP, when it comes to the big four parties, the concept is conspicuous by its absence. What this election proves is the strategic necessity not only of left cooperation, but also that the left must be willing to work with those seeking to end communal politics, and create a new type of politics in NI based on commonality and active citizenship.
DUP Election Manifesto, SF Election Manifesto, SDLP Election Manifesto, UCUNF Election Manifesto, Alliance Manifesto, Green Party Manifesto, Eamonn McCann Manifesto
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
