Rule or Ruin 2

Last week I posted here on the attempt by paid officials of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and their new best Comrades ever in the Socialist Party (SPEW) to take over the grass roots North East Shop Stewards Network (NESSN) and turn it into one of their pointless “fronts”.

It seems that NESSN is seeing off this threat. Even though it now appears that there are two NESSN Facebook groups and that there has been the usual ultra left problem with their financial accountability!

Elected NESSN regional secretary Dave Harker reports “Some hopeless sectarians are seeking to rule or ruin NESSN, but they will fail, and there is no cause for alarm. However, comrades should note the following: …Hannah Walter (SPEW - grayee comment and emphasise) has removed Tony Dowling as an Administrator of the NESSN's original Facebook site. (I was removed a week or so ago.) The real NESSN Facebook site is now (here). This underlines the urgent need for an umbrella organisation like the real NESSN. In solidarity with those in solidarity with the Corus workers and all workers in struggle. Dave Harker, Regional Secretary, North East Shop Stewards' Network.

Minutes: NORTH EAST SHOP STEWARDS’ NETWORK
Committee: Geoff Abbott, Sue Abbott, Dave Ayre, Paul Baker, Ross Carbutt, Derek Cattell, Alan Docherty, Tony Dowling, Dave Harker, Peter Murray, Hannah Walter, Shirley Winter
Regional Secretary: nessnsec@googlemail.com or NESSN, c/o Newcastle TUC Building, 4 Cloth Market, Newcastle, NE1 1EE http://www.nessn.org.uk/

Minutes of the NESSN Committee meeting held in Darlington Town Hall on 2 December 2009
1. Present Alan Docherty, Dave Ayre, Dave Harker, Paul Baker, Ross Carbutt, Shirley Winter
2. Apologies Geoff Abbott, Sue Abbott, Peter Murray, Tony Dowling
Absent without an apology: Hannah Walter (grayee emphasise)
3. The Way Ahead
Dave Ayre was elected to the chair. He remarked that ‘there had been a crude attempt to undermine NESSN’ and that ‘the rest of the Committee deserve a handslap for leaving so much to the Secretaries’.
a) The Regional Secretary reported that several documents had been circulated to the Committee, but he had received no evidence to support any allegations made against him at the 19 November ordinary meeting.
It was AGREED that
(i) the NESSN Constitution includes the NSSN ‘Founding Basis’;
(i) only comrades with an elected lay union office can propose, second and vote on motions at any meeting, including the AGM;
(iii) only comrades with an elected lay union office can propose, second and stand for the Committee at the AGM;
(iv) the attempt to turn the 19 November meeting into an AGM and the ‘motion’ were unconstitutional;
(v) any meeting not called by the elected Regional Secretary is unconstitutional.
b) Alan Docherty tabled a document by Fran Heathcote (as a Socialist Party member) and Elaine Brunskill (as Socialist Party North Regional Secretary), and another from Alan Docherty and Tony Dowling in their personal capacities.
It was AGREED that since both documents were not sent to the Regional Secretary, as stipulated in the invitation to all Networkers, they were out of order.
c) Derek Cattell had thanked Alan Docherty for speaking to GMB stewards about NESSN.
It was AGREED that we invite Derek to join the Committee. (He subsequently accepted the invitation.)
d) Ross Carbutt had circulated a statement as Secretary of Tyne and Wear branch of the IWW. The IWW would seek to change NESSN policy at the AGM in spring 2010 and the event organised by Dave Douglass was a solo initiative.
It was AGREED that the event organised by Dave Douglass in spring 2010 could be advertised on the NESSN website.
e) The former (SPEW - grayee comment and emphasise) Treasurer, Hannah Walter, had been elected at the AGM in spring 2009 and resigned on 12 October 2009. She had not given the Acting Treasurer any documents until 19 November, and did not hand over the chequebook or paying in book. The Acting Treasurer had asked the Regional Secretary to stop the cheque book and spent hours trying to make sense of the incomplete data. The Committee was extremely concerned about his ‘Provisional Financial Record’.
It was AGREED to ask the Acting Treasurer to
(i) circulate a ‘Provisional Financial Report’ to all Networkers;
(ii) send Hannah Walter (SPEW grayee comment and emphasise) a list of queries about the missing documents, receipts, and so on; and (iii) report to the next Committee meeting.
f) Various proposals for future NESSN events were discussed.
g) The next meeting of the elected and co-opted members of the NESSN Committee will take place at 6.00-8.00pm on 13
January 2010, and the Tees Valley District Secretary was asked to book a room in Darlington Town Hall.

Hat-tip thingy Tynesider

Shotton Steel Works 1980: Teesside Cast Products 2010

The BBC headline is “1,700 jobs to go as Corus mothballs plant...Steelmaker Corus has confirmed it will curtail production at its Teesside Cast Products factory, putting 1,700 people out of work”.

Although there has been many thousands of job losses already announced in the last year or so and I am currently trying to argue against possible redundancies at my own employer, the prospect of a whole steel factory closing down immediately brings back very dark memories from my childhood.

In March 1980 I was 17 and I remember the devastation of my local community when the local steel works at Shotton was closed down with 6,500 jobs lost. The North-East Wales local economy was sent reeling. The misery was not helped by the closure of textile mills and the early 1980’s recession. At one point there was 33% local male unemployment. My parents were not employed at Shotton but most of my friends had one or more of their parents or older siblings working there. It was a desperate time for individual families and for the region. It took a long time to recover. These are the things that I remember the most from that really horrible time:-

While it would be somewhat unfair to say that that nothing was done by the Tories at the time to tackle mass unemployment but it was very little and totally inadequate. There was also no confidence or belief that the state could make a difference. Good people were simply left to rot on the dole. The Tories then (and now) fundamentally do not believe in interfering in the market. They thought (by and large) that mass unemployment was just a price worth paying and its real solution was pay cuts and job insecurity.

I joined the Labour Party in 1978 and I can remember clearly members arguing that it would not matter if the Labour government lost the next General Election – if fact it would do the Party "good" to have 4 or 5 years of opposition to revitalise itself. Even at the time I thought this attitude was rather weird?

It was self evidently not worth me leaving school to try find an apprenticeship (the only realistic expectation for male working class kids at the time) so I took the easier option to stay at school and take my A levels and then apply to university. The first member ever of my family to do so.

I hope and pray (agnostically of course) that the Steel unions and the local Teesside community can defeat this plan to mothball the plant. But if this does happen then let us hope that a Labour government is re-elected next year and not “do nothing” Tories who will ideologically condemn those unemployed steel workers to become a future lost generation. Not that this lets the current Labour government off the hook since many people will compare rightly or wrongly how it deals with this crisis with the massive intervention to save the banks.

Finally I looked at the "comments" on this local North East Wales BBC website about the Shotton closure and two things strike me. Firstly how many of the commentators have emigrated aboard since the plant closed and secondly the often heart breaking requests for further information from family members about how their fathers or husbands had been killed while at work.

(Picture of work at Shotton, mass meetings and going to lobby Parliament over closure. Many thanks to Col. Roi )

"Notes on Nationalism" George Orwell

There is a Facebook group that I am a “Fan” of called George Orwell. The group yesterday posted a link to his essay “Notes On Nationalism” which I don’t think I have ever read but found fasinating and would recommend. These are the first 3 paragraphs.

“Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.”

“Wreckers or Builders? A History of Labour MEPs 1979-1999”

I’ve just started reading this new book by fellow Newham Labour Party supporter and former MEP Anita Pollack. I met up with Anita and other Party members at conference this year and got this flyer which I meant to post months ago. It is amazing Politics that Labour used to be the Party fanatically opposed to a European Parliament (or practically anything to do with Europe) while it was the Tories who were its most enthusiastic supporters. How times change. Whatever you view of the role of Europe this should be a fascinating insider account.

Anita also use to work for Barbara Castle and was Chair of Manor Park ward when I gave them a talk here on the “Labour Movement and New Capitalism” in 2007. Here is a review of the book by David the Methodist Preacher blogger who was also a MEP colleague at the time. The ISBN number 978-0-9556202-9-4, and it is available for £20 from Turpin Distribution Services. (Free delivery in the EU) contact 01767 604 951 or email: custserv@turpin-distribution.com.

I have read a number of books recently that I haven’t quite got around to posting upon so I thought it was best to post this plug now.

Yorkshire and Chelsea Building Society merger

This morning I received notification from the Yorkshire Building Society (I have a saving account) that they are considering merging with Chelsea BS. Which I think is fair enough and good thing for the mutual sector. Since bringing together the 2nd and 5th biggest mutual societies together will help bring some competition to the Nationwide BS (by far the biggest) and help it compete with the private (and nationalised!) banks.

While I accept the recommendation of the directors that this merger is in the best interests of the Yorkshire BS I am less impressed with the “information sheet” supplied that failed to make clear that the driver for the merger is due to a series of recent major financial “difficulties” experienced by Chelsea BS. Check out this BBC report "In August, Chelsea reported that it had set aside £41m to cover to mortgage frauds, which helped push the society into a half-year loss of £26m... In 2008, it reported a loss of £39m, the largest recorded by a building society. It had to write off £44m, which was the bulk of its investments in two failed Icelandic banks. Chelsea also wrote off a further £15m after buying a mortgage broker in 2007 whose business subsequently collapsed in the credit crunch”.

I think it is really important that the mutual sector is open and honest with their savers and does not treat them as children who cannot be trusted with grown up information. Neither was there any mention of any possible impact of the merger on staff jobs. As savers and policy holders we are the “collective owners” of Yorkshire BS and we should be concerned about what will happen to them.

The mutual sector must be at all times and in all ways ethically better than the private sector. I hope that the “more detailed” information to be sent out later this month before the Special General Meeting will be up to speed on these points.

Still time to nominate the forces of light and reason in London UNISON.

In our London UNISON world the first big election test of 2010 is of course, next year’s UNISON London Regional Council AGM.

The 130,000 UNISON members in our region can send delegates via their branches to elect by secret ballot the Regional lay leadership - Regional Council Officers for the coming year.

There is also a number of other important regional committee members elected as well. Nominations close on 15 December 2009.

Rank and file delegates were able to wrestle control of the regional lay leadership away from the SWP/SPEW dominated Ultra Left 4 years ago and we have regained control at each AGM with increased majorities. The dream ticket for next February (IMO) is:-

Regional Convenor – Gloria Hanson (bottom right)

Deputy Convenor – Conroy Lawrence (bottom left)

Finance Convenor – John Gray (middle top)

Equalities Convenor – Monica Hirst (not showing)

Publicity Convenor – Lynn Bentley (top left)

Young Persons Convenor – Emma Rolland (top right)

Monica takes over from Gill Brown (top 3rd from left - who is a new NEC member) as our Equalities Convenor Candidate.

So why re-elect a Centre Left “sensible slate”?

Since the Region was brought back into members control Gloria and her team has helped increase membership; developed and trained more activists; organised effective regional campaigns on pay, equal pay, pensions and against privatisation; campaigned for equalities and against discrimination; and intensified work with members working for private companies and in the voluntary sector. The region is now built on solid foundations.

The coming year could present UNISON with many challenges. However, the Greater London Region is more than capable of organising to defend our members from future attacks but we need a solid leadership to do this. We need a team who:

- continue to return control of the union to its members

- strengthen support for branches and activists in undertaking the difficult task of supporting members at work

- put members first, keeping ultra left politics out of the union

- celebrate diversity, promote unity

- on real issues for real members, keep the union relevant

Please support Gloria and her team in carrying on with the work they started

The Ultra Left slate has been publicised widely by the usual suspects. However it seems some of their slate are now protesting that they are “independents” and they want nothing to do with those extremists. While at the same time I understand some of the true believers are horrified at the prospect of some of their “slate” and their “politics” (or lack of). Especially one of them who boasts of their very close relationship with full time officers? (personally I think that all activists should have good relationships with their full time officers?).

Murky waters indeed!

A close UL mole has even suggested to me that some of their slate are only standing for some sort of “a laugh”. Whatever that means?

I do look forward to next year’s Regional Council AGM which I always enjoy but I hope for the sake of the union that we will not again have the ultra left minority indulging in their usual aggressive, bullying and threatening behaviour while trying to shout down anyone who opposes them.

Of course such conduct wins us loads of votes but we would always rather have a dignified and reasoned debate. But I doubt very much this will happen. Never mind - roll on next Feb!

"The more he talks, the less he says"

Brown on Cameron: Check out that PM Question time on Wednesday 2 Dec. Hat-tip thingy Dan McCurry.

Labour Party Social brings Political Cheer

Last night I attended my first 2009 Christmas Social. The Labour Party is traditionally very hospitable at this time of year and keen to celebrate the season while amongst comrades while at the same time raising funds for the good fight ahead.

The event was in the Vicarage Lane Community centre, Stratford and members from West Ham, Stratford & Newtown and Plaistow North ward met up to share company, conversation, food, wine and raffles. Our MP Lyn Brown was there (third from right photo). I won a bottle of Port which was great timing for Christmas. We raised £144 for the West Ham CLP campaign fund.

The mood was politically pretty good as well. People feel that at long last things are moving nationally our way - slowly but surely. One or two swallows don’t make a summer but the opinion polls are turning. The Tories are also being seen to panic as they realise that their expected shoo in ain’t going to happen. Cameron got well hammered by Gordon Brown at PM Question Time this week.

This will happen we think since the Emperor does not have any clothes; the Tories have been barking up the wrong economic tree and the Great, British public are finally beginning to “get it”. A Road-Runner moment as people begin to consider what a Tory government would really mean. As Lyn said “Game On” for the general election.

Sack the RBS Board!

I've just struck a blow for shareholding democracy by joining the Facebook group "RSB Directors Resign NOW".

Those (w)bankers on the Board of the bankrupt bank RBS which we as tax payers own say they will resign en mass if the Govt stops them paying out £1.5BN to their greedy banker chums.

We say as shareholders what are you waiting for?
GO NOW!!

Which I thought all sounded a little "sell out reformist" so I'm thinking of forming a group called "Sack the RBS Board". Which will no doubt make all the bastions of capitalism tremble.

Seriously I think that the government should hold firm and not submit to crude blackmail by the RBS Board and if necessary accept their resignation and replace them with people who realise that times have changed and things have moved on.

After all, we are the 84% masters now...

TUC asked by Gov to Sack Millionaire Banker Paymasters!

I could not resist this headline – but check out the excellent TUC blog Touchstone and Nigel Stanley’s post on Lord Myners speech to the Lords today

Who said “I would estimate that at least 5,000 people working in the banking industry in the UK will receive, if nothing is done, remuneration in excess of GBP1 million this year.

I think the real responsibility here must lie with the shareholders. Accordingly I have written to the National Association of Pension Funds, the CBI and the TUC urging them to use their influence to persuade trustees to ask their fund mangers: ‘What are you doing to stop these quite unreasonable and unjustified levels of remuneration?’

The decisions about bonuses are going to be made over the next six to eight weeks and it is important our major institutions engage now with the companies and say that ‘we will not support grotesque payments and if you persist in paying them we will exercise our votes to remove from the board the people who authorised them’.

Rock on Lord Myners! By co-incidence I am currently writing up my report on my latest Local Government Pension Scheme Panel and Pension committee meeting. I wish Lord Myners had said this beforehand. It would have been interesting to raise the question with our fund managers. I suppose we need to write to our Panel and Committee chairs? Will ask UNISON Capital Stewardship unit for advice methinks? Colin?