Bloody Sunday – justice still denied!
The Bloody Sunday March For Justice continues in Derry every year as part of a weekend of events. This year’s invite to the former leader of the imperialist British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn to speak as part of the official programme in Derry is disgraceful given the record of the Labour Party in government: the 1969 Labour government reintroduced British troops to the north of Ireland and during 1974-76 Labour continued internment and removed special category status for political prisoners to criminalise the national liberation struggle. As leader of Labour in 2018, Corbyn turned his back on the Palestinian people, who continue to suffer their own Bloody Sundays, by adopting the pro-Zionist IHRA definition of antisemitism.
FRFI supporters joined the annual Bloody Sunday solidarity events in Glasgow on 22 January and in London on 27 January. At the London event organised by the Terence MacSwiney commemoration committee and Sinn Fein, FRFI were told we could not speak while two Labour Party MPs were given the floor and shamefully were thanked for the Labour Party’s history in Ireland. Britain out of Ireland! Justice now! Prosecute the killers!
Dominic Mulgrew
Glasgow
Racism and women’s oppression
On Christmas Eve 2021, the government quietly announced that it would add care workers to the ‘shortage occupation list’, meaning migrant labourers will be allowed through Britain’s post-Brexit border controls to take up low paid, precarious work in the care sector. The sector has been lately decimated: in the past 20 years by austerity budget cuts and privatisation, and in the past two years by the return to the home of working class women, as outlined in the recent FRFI publication, Women’s oppression under capitalism. British imperialism in crisis is increasingly unable to afford the level of welfare offered to the working class in the post-war years. The Conservative Party is divided internally over the Prime Minister’s unpopular proposal to raise taxes to ‘fund health and social care’. So, the British state turns to capitalism’s back-up plan: the reserve army of labour. The struggle against these evils is intrinsic to the struggle for socialism, as is argued in the pamphlet. I urge readers to join their local FRFI group and discuss the pamphlet and what must be done to carry the fight forward.
Adam Grey
Birmingham
Win for Palestinian resistance
On 10 January Israeli company Elbit Systems sold off one of its ten UK factories. Its Oldham site in greater Manchester had been targeted by direct action activists from Palestine Action since 2020, who have protested, marched, occupied and even broken in and damaged equipment inside.
Elbit is Israel’s largest privately-owned arms company. Its biggest single customer is the Israeli Ministry of Defence and it supplies about 80% of Israel’s drone fleet. These drones plus other arm components are ‘battle tested’ on Palestinians in Gaza. The shutdown of the factory in Oldham is a massive victory for the pro-Palestinian resistance.
Around 100 protesters are facing trials over the next few months for direct action against Elbit sites and sites belonging to the landlords and suppliers to Elbit. Manchester RCG condemns these politically motivated prosecutions and calls for support for those on trial. We also call for the direct action to be widened to target British companies that support Israel, and to be organised on an open and democratic basis.
Manchester RCG
Hooded men
The Hooded Men were arrested in August 1971 as Britain introduced internment, summary detention without trial, of hundreds of people across the Occupied Six Counties of Ireland. 14 of the internees were subjected to stress positions, hooding, deprivation of sleep, food and water and white noise. Mental and physical breakdown was deliberately induced, and the damage has lasted a lifetime. Britain was condemned at a court in Strasbourg in 1978 of ‘inhuman and degrading’ acts but the judgement avoided any description of this treatment as torture.
However, the British Supreme Court finally decided in December 2021 that the Hooded Men’s persistent contention that they had been tortured was indeed true. The Tory government of the time and subsequent Labour governments knew this too. A victory for the 50 year campaign of the Hooded Men to expose Britain’s crimes but those torture techniques were used again, murderously in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Michael MacGregor
Dundee
Defend Ryan Roberts!
As part of the national reaction to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, in March 2021 there were protests in Bristol. All accounts attest to the police instigating violence, riot police attacking protesters, the use of dogs, mounted police, truncheons, and the police circulating exaggerated reports of police assault that they had to retract. 25-year-old Ryan Roberts has received a disproportionate sentence of 14 years in gaol for his part in the demonstration. This intimidatory sentence was handed down for protesting against measures that will curtail the right to protest and is intended to make an example of him. He is the 12th person to be sentenced from that day and in all the sentences total 50 years in gaol.
Hannah Caller
East London
You can send letters of solidarity to Ryan: Ryan Roberts A5155EM, HMP Bristol, 19 Cambridge Road, Bristol, BS7 8PS
Science for humanity
2021 saw the deaths of two great scientists who were both born in 1929; Richard Lewontin, evolutionary biologist, geneticist and Marxist, joint author of Not in Our Genes, Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, (1984) and EO Wilson, author of Sociobiology (1975).
These two scientists held opposing views of genetic science which have important political repercussions about the way we view humanity, either as socialists who believe ‘man makes his own history, but not in circumstances of his own choosing’ (Lewontin), or that humans are programmed for competition (survival of the fittest) by inherited genetic traits which lead to a hierarchy of success with winners and losers (Wilson).
Lewontin criticised Wilson’s Sociobiology, saying that, ‘Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems’.
Susan Davidson
North London
Solidarity to Rikers Island hunger strikers
On 7 January around 200 detainees on Rikers Island, a prison island just outside Manhattan, went on hunger strike at the appalling conditions of their incarceration. Grievances include broken heating in a city which is regularly below freezing in winter, large rats in the complex, lack of access to: mental and physical health services, mail, the complex’s law library, and in-person or virtual visits from relatives and lawyers. Some of the people being held in this complex have been held for up to five years awaiting trial. After initially publicising the hunger strike, it has been reported that attorney Christopher Boyle’s phone has been blocked prompting fears of staff reprisals against the strikers. We support the strikers’ demands for access to these basic services.
Despine Dohman
Nottingham
‘Maroon’ Shoatz 1943-2021
After nearly 50 years as a political prisoner, Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army veteran Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz died on 17 December 2021. Shoatz was granted ‘compassionate release’ for the final seven weeks of his life due to his suffering stage four colorectal cancer.
Shoatz was killed by the regulations of the US prison system. In a revolutionary example of selflessness, Shoatz urged action to free others before himself. In an interview with Dhoruba bin Wahad in 1996 he said:
I’m being brutalised and whatnot, sensory and perceptual deprivation, despite being kept within a box … for years on end, however, we have much much more pressing situations than mine. We have the case of Mumia Abu Jamal… [who] has successfully exposed so many inconsistencies about the overall situation that people find themselves in contact with the criminal justice system, which is the blacks, other ethnics, and the poor people that he has become an extreme threat to the overall system… you have other people [too]… and that’s other people all around the country on death row.
As of July 2021, 2,474 inmates were languishing on US death row. To honour the legacy of revolutionaries past and present, like Maroon and Mumia, we must step up the struggle to free all political prisoners and defeat the capitalists whose class power depends on caging millions of humans.
Matt Glass
London
