Honorary Proletarian

Welcome to a British summer!  I just have to mention the dedication of a group of local schoolkids who not only put on a good brass band performance on the Lord Mayor’s Parade this lunchtime, but kept it up for an hour while walking through the streets of Oxford under a real barrage of water.  I think they deserve the rest of the week off school for that!

Nothing like awful weather to produce a feeling of solidarity with all the gowned, feathered and belly-dancing-costumed participants in the fun run to the beer tent at the end; the man with the Heath Robinson music machine built on a pram, that reminded me of a similar device the British branch of the PKK take on demos; and the two functionaries who took turns carrying the Mace (which is bigger than either of them) a mile and a half, before collecting the Councillors’ sopping wet gowns to take back to the Town Hall.  And well done to the rickshaw drivers - not a job I’d want myself (I remember a late-night ride in a rickshaw with Volty, with a growing conviction that the poor guy was about to drop dead of heart failure).

Here’s hoping for better weather…

Ruskin College, where I have the honour to be completeing my MA dissertation, was founded in 1898 as a workers’ college in the heart of elitist Oxford, providing the best education money could buy without the necessity of buying it.  Its buildings on Walton Street were funded (apart from one large donation) by unions, by union branches and by union members gathering pennies from their fellow-workers.  These represent not just bricks and mortar, but 110 years of British and international Labour Movement history.

Now the College’s Principal, Audrey Mullender, wants to sell these buildings to Exeter College and move the whole College to its secondary site in Headington, some way from convenient transport links (which, if you’re one of the elderly people who come to Ruskin for short courses and workshops in the holidays as part of the College’s “Ransackers” project, is quite a big deal).  One of the few arguments put forward in favour of this plan is that the Principal wants to provide all en suite accommodation for conference guests, as general secretaries and their cronies expect luxury hotel standards (when students from outside Oxford arrived for the last MA workshop they found chocolates on their pillows).  Shame on the management of a college supposedly dedicated to providing education for those who would otherwise miss out, for wasting money on such extravagance!

The planned development in Headington has three years to be largely completed and six at most to be completely operational in very detail - but it does not yet have planning permission, or anything definite enough to apply for planning permission.  There is no business plan - or at least, if there is Audrey Mullebnder isn’t telling anyone about it - and the scheme faces a potential shortfall of twelve million pounds, even after the sale of all the buildings in Walton Street, with no ideas at all as to how to raise this money (unless you count the principal suggesting weakly that the Headington canteen could be opened as a public restaurant some time in the future!)  Nor does it seem that Exeter management are entirely confident of having enough money to buy the site.

Exeter College management have at least been open with students about the negotiations (see below) - and as their message reveals, they at least appreciate the value of a central site!  By contrast, despite meeting with students several times Audrey Mullender has refused to reveal the state of negotiations or even if she was negotiating with anyone, and has tried to hide from students the names of members of the Governing Council.  She appears to be - frankly - stupid enough to believe that by doing this she could prevent anyone finding out what she was doing, when Exeter is emailing all its students and Ruskin Students’ Union representatives sit on the Governing Council!

I know Ruskin is supposed to be iconoclastic, but anyone who thinks it is a good idea to sell the college - or that they will be allowed to do so - is barking mad.  The whole scheme constitutes the most ill-thought out and fatuous bundle of plans I’ve ever come across.  Given the nebulous nature of the financial plan there is even, surely, a serious danger the College could go bankrupt.  Ruskin is irreplaceable and this must not be allowed to happen.

Announcement from the Rector of Exeter College
 
Exeter College is delighted to announce that the Governing Executive of Ruskin College has agreed to sell us its Walton Street site.

This is terrific news and an outstanding opportunity.  It effectively creates a Third Quad, expanding our space in central Oxford for teaching, research and student accommodation by roughly half.  It will bring much of our student body closer to our main site.  Together with our plans to build new accommodation for our graduates at Exeter House on the Iffley Road, it will give us some of the finest student facilities in Oxford.

As part of this historic arrangement, Exeter and Ruskin will develop a programme of joint academic, cultural and social activities.  We hope that this new relationship will, in time, expand the range of academic interests of our College, create opportunities for our graduates to undertake teaching, including teaching students from non-typical backgrounds, and widen the social and ethnic diversity of our student body.

There is still a long road between here and a move into the Ruskin site.  Ruskin will relocate most of its activities to a large site in Headington, for which it does not yet have full planning permission.  We may not be able to get on to the Walton Street site till 2011, or to inhabit it fully till 2014.  But we can begin at once to discuss how we use this fantastic opportunity for the benefit of future generations of scholars.

There is a nice historical twist to this arrangement.  William Morris was an undergraduate at Exeter College, and had close links with John Ruskin.  Ruskin College in turn was founded to educate those who were otherwise excluded from education - on principles established through the collaboration of these two social and educational pioneers.

We will be coming to the whole Exeter College community for advice and support in order realise the full potential of this exceptional opportunity; please be part of that discussion.  This acquisition will form a central part of the major fund-raising campaign that the College will launch next year to celebrate our 700th anniversary in 2014.  We will enter our eighth century with a truly exceptional range of possibilities – academic, cultural and social - to reinvigorate and develop the collegiate ideal.

Frances Cairncross

Rector
 

There were a few who were in open rebellion against the said Whiggery—a few, say two, Carlyle and Ruskin. The latter, before my days of practical Socialism, was my master towards the ideal aforesaid, and, looking backward, I cannot help saying, by the way, how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin! It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent, which I must say was not by any means vague…

Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with…a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world?…So there I was in for a fine pessimistic end of life, if it had not somehow dawned on me that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds of a great change, what we others call Social-Revolution, were beginning to germinate.

- William Morris, “How I became a Socialist”.

Hello again!  (Is anybody still here?)  As you may know, if you are still there, I’ve been working hard for a while on a little thing called an election campaign, and I decided to give blogging a rest.  Perhaps I was wiser than I knew: here is a good example of why not to blog while standing for election.  It’s not so much a Lib Dem council candidate rhetorically asking “Why is heroin so intrinsically bad” - the answer being obvious to anyone who has ever known a heroin addict - as the tagline “Ramblings of a Geo-Mutualist Liberal Democrat” that is really a bit hallucinatory!  That and the fact he apparently hankers after Hayek, Thatcher’s economic guru, whose Oxford followers want a free market in human body parts.  Jock is thinking of standing for the Lib Dems in the upcoming Holywell Ward by-election, covering half of Oxford University, so students watch this space…

Anyway, we won the local elections, regaining control of Oxford City Council.  This turns out to have been somewhat unusual so will require a bit of explanation.  Suffice it for now to say that by virtue of hard work we got in between the media and the people, with the right candidates and the right policies (within the limits set by local government).  Ultimately electoral success depends on being there on the doorstep, which depends on enthusing the activists, which depends on having the politics to enthuse them with.  It’s grassroots politics, something socialists, of all persuasions, are well-placed to do: Dave Nellist, for example, is an old master.  And those local Labour campaigns with the best results on 1st May were the ones with the highest contact rates.

This sounds like I’m advocating a radical change in direction for both the Labour Party and generally for the labour movement in politics.  In an ideal world, it shouldn’t sound like that, and there are lots of councillors, activists and even a few MPs who really don’t need to be taught how to suck eggs.  But yes I am saying Labour needs to turn about (though I’m not advocating joining the Socialist Party!)  It is time that the organisers and policy wonks, the talkers and debate attenders, realised that the labour movement link is what makes the Labour Party both distinctive and a viable party of government.  We cannot survive as the Liberal Party, or some approximation of it with closer trade union support.  Labour gains its support from being the party of the working class.  If its government keeps on slowly poisoning the grassroots the Party will wither and die.

What is surely evident from the election results aross the country is that “New Labour”, long dead as a coherent ideology, has just breathed its last as a viable electoral project.  There are those who say - and they are the same kind of people who have been saying it for decades - that grassroots democratic socialism cannot win elections.  Now with such a weight of Fabians and Kinnockites and ex-SDPers against me, even if none of them ever won an election, who am I to say that it can?  I can assert, though, with complete confidence, that right now nothing else can.

www.feministfightback.org.uk
rebecca.galbraith@yahoo.co.uk

12.00pm
Registration

12.30pm
Opening speech by Sofie Buckland (NUS National Executive)

1-2.15pm
a) Imperialism and Motherhood
Speaker: Anna Davin (founding editor of History Workshop Journal)
Facilitator: Gwyneth Lonergan
b) From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Freedoms
A panel discussion with Charlotte Gage (Abortion Rights), Cathy Nugent 
(Workers’ Liberty), Rosie Woods (NHS worker)
Facilitator: Anna Longman

2.20-3.35pm
a) Getting your message across
Jill Mountford (former organiser of the Welfare State Network) and 
James House (TV documentaries producer)
Workshop facilitator: Rachael Ferguson
b) How to campaign
Workshop Facilitator: Anne-Marie O’Reilly (trade union organiser)

3.45-5pm
Planning for a National Day of Action
Facilitators: Laura Schwartz and Rebecca Galbraith

* Food: cheap vegetarian food will be served from 12 noon
* Free creche: Please register with rebecca.galbraith@yahoo.co.uk for 
a free creche place
* Social with X-talk: 7pm @ The Ivy House, Southampton Row, Holborn
* The teach-in is free to attend but a suggested donation of £1.50 
unwaged and £3+ waged is encouraged.

Just a quick plug for this event organised by some students at Wadham College (inevitably, says I with a swell of pride!)  It looks quite impressive, with lots of people coming and some really good speakers, including my comrades Dan Randall and Sofie Buckland.  It’s going on for three days (commendably ambitious!) so I doubt if anyone, barring the organisers, will be there for the whole thing - but people can drop in for whatever meetings or events they like.

Hope to see you there!

On Wednesday Fidel Castro announced that he is definitively stepping down from the inextricably linked posts of President of the Council of State and commander-in-chief of the Cuban armed forces.  He has been the twentieth century’s second most durable head of government - second only, that is, to Kim Il-Sung.  This is not something to be proud of.

Of course, it must be recognised that Cuba and North Korea are very different phenomena.  In North Korea millions of people have starved to death.  In Cuba the government has established free universal healthcare and education, ensuring 98% literacy.  Cuba’s public services are the envy of the 35 million people in the United States without health insurance - and many of those with, as Michael Moore recently demonstrated.

However, Cuba under Castro has been fundamentally a Stalinist state.  There are no forced-labour camps, but there are political prisoners; there are no show-trials, but there is a secret police force.  Most importantly of all, there are no free elections.  There are still some in the western world who call Cuba socialist, on the grounds that they understand socialism as reform and Cuba has enacted some impressive reforms (though often it is the most right-wing fake reformists who are the most enthusiastic: take George Galloway for example).  However, Cuba’s regime lacks the instincts of democracy and popular sovereignty, as well as the fierce working-class allegiance, that characterise the best reformists.  In that respect, a great gulf separates Fidel Castro and Nye Bevan.

What is more, the course of reform in Cuba has not run smoothly.  Facing an economic crisis following the cessation of Russian aid, the regime chose to deal with it not by relaxing the state’s political stranglehold but by inviting capitalists to set up tourist resorts inaccessible to all Cubans except for the privileged bureaucratic elite and those employed as skivvies.  Prostitution, the elimination of which was one of the first achievements of the Castro government, has sprung up again as some desperate Cubans cannot make ends meet any other way.

So what will happen in Cuba now?  In the short run, not very much.  The regime has named as interim president Fidel’s brother Raul, who has effectively been running the country since Fidel became ill in 2006.  Fidel’s resignation statement, however, hints at knowledge that this situation is unsustainable.  Cuba is not China, where the “Communist Party” has turned itself into the mouthpiece of a flourishing new capitalist class; it is much smaller and the potential for that kind of elite transition does not exist.  The Cuban people have but up with Castro because he has enacted reforms and defied the United States, but now he has gone they will no longer consent to be ruled by a coterie of elderly Stalinists.  In the medium term, then, either the system ludicrously and insultingly called “People’s Power” will have to be dismantled or there will be massive popular mobilisation to bring it down.

In the long term, there is, as the saying goes, everything to play for.  Cuba seems unlikely simply to collapse as the Eastern Bloc did.  Will the people of Cuba be able to hold on to and extend the social reforms they have brought about while building a genuinely democratic system of government - a workers’ democracy?  In isolation, the Cuban people have with their own hands and brains maintained their first-class public services and, perforce, made great strides in the development of cheap generic drugs and green technology.  If they can build a free society on this - as they will if they are not crushed between the twin monsters of Stalinism and free-market capitalism - they could be in reality what the Castro regime’s supporters foolishly or mendaciously proclaimed it to be - a socialist beacon of hope to the world.  They will need our support.

Mike Treen of the Unite union (New Zealand), organiser of the first successful strike of low-paid and vulnerable workers in Starbucks, is currently on a week-long speaking tour of Britain organised by No Sweat.  His first meeting is here in Oxford, at 1pm tomorrow (Monday) in Lecture Room 23, Balliol College, Broad Street, organised in conjunction with the Oxford University Living Wage Campaign. 

Mike is by all accounts a fascinating and inspiring speaker, and I hope lots of people will turn up and make a good impression on a comrade who has, after all, come half-way round the world!  There will also be information on the campaign for a living wage in the university and in the city of Oxford, and how to get involved here in the sort of fight Mike and the Starbucks workers have waged so sucessfully in New Zealand.

More on the Unite (NZ) “Supersize My Pay” campaign here.

An inspiring story from France in the latest issue of Solidarity.  We must act in the same spirit here.

workers; and in recent strikes in the Essonne region, this has been used against them.  Last summer, at nine branches of the Buffalo Grill steakhouse chain, around 30 staff went on strike to demand that their bosses regularise them.  They occupied one restaurant for several days, and most of them won legal status.  Shortly after the Buffalo Grill strike, workers at an industrial laundrette called Modeluxe struck in solidarity with their undocumented co-workers’ demands for regularisation.

On Saturday I went up to Campsfield, the immigration prison near Oxford, for the regular demo in solidarity with detainees that has been held there every month since the place was set up in 1993.  There were only fifteen demonstrators, which I’m afraid rather bears out what I’ve said below about environmentalists.  It’s only once a month and it’s half an hour on the bus.  Come on, guys.

Campsfield was set up fourteen years ago by the Tories - the traditional party of bigotry and inhumane opprtunism - but it is maintained by a government purporting alliegance to Labour, the traditional party of the oppressed and disadvantaged.  Where is the party to which the statement that “people are suffering” was a call to action rather than a calculation of poltical advantage?  A visit to Campsfield drives out of the window all notion of a “balanced” view of the good and bad things this government has done.  It has done good things - that I don’t contest - but those government ministers who have decided to lock up innocent people behind razor wire for the “crime” of coming to Britain while being Black, and those who have gone along with it, are fundamentally bastards.  Anyone who can tolerate Campsfield and the other detention centres throughout Britain has surrendered his or her soul to Toryism.

This, however, cannot mean a rejection of the struggle through the established labopur movement, which seems in this case to have produced such appalling results.  Only the united forces of the basic organisations of the basic oppressed class in our society, that is the unions, and moreover the unions in politics, can effect “fundamental and irreversible change” in that society.  One union backing some non-Labour candidates is (in the right circumstances) a legitimate tactic, but it isn’t a strategic solution.  Only our united efforts to either force the bastards out of out party, or (in the last resort) start a new party in which the bastards will not be welcome, can have a significant long-term effect.  Let’s face it - we’re in political for the long term.  all the attempts of the Left in recent years to go for short-term “breakthrough” solutions have gone off at half-cock and come to nothing, except leaving the remains of a few Left organisations as debris along the road.  Let’s not make the same mistake again - all of us or none, comrades.

This morning I slept through my alarm.  By nearly four hours.  Which was annoying.  What was mysterious, though, was the dream I finally woke up from.  I dreamt that the world was about to be destroyed by a meteorite, but was saved by John Angliss.  Make of that what you will.

In real international news, I learn that Suharto, former genocidal dictator of Indonesia, has finally kicked the bucket.  Suharto originally came to power with the backing of the US government, who trusted him to “deal with” the Communist Party of Indonesia, at that time the largest outside the Stalinist bloc.  He did this by indiscriminately slaughtering more than 600,000 people, many of them in no way connected to the Communist Party (as if that made a difference).  Hundreds of thousands more murders followed in West Papua, East Timor and Aceh.  Although he was overthrown in 1998, neither he nor his grotesquely corrupt (and consequently extremely rich) family have been brought to justice.  This impunity, again, involves the collusion of the Western powers.

Amazingly, today David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, sent a message of condolence to the Indonesian government - that is, the relatively democratic government that owes its existence to the revolutionary overthrow of Suharto’s dictatorship!  Is Miliband joining the Boris Johnson/Oxford Union Society school of diplomacy?!  “Oh dear, the chap who murdered a million of your people has died.  Jolly bad luck, what?”  Meanwhile, West Papua is still suffering from the remaining elements of military dictatorship in the Indonesian system and needs our practical solidarity: I can’t see it getting much from Mr. Miliband.

Lastly, I draw readers’ attention to this letter (third one down) in the Grauniad.  It truly is a Lib Dem classic.  A councillor of that persuasion from the Lib Dem-run Liverpool City Council objects to the report that his council is the least efficient in the country.  On the contrary, he says, Liverpool has moved a long way down the council tax league table since his party took charge.  Middle-class people pay less tax than they did.  That’s what councils are for, isn’t it?  He gives every impression of having no idea that a council’s efficiency could relate to the services it provides.  Hmm, well ten years ago, according to the Lib Dems, Liverpool council had the highest council tax in the country.  Then they took over, cut council tax by 3% in absolute terms in one year, and now it’s the least efficient council in the country.  There’s a lesson there somewhere, isn’t there?  Reminds me of Oxford where the Lib Dem administration is desperately seeking cuts to make the frayed ends of their rich-pleasing tax policy meet.  Playgrounds, leisure centres, all things working-class people need and Lib Dem voters with their huge gardens and private gyms don’t.  Thankfully Labour in Oxford has no intention of sticking to the previous administration’s spending plans, like, er, Gordon Brown…