Second of LLI’s series of meetings seeking to link the Labour left with labour-movement and left campaigns: Saturday 18 December, 4:30pm to 6pm.

Zoomlink https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89987346975 or http://bit.ly/lli-hsc

Speakers include:

• Becky Talbot, March With Midwives https://www.facebook.com/groups/463781921584006

• John Puntis, Keep our NHS Public https://keepournhspublic.com/

• Alison Treacher, Care and Support Workers Organise (CasWO!) https://twitter.com/CaSWO_

• Edd Mustill, NHS Workers Say No! (Edd writes: some background to the [NHS pay] campaign and some personal views on where we should be going next: https://medium.com/@ourcommonendeavour/the-nhs-pay-campaign-where-we-are-and-where-we-need-to-go-5ebe1359587a)

NHS waiting lists were at 5.8 million in mid-November, before winter really started and before Omicron. Part of the reason is Covid impacts, but the defining fact is that the public health grant has been cut by 24% on a real-terms per capita basis since 2015/16: https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infographics/why-greater-investment-in-the-public-health-grant-should-be-a-priorityAt the same time incremental privatisation of the NHS – conversion of large parts of it to a public “logo” and commissioner of private services – has increased, and the Health and Social Care Bill currently in Parliament seeks to push that process further: https://www.the-pda.org/health-campaigns-together-briefing-on-the-health-and-social-care-bill/

The government’s proposals for social care will mean increased costs for many poorer families: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/18/six-in-10-elderly-care-users-in-england-set-to-lose-out-from-costs-cap

They will leave untouched the long-term privatisation and subordination to profit of social care: https://lowdownnhs.info/analysis/long-read/the-history-of-privatisation-second-in-a-series-by-john-lister/

Both NHS workers and care workers face huge staff shortages and squeezes on their real wages. Over 100,000 job vacancies are unfilled in social care https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/adult-social-care-workforce-data/Workforce-intelligence/publications/national-information/The-state-of-the-adult-social-care-sector-and-workforce-in-England.aspx and the median hourly pay for care workers is only pennies above the legal minimum wage https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/adult-social-care-workforce-data/Workforce-intelligence/publications/Topics/Pay-rates.aspx. The official NHS job vacancy count was 94,000 in June 2021 https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey/april-2015—june-2021-experimental-statistics, and NHS real wages are well below what they were in 2010 https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/chart-of-the-week-real-terms-nhs-staff-pay-from-2010-to-2020

The Police Bill has now completed its process in the House of Lords, with new amendments added by the government. It will return to the Commons in January 2022.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill poses a dire threat to the right to protest and campaign, including the rights of workers and trade unions; to human rights in the criminal justice system; and to people suffering discrimination and oppression, particularly Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

The new amendments from the government would bring in jail sentences of up to 51 weeks for offences like obstructing a highway. These are aimed at environmental protesters, and could also hit trade-union battles.

This bill sits alongside a raft of other authoritarian, anti-democratic legislation – on the right to vote, immigration, judicial reviews – and threats to even further restrict the right to strike.

The Bill will be returning to the House of Commons in January 2022. The labour movement must speak up vocally and mobilise its weight to defeat or at least mitigate it. We resolve to promote and mobilise for protests against this bill.

We call for withdrawal of the Bill and for repeal of other earlier restrictions on the right to protest, including all anti-trade union laws.

We call on the trade union and Labour Party leaderships to speak out, sound the alarm and call people onto the streets.

If the bill passes we call for unions and Labour Parties to stand in solidarity with those prosecuted and to help fund legal defences.

Activists supporting the Sheffield couriers’ strike have sent us this model motion:

This branch/CLP

NOTES
1) The JustEat couriers in Sheffield, who are organised in the IWGB, have faced a 24% pay cut from 6 December on most of the deliveries they do

2) The couriers have been striking from 6 December, with the strikes spreading to other towns such as Chesterfield

RESOLVE

1) To advertise our support for this strike
2) To make a donation of £___  to the IWGB Couriers and Logistics Branch strike fund
3) To invite a speaker from the campaign to a future meeting

• Donations via https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/strike-hardship-fund-iwgb-couriers-logistics-branch

By Julie Ward

On Tuesday 23 November, the day before 27 people drowned in the English Channel trying to reach the UK, Priti Patel announced the official opening of Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) in County Durham, a new women-only facility intended to replace the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre near Bedford.

The new facility in Medomsley, near the town of Consett, was formerly Medomsley Detention Centre (for boys) and was the site of historic abuse carried out over decades before closing in 1988. Five former officers have already been jailed for their part in the abuse with many more thought to have been involved in what was probably an organised paedophile ring. The authorities have ruled that anyone incarcerated in the centre during the period in question is eligible for compensation without the need to go through a long, drawn out, painful legal process. This is a huge acknowledgement of institutional failure also replicated elsewhere in the system.

In 1999, the centre re-opened as Hassockfield Secure Training Centre but despite the name-change the facility failed to shake off its reputation as a place of inhumanity. Adam Rickwood, aged 14 from Burnley, took his own life there in 2004. The Training Centre, which was run by Serco, eventually closed in 2015.

In the intervening years the local council considered how best to use the site, mindful of the stigma associated with it. Plans for a housing development and a pocket park were progressing but in January 2021 the Home Office announced it would instead be repurposing the site as an IRC for women failed asylum seekers. This centre was to be called Hassockfield – hence the “No to Hassockfield” campaign – but was recently renamed “Derwentside IRC”.

This development was trumpeted by the local Tory MP Richard Holden as a great deal for the local economy bringing much-needed jobs to the area. Holden had won the NW Durham “Red Wall” seat in the 2019 General Election, depriving Laura Pidcock of her seat in the House of Commons.

Holden’s hardline anti-migrant rhetoric sees him continually misleading constituents, describing asylum seekers as illegals and foreign criminals. Whilst it is true that some asylum seekers do have previous convictions they are often for very minor transgressions and are already spent. In these cases locking people up whilst they are still in the process of seeking asylum is a double punishment and goes against human rights norms.

In fact, the UK is the only country in the 47 member state Council of Europe that practises indefinite detention whereby people seeking sanctuary are held for months if not years not knowing when their nightmare will end, if they will eventually be given leave to remain or whether they will taken in the middle of the night to be deported. Lord Alf Dubs, who was himself a child refugee brought to England on the Kindertransport, counters the rhetoric of Holden and others by reaffirming that “no one is illegal”.

The contract to run the Derwentside IRC has been given to Mitie whose appalling record on workers’ rights in places such as Heathrow and Sellafield has led to strong retaliatory actions by Unite the Union. Mitie job adverts for custodial posts at the IRC have been used as source material by the NE Feminist Theatre Lab in their ‘Newspaper Theatre’ work along with testimonies of former employees and those with lived experience of detention, to expose the culture of racism and bullying within the company.

Mitie is one of the companies to profit from the pandemic being given huge government contracts for covid testing sites and quarantine hotel security. However, one of its biggest contracts involves running immigration detention centres. In 2018, the firm won what was believed to be the biggest ever immigration detention contract in the UK after sealing a deal of more than £500m. This included the running of Colnbrook removal centre in Heathrow, where the most recent inspection reports said it ran dirty facilities with poor record-keeping.

Tory peer Philippa Roe, or Baroness Couttie, sits on Mitie’s board, and was given a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2017. A party whip in the upper chamber, she was Conservative leader of Westminster Council between 2012 and 2017. Conservative peer Baroness McGregor-Smith, who is currently president of the British Chamber of Commerce and a non-executive board member of the Department for Education, was CEO of Mitie for almost a decade. Accusations of cronyism abound and it is easy to see why.

Since learning of the government plans local people have mounted a vigorous campaign against the new IRC, working across political lines and with faith communities, trade unions, academics, students and the local arts community. We have worked closely with Durham People’s Assembly Against Austerity, Abolish Detention and Women For Refugee Women. Regular monthly demonstrations have been held at the site with a range of speakers including people with lived experience of detention along with local artists and performers.

On 4 December campaigners organised a National Demonstration in the Consett town centre, attracting several hundred people. Meanwhile there was a Solidarity Action in Hyde Park.

On Thursday 25 November I had addressed the crowds who had gathered for a vigil outside the Home Office for those who had perished trying to cross the Channel. I urged campaigners in the capital to join the protests against the facility, either in person or online, to join up the dots regarding the ongoing ‘hostile environment’ and to recognise the common struggle that we must all embrace in the face of a cruel Tory government who are complicit in the deaths of people seeking sanctuary, including women and children.

At the same time as Priti Patel was making her announcement in Westminster on 23 November Tom Pursglove MP, Minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration, was being given a tour of the refurbished centre in Durham. It’s useful to note that prior to becoming a MP in 2015 Pursglove worked for hard Brexiteers Chris Heaton-Harris and Peter Bone. He was a founder of Grassroots Out which saw him working alongside Nigel Farage and other right wing populists to win the referendum campaign which has subsequently seen the country slide further into highly distasteful migrant bashing.

Mary Foy, Labour MP for Durham City, has commented, “The Home Office, and the Conservative Party, continue to use the plight of refugees for political point scoring – something to wheel out to show that they are ‘tough on immigration’. But what are they actually being tough on? Because the reality is the people who will be punished will be victims of torture, of rape, and of other gendered violence.”

The opening of Derwentside IRC is the epitome of an inhumane Tory government who have assumed Nigel Farage’s clothes and lost their moral compass. Women asylum seekers are amongst the most vulnerable people in our society and they deserve our attention.

• Julie is a No to Hassockfield campaigner and former Labour MEP for the North West of England.
• Find out more and support the campaign: notohassockfield.org.uk

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Reposted from https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2021-12-08/hundreds-protest-against-immigration-detention-north-east

According to LabourList, the Labour National Executive Committee (NEC) plans to push through the “trigger ballots” on sitting MPs (to decide whether they are confirmed as candidates for next time without demur, or face contest) by June 2022, and have all candidates selected by March 2023.

Given that many constituency Labour Parties have been preoccupied with local government selections recently, and will be preoccupied with local government elections in March-May, that means rushing through those “trigger ballots” very fast.

The Boundary Commission is due to announce new parliamentary constituency allocations by mid-2023. The changes will probably benefit the Tories, so there is strong incentive for the Tories to wait until after mid-2023 for the next general election.

But, reports Labour List, “the NEC [National Executive Committee] is set to draw up a formula for how candidates confirmed or selected in 2022 are allocated to new seats” after mid-2023, instead of the new boundaries triggering new selections, as happens with local government wards.

In July 2020, the Forward Momentum slate won the Momentum NCG elections and promised to “rebuild our organisation from the ground up”.

That was always going to be difficult. The winter 2020-1 Covid wave depressed activity. A lot of left-wing activists have scaled down activity, or dropped, from despair after the December 2019 election result, or disgust at Keir Starmer’s push to the right after he got elected leader on leftish promises and the ever-rolling succession of suspensions and expulsions.

Yet fewer left-wingers might have become inactive if they had seen Momentum doing effective work. Lockdown has been lifted sufficiently for street protests to multiply, a little surge of strikes to develop, and even an in-person Labour Party conference to be held, with a number of left-wing victories in policy votes.

And in mid-2020 Momentum was reported as having 20 paid staff. We at LLI have no paid staff: in fact all our committee do their LLI work alongside a lot of other labour movement tasks on top of day jobs. Momentum’s funds and staff give it a great advantage over other Labour left groups today and indeed over the Labour Party’s entire history.

As we understand it, Momentum’s paid-up membership has shrunk from a peak of 45,000 to 20,000. But 20,000 is still a lot.

What has been done in the way of “rebuilding from the ground up”? The Momentum Twitter account has recently given good coverage to the Sheffield couriers’ dispute and the UCU dispute. That’s good, though realistically no more than a keen keyboard warrior could do in their spare time.

Momentum had some presence at the Labour Party conference, but really less than LLI (with our much smaller material resources), and almost all focused on the rule-changes. Momentum even had an explicit policy there (decided by whom?) of “no position” on all the numerous and significant moves to refer back sections of the National Policy Forum report.

Momentum NCG minutes are posted on the Momentum website only with long and variable delays (the last ones available there are from 6 September). They are usually uninformative (lots of stuff on the lines of “X noted Y”), but they don’t look like the NCG has ever much discussed this “rebuilding from the ground up” business.

Some localities have seen interventions from the Momentum office apparently designed to help them rebuild, but few of them, as far we can see, effective.

We don’t have enough reach to give an overview, and maybe someone can give us information which changes the picture. But here are some examples of what we do now.

In Broxtowe, near Nottingham, an active Momentum group was rebuilt, precariously but rebuilt, over summer 2021. Recently all its members got messages saying that their group must merge into the Nottinghamshire group (a less active group, though covering a much bigger area). The Broxtowe people shrugged and went along with it, but the merger meeting was tiny. The Nottinghamshire Momentum Facebook page is updated occasionally, but advertises no meetings or activities.

Momentum in Leeds has revived a bit this year – it called a meeting on Right to Food on 2 November, it took a banner on the Leeds COP26 protest on 6 November – but little thanks to the Momentum office. And, as we understand, it has run into difficulties recently.

On the London COP26 protest, Momentum seemed to have “outsourced” its contingent to Camden Momentum, and it was small.

Southampton Momentum was one of the biggest and liveliest Momentum groups. Its meetings are now just a handful.
Momentum outsourced its bloc on London COP26 protest to Camden Momentum, and it was small.

Camden Momentum used to be a large, though maverick, group. It has someone who updates its Facebook page, but no indication on that page of it holding meetings.

Southwark Momentum was also large. Again, it has someone who updates its Facebook page, but no indication of meetings.

Sheffield Momentum was once large. It fell apart in 2019 and 2020 through internal conflicts (not the fault of the national office). We can find no sign of significant revival.

Lewisham Momentum was once a busy, active, pluralistic group. In 2018 a Stalinist-led group organised a split, and its splinter “Momentum” was immediately recognised by the national office. It had not much activity then, but some. Now its Facebook page shows only two posts (those “shares” from elsewhere, rather than its own posts) since November 2020.

Maybe other Momentum groups are doing better. In fact, there surely must be some that are doing better. But “rebuilding from the ground up” seems to have regressed rather than advanced since July 2020.

Labour Left Internationalists has today, 4 December, sent the letter below to the Momentum NCG.

I’m writing to the Momentum NCG on behalf of Labour Left Internationalists (formerly Momentum Internationalists: the change in name is designed to signal a broadening of our activity, and not any move to stop supporting or participating in Momentum).
First, I’d like to express our thanks and appreciation for the publicity which the Momentum Twitter account has given to the Sheffield couriers’ dispute, which a number of LLI activists are involved in.
Second, though, we want to ask what has happened to the process announced for developing new democratic structures in Momentum.
According to the schedule published earlier this year, final proposals should be going to the Momentum NCG today. But as far as we have been able to find out, earlier stages of that process (the 26 September and 24 October deadlines) have vanished.
We’ve consulted the NCG minutes on the Momentum website, but the most recent minutes there are from 5 September. Understandably, they are mainly about Momentum activity at Labour Party conference. There’s no mention of any change of plan or postponement of the schedule for developing new democratic structures.
Please let us, and other Momentum members, know about this.
Thanks, Martin Thomas
Below is the schedule published earlier this year:
September 26: interim proposal published. 4 week window for local groups, affiliates and individual members to submit amendments (closing October 24)

October 24: Assemblies meet, discuss, factor in feedback and amendments, and prepare final proposals over a 3 week period

November: Assemblies present proposals to the NCG at a special mid-November meeting, opening up a 3 week period for the NCG to suggest amendments or prepare counter proposals to go to an all-member ballot. The Assemblies must meet once to consider any amendments from the NCG

December 4: Final proposals are presented by the Momentum Assemblies to the NCG for consideration at the December 4 meeting. The proposals will be approved for an all-member ballot

December: all member ballot

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PS [6 December] – After inquiries by one of us on the Momentum Slack, we have some info:

Circulated by the Labour Campaign for Council Housing

This CLP welcomes the housing composite resolution passed at the Labour Party Conference which included the main demands of the Labour Campaign for Council Housing. It called on the Labour Party to “demand that the government takes action now to end the housing crisis by”

➢ Fully funding councils to deliver the building of 150,000 social rent homes each year, including 100,000 council homes

➢ Ending Right to Buy

➢ Reviewing council housing debt to address underfunding of housing revenue accounts

➢ Fund the retro-fitting of council housing to cut greenhouse gases, provide jobs and promote a shift from outsourcing to Direct Labour Organisations

➢ Ending Section 21 (no fault) evictions

It also said: “Conference also calls upon Labour to place these actions at the centre of its housing policies.”

The passing of the composite resolution needs to be a launching pad for campaigning activity. We therefore

➢ Call on the Party nationally to implement the composite resolution as a matter of urgency.

➢ Call on our Labour Group to propose that our council declares a housing emergency to campaign for those key demands. This may include lobbying local MPs, the Local Government Association and other organisations, working with tenant groups and trades unions.

The CLP agrees to affiliate to the Labour Campaign for Council Housing.