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London Labour Party conference passed this motion from the Communication Workers’ Union. Below is the speech for the motion given by the CWU’s Maria Exall.

Particularly given the Labour right took control of the London Labour board, it will take a fight for this and other left-wing demands to be acknowledged, yet alone campaigned for.

CLP section 150 for the motion, 5 against, 6 abstentions
Affiliates section 51 for, 0 against, 1 abstention

This Regional Conference notes the necessity of broadband services during the COVID pandemic. The ‘digital divide’ has meant that many working class children in London have been denied equal access to necessary IT services and equipment which has affected their learning and their opportunities to connect with others during lockdowns. We also note that many poorer and more vulnerable adults in London are also denied the services they need to access everything from Government services and benefits to online shopping.

We call on the GLA and Local Authorities to support widening access for London children and adults to telecoms services and IT. We believe that Labour Local Government should invest in services that can help tackle the digital divide, aid community cohesion and help overcome inequalities.

We recognise that telecommunication is an essential service for citizens in London and welcome the 2019 Labour Manifesto commitment to public ownership and democratic control of broadband infrastructure. We aspire to a capital City which provides free broadband for all.

***

Maria Exall’s speech

The CWU has long raised the problem of a growing digital divide. Here in London this divide restricts local economic development and makes worse existing social inequalities. The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the urgent need for universal access to broadband services. But the UK is on course to miss its latest target for the roll-out of full-fibre broadband by 2025.

Only a publicly funded, owned and accountable service will get the job done and boost other public services and the wider economy. Public investment and ownership is necessary as after nearly 40 years privatisation has failed to deliver services worthy of a leading capital City. In the end it is public ownership and democratic control that can improve the quality of services in our region and within our local communities as we build back from the pandemic.

But the current remit for telecoms regulation is a competitive market model that leads to downward pressure on pay and conditions for us as workers in the industry and mega profits for the leading companies in the sector, BT, VM, Sky.

The major telecoms firms divvy up the spoils for their shareholders rather than invest and develop the services that we as local residents need. They use outsourcing and casualised labour with all that implies. They cut costs which means site closures in London, with permanent skilled jobs exported to other parts of the UK and abroad. At present we in the CWU are fighting to keep highly skilled BT jobs in London. It is wrong that one day you are a key worker the next you are made redundant.

Conference, it could all be so different.

We could be freeing up the real potential of new technologies to tackle class inequality, prioritising improving access for those isolated and vulnerable and bring our communities closer together; to build a new collectivity for the 21^st century.

We could have job security and quality training for the next generation of telecoms workers in London.

We could be using technologies to deal with local environmental concerns. Digital inclusion is necessary for a just future.

During the pandemic Labour Councils have done their best to facilitate the provision of both computer hardware and connectivity to the internet to assist school children and young people with remote learning. But much more fundamental change is needed.

Everyone is entitled to high speed access and IT equipment that allows them to work and learn from home, connect with others in their communities and access vital local services.

It is the right time to restate the Labour Party’s pledge for publicly owned free full-fibre broadband.

Please support our motion.

Telecoms is an essential service and it should be a public utility run for the common good.

By Martin Thomas

The Labour Party leadership have drafted the “skeleton” of a new complaints procedure and indicated that they want rule changes at the conference in September.

Cases to do with sexism, racism, antisemitism etc. will go to National Executive Committee (NEC) panels, and appeals to a new Appeal Board, replacing the National Constitutional Committee (NCC), and appointed, not elected: four lawyers, four HR people, four appointed party members.

This is a response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) calling for an independent procedure. It looks like the EHRC has ok’d it.

Less independence

But it makes the General Secretary the manager of prosecutions and of the appointment of judges. It makes disciplinary procedures less independent of the Leader’s Office and the General Secretary than they were before. And it’s not clear when people would have a right to appeal, even to the new appointed Appeals Board.

There are no rules or guidance about proportionality of sanctions to offences, so the machinery can still expel some people for minor offences while leaving others unscathed or only reprimanded.

Even where the rule is fairly clear-cut, as in prohibiting support for anti-Labour candidates in elections, there is a lot that is arbitrary in the rulebook. A number of people were excluded in 2015-6 because they had recently opposed the Labour Party electorally. Or rather, because they had done that and lost. If they had won and then sought to cross the floor, they would have been accepted straight off.

The rules most used for exclusions are even more arbitrary. You can be excluded for association with any political group other than an official Labour one, so in principle anyone could be expelled for supporting Friends of the Earth, or CND… or Progress (and with “support” defined vaguely). There’s no defence, there’s no appeal.

Multiple channels for exclusion

So the Labour Party is developing a series of channels for exclusions. There’s the new complaints procedure, for cases involving “protected characteristics”. Then a second channel is set up by the new bans, for auto-exclusions to be done in bulk and at speed.

A third channel: the new ban doesn’t supersede the old blanket power to auto-exclude anyone associated with any group other than an “official Labour” one. Two Socialist Appeal people were recently excluded under that old blanket power, even before the new bans.

Channel four is indefinite suspensions: hundreds of people suspended, often without clear charges, for long periods, and with a warning that talking publicly about their suspension will be considered a disciplinary case.

Ann Black, a member of the NEC who voted for three of the bans and abstained on Socialist Appeal, reports “nearly 100 members still suspended after more than 18 months… more than 1000 complaints… unresolved”.

And the fifth channel, presumably, is a disciplinary process for charges not to do with racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc., and not subject to “auto-exclusion”, plain old misbehaviour like mishandling party funds.

The big issue here straightforward bullying and cheating by full time officers. There remains pretty much no way to deal with that. On the contrary, we’re beginning to get to the position where we cannot discuss the performance of Labour Party staff because it’s subject to a staff agreement.

There is a current rulebook provision for Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) to initiate disciplinary cases, but it is not really workable, and in practice is not used. Remedies for straightforward rule breaking, ability to hold full time staff to account, and right of fair treatment for members, are non-existent.

Around the same time we’ve heard that the Labour Party is proposing to make redundant a quarter of its staff and employ dozens of agency workers to process complaints.

How are the agency staff trained? Who is accountable for the work? Who owns the agency? Who’s making a profit on this?

There is no review process for the handling of complaints and nothing that we have seen has anything has tried to remedy that lack. When the staff make a decision to prosecute, no-one knows if it’s fair.

The EHRC discovered that in the 70 cases that they looked at, as a sample, a significant number had no documentation, no records of the interviews…

No to court cases

As a matter of political approach, we’re against taking the Labour Party to court. We want to resolve issues within the party. Others will think differently; but even on practical grounds their prospects are poor.

There was a court case about unjust procedures recently taken by a number of people who had been either suspended or accused of antisemitism. Fundamentally, they lost. That will give the Labour Party leadership massive confidence that the bars for action to be defined as capricious, perverse or arbitrary or irrational are exceedingly high.

A court permitted Iain McNicol (general secretary 2011-18) to kick 125,000 members out of the 2016 leadership election. In 2016 a Socialist Appeal supporter, Jack Halinski-Fitzpatrick, raised £10,000 to get an injunction against his suspension, and he lost.

Sadly, we missed chances to change things in the Corbyn era: a rule change to delete the “auto-exclusion” clause, for example, was defeated after getting no support from the party leadership and the scrappiest of debates. The Labour Party’s unfair procedures with rule changes will make the pushback a long battle.

CLPs can get rule changes considered only after long delays, and often have their proposals ruled out of order capriciously. The NEC has the power, and often uses it, to push through large rule changes at conference with only a few days’ or hours’ previous notice.

It’s a long battle, part of the bigger long battle to transform the labour movement into a force capable of winning socialism.

Since the military coup that took place in Myanmar in February of this year, the workers’ movement in that country has been leading a fight for democracy. 

The trade union movement in Myanmar has burgeoned since 2011, when the semi-military government first relaxed anti-trade union laws. The result has been a decade of strikes and organisation, centred in the garment factories of Yangon. Now, those organisations are fighting to end the coup government.

Since May, repression against trade union activists in Myanmar has become extremely intense. In the industrial districts of Yangon, many trade unionists have been forced into hiding. Being a trade union militant in Myanmar is now extremely dangerous.

The trade unions of Myanmar are now demanding that international firms break off all economic contact with the country, in order to put maximum pressure on the Tatmadaw military regime. This means western garment companies should stop placing orders with factories in Myanmar.

Over the next two weeks, Momentum Internationalists will start holding street actions aimed at raising public awareness of these demands and increasing pressure on clothing companies and other chains to support this call from the Myanmar trade unions. We will also be supporting a fundraising drive: http://bit.ly/Myanmarfund

Download our latest leaflet below.

Labour Party conference 2021 will take place in person from 25 to 29 September in Brighton. This will be an important point for the left of the labour movement to regroup and halt its retreat and dissipation. Probably the most important aspect of that political regrouping will be around motions and policy. Socialists in Labour should look here for a list of motions to support.

Starmer won his election as Labour Party leader with 60% of the vote in 2020. This was an indicator of how badly the Corbyn project had been discredited – Corbyn’s chosen successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, failed to get even a fraction of the vote share that Corbyn received in 2015 and 2016. But Starmer was elected on the basis of a manifesto that promised a continuation of at least part of Corbyn’s left-wing political platform, just independent of the widely (and rightly) mistrusted chiefs of staff in Corbyn’s leader’s office; Murray, Milne and Murphy.

Since his election, Starmer has shifted substantially to the right, reverting to the Miliband-era tactic of agreeing with the government on the fundamentals and offering small, qualified criticisms here and there – a “small target” strategy that avoids doing anything bold, decisive, or setting out an alternative agenda – and shored up his authority by picking fights with the pro-Corbyn left through high-profile disciplinary measures. Most recently, that office-led fight on the left has been stepped up with an NEC decision to proscribe Socialist Appeal and other pro-Corbyn groupings.

Left-wing policies winning out at conference would be a signal to the rest of the movement that the Labour left has not gone away. It would provide a boost to attempts to re-organise the Labour left more broadly.

In particular, the politics of the internationalist left need to be re-asserted, against any and all accommodation to Johnson’s Brexit nationalism and anti-migrant demagogy; and for a vision of working-class, socialist internationalism, rather than the Blairite internationalism of NATO and global capitalist institutions.

In terms of nominations for the Conference Arrangement Committee, we are backing Seema Chandwani (L1187007) and Billy Hayes (A065571) and for the National Constitutional Committee we are backing Rheian Davies (L1443442), Anna Dyer (L0081865), Annabelle Harle (A002070) and Emine Ibrahim (L0150489). These are the consensus candidates being supported by Momentum and the wider Labour left. In our view several of these individuals represent some of the worst politics on the Labour left, being involved with the disastrous Haringey “Momentum Council”, or promoting anti-trans politics, or engaging in absurd anti-communist agitation against Workers’ Liberty. But in the absence of better left candidates, it is better that they beat the right wingers.

Momentum Internationalists will be seeking to organise support for the politics of socialist internationalism at this conference. It will be backing the following motions:

1) Build Back Fairer – a motion setting out a programme of demands on how society should be rebuilt after the pandemic, in the interests of the working-class majority.

2) China, Hong Kong and the Uyghurs – a motion expressing solidarity with the Hong Kong democracy movement and the struggle of the Uyghur people against repression and genocide; and taking a position against Cold-War rhetoric from western powers

3) Global climate justice – a motion setting out what the labour movement should be demanding in terms of a serious and socially-just response to climate change

4) Migrants welcome: end deportations and the racist Hostile Environment – a motion from the Labour Campaign for Free Movement 

5) A motion from the Free Our Unions campaign entitled “Unshackling workers from draconian anti-trade union laws”6) A motion on racism and policing, setting out demands around addressing the unaccountable and racist nature of policing in the UK and putting forward a programme for cutting the social roots of racism and discrimination.

By Alice Hazel

It looks like the government’s pay “award” for NHS workers will be 3%. Maybe only 1.5% will be a basic ongoing increase, and the other 1.5% a one-off payment.

This falls way below all the claims the unions put into the Pay Review Body.

Three per cent does nothing to address the real-terms pay cuts faced by NHS workers over the last 10 years, or the 100,000 vacancies that are taking many workers to breaking point and crippling NHS services.

After a more than a year of extraordinary effort and current escalating pressures NHS workers will feel this as a body blow. The government are confirming, what many NHS workers knew, the applause piled on NHS workers by politicians at the height of lockdown was complete hypocrisy.

The Tories have tried to convince us that this has been a collective sacrifice across society, but that is a lie. Those who already had extreme wealth and were in a position to benefit from the emergency have thrived. Inequality has risen.

The wealth is available to pay for a recovery that includes massive funds allocated to public services, including well-supported healthcare. The government can make the political decision to tax the rich, to invest in the NHS, including the 15% pay rise for NHS workers demanded by rank-and-file NHS workers’ groups since mid-2020. They can do that. But they won’t without a fight from NHS workers.

Activists will organise local protests to re-raise the demand for 15%.

We will also call on our trade unions to make an immediate stand — rejecting this pay award and moving quickly to ballots for industrial action, with firm commitments from the union leaderships to reject and organise.

The Royal College of Nursing, a conservative union relatively strong among nurses (and with a combative minority within it), has declared that it will require majorities in three successive ballots before strikes. That is a plan to derail any chance of action. Members of trade unions should demand formal industrial action ballots by then end of the summer at the latest.

We don’t want to take action just as a release from frustration. We want to win decent pay and save the NHS from Tory privatisation.

That means a campaign that involves strike action, co-ordination across the health trade unions, building solidarity in the labour movement and across our communities. Within the big unions — RCN and Unison — we should be calling for disaggregated ballots to give us the best chance of reaching the trade union legislation thresholds. Winning ballots in as many workplaces as possible will give us the possibility of nationally co-ordinated action which can escalate with time.

We need to act quickly. Without pressure from below the unions won’t mount a serious fight. As many in the NHS have said: “if we can’t fight now, then when will we?”

By Dan Davison

Recently, the Democratic Socialists of America International Committee (DSA IC) sent a delegation to Caracas, Venezuela. From 21 June to 1 July, they attended the Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples and related events. The Congress was essentially a propaganda tool for the Venezuelan government. It was launched by President Nicolás Maduro himself and one of its explicit objectives was “to express support for the Bolivarian Revolution”.

There is certainly a pressing need for international solidarity with the Venezuelan working class. Economic and political crises have left the country in a dire state. The minimum monthly wage is now 10 million bolívares, which at the current exchange rate is the equivalent of only 3.54 USD. The Covid-19 testing and vaccination rate has been slow, and the government has misreported the death toll: as of 14 June, they registered only 2,764 deaths, but have been routinely omitting patients who were not tested or whose results did not arrive on time. 

Widespread malnutrition and a collapsing healthcare system have increased infant mortality and deaths in childbirth. Gang warfare has escalated in Caracas neighbourhoods, with the police and military so miserably failing to reestablish control that they showed false photographs of confiscated weapons that were actually taken in Bolivia. More than 6 million Venezuelans have fled the country since Maduro took office in 2013.

However, the DSA IC’s understanding of “solidarity with the Venezuelan working class” is “support for the Venezuelan government”. Sometimes this is based on the Maduro regime’s ostensible socialism; other times it is purely negative anti-imperialism (i.e., “Maduro is against American imperialism, ergo we should back Maduro”. I have heard at least one person analogise the situation to critically supporting a bureaucratic trade union against the bosses. Perhaps intentionally, this is the exact analogy that certain orthodox Trotskyists used for the Stalinist USSR in the 1940s. The problem with this analogy is its implication that, like a bureaucratic trade union, the Maduro regime is in fact fighting for working-class interests, just in a flawed and conservative manner. 

However much the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) positions itself as pro-worker and blames the country’s ills on American imperialism, the Maduro government systematically attacks the working class and is itself backed by imperialist powers like Russia and China. It has introduced austerity measures like the Ministry of Work’s Memorandum 2792, which undermines collective bargaining agreements. It invites transnational corporations to engage in harmful mining operations in Venezuela’s Amazon region. It keeps a Mafia-like grip on the unions and persecutes labour activists like Rodney Álvarez, who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Orlando Chirino, an independent socialist and trade union activist with the Venezuelan left-oppositionist Party for Socialism and Liberty, astutely puts it as follows in an open letter to DSA:

“In Venezuela we are fighting against an anti-worker and anti-popular capitalist government, authoritarian, conservative, repressive, that hides the repression and the anti-worker and anti-popular adjustment that it applies, under a ‘socialist’ pseudo-discourse, and as it’s not aligned with the US, it’s perceived by some as ‘Anti-imperialist’, and supported by sectors of the US and European left. This scheme repeats the typical mistakes of the cold war in the 20th century. The true internationalist must always support the struggles of workers and peoples for their liberation, beyond national borders.”
In short, I urge comrades in DSA and elsewhere on the international left to support the Venezuelan working class against the attacks it faces from imperialist powers and the Maduro regime alike. For example, Labour Party and trade union branches should perform actions in solidarity with left-wing political prisoners in Venezuela like Álvarez whilst also pushing back against right-wing calls for intervention. I also recommend following Venezuelan Workers Solidarity, a group of Venezuelan socialists in the US that rejects crude campism, as well the Venezuelan Voices blog, which provides helpful analysis from a critical left perspective.

By Dan Davison

In recent weeks, large-scale protests have erupted on the streets of Cuba. Their main (and, in my view, ill-advised) slogan is “Patria y vida”, meaning “Homeland and life”. The catalyst of these demonstrations is the Cuban government’s handling of the economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Working-class Cubans face high inflation and major shortages in food, medicine, and power supplies. Longer-term causes of the unrest include the crisis of legitimacy the Castroist regime has increasingly faced since Fidel Castro’s death in 2016.

The response of much of the international left has been to exclusively or near-exclusively blame these material hardships on the USA’s 60-year embargo on Cuba, as well as more recent US sanctions. For instance, a statement from the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) of UK Labour MPs correctly opposes foreign intervention and calls on President Biden to suspend US sanctions, but causally attributes the “real suffering [of] the Cuban people” only to the US blockade, the Trump Administration’s wave of sanctions, and the pandemic. It does not engage with any of the protesters’ political demands against state repression and in effect washes the Cuban government’s hands of all responsibility for the crisis.

Certainly, Cuba’s history with the US is highly relevant. The US dominated Cuba before the Cuban Revolution of 1953-59 and then attempted to reassert its de facto control over the island by financing and directing a landing force of Cuban exiles in the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. Respecting consistent democracy has to include support for Cuban freedom from such imperialist predation. As such, the left and the labour movement should strongly push back against calls for the US or other powers to step in.

At the same time, respecting consistent democracy requires one to support the Cubans’ own demands for democratic rights. Although much of the left sees Cuba as either socialist or in transition to socialism, the truth is that Cuba is a class society where a privileged bureaucracy exploits and represses the working class it claims to represent. Workers in Cuba have even fewer political freedoms than they have in bourgeois-liberal democracies. They have no free elections and are not allowed to form independent trade unions.

To dismiss this lack of political freedoms by pointing to Cuba’s nationalised property and successes in social programmes is to forget that the socialist cause is (or at least is supposed to be) about extending democracy. Simply put, without democratic freedoms, there can be no socialism. It also ignores how the regime has arrested such dissident left-wingers as the Cuban Marxist scholar and activist Frank García Hernández and clamped down on demonstrations for LGBT rights and against racism. Consistent socialists would condemn such repressive acts when capitalist states commit them and that should not change simply because the Cuban state drapes itself in red.

A socialist response to the crisis in Cuba should include, among other things, a sliding scale of wages, independent trade unions, and concrete measures for democracy and against corruption. To be sure, many of the protesters will favour a more “free market” solution. This is unsurprising given how much the decades of “actually existing socialism” have discredited socialism in people’s eyes. Nevertheless, the political duty of the international left is to support Cuban workers against both foreign imperialism and their domestic regime and to help the left-wing currents within the protests win out against the right-wing currents.