Anti-racist protesters on trial
News of the successful community resistance to an anti-immigration raid on Kenmure Street in Glasgow in May 2021 reached many ears. And rightfully so… It is important to recognise and celebrate victories against state racism.
However, unlike the career leftists, community representatives and liberals, we have to recognise our enemies and work together against the harm they do. The UK Border Force and Police Scotland are collaborators and enforcers of a racist national border policy. They were not facilitators of a peaceful protest. A success like Kenmure Street was achieved through conflict with forces who would have had it another way.
Three of us were arrested on that day and have endured over two years of long-winded and draining legal proceedings. The accusations are the usual long and spurious list of minor public order offences as well as a more serious charge: assault of two police officers. The assault was in fact committed against the accused by the officers who broke her fingers.
One case has finally been concluded and was won against the police and state prosecutors. The second case ended in a plea bargain and the final case is ongoing. By mid-September this final case will have been heard over eight full days in court, which is longer than some murder trials in Britain run for.
As agents of the racist state, the police force knows it is easy to extra-judicially punish people to try to deter them from taking action. For the state and police the most effective outcome of these processes is how they affect us emotionally. Without building networks of support and solidarity these tactics will cumulatively weaken our hopes for a greater culture of resistance.
CRAIG BLACKPEPPER
Southside Glasgow
Grenfell fire: no lessons learned
After the inquest into the 2009 fire at Lakanal House in Camberwell, south London, Mbet Udoaka – whose wife and baby daughter were among the six people who died in the blaze – warned: ‘We fear very much that lessons have not been learned and that it could happen again’. None of the coroner’s recommendations, including the retro-fitting of sprinklers in high-rise council blocks and restrictions on the use of flammable construction materials, were implemented. Just four years after the inquest, Grenfell Tower in the west London borough of Kensington and Chelsea went up in flames, killing 72 people. The council’s head of social housing had repeatedly ignored the Lakanal recommendations.
Now history is repeating itself. In July, the High Court in London upheld the government’s decision not to implement an early recommendation from the Grenfell Inquiry – that owners of high-rise residential buildings should urgently ensure ‘personal emergency evacuation plans’ for people with disabilities. The government decided in 2022 that such a measure would be ‘disproportionate’. The majority of those who died at Grenfell had disabilities, trapped on top floors without access to a lift once the fire started. It’s an early warning that the findings of the Grenfell Inquiry, due to be published in 2024, will offer no redress to those living in Britain’s increasingly dilapidated and dangerous social housing. Ultimately, it will serve simply as a mechanism for the ruling class to kick the issues into the long grass.
Meanwhile, for the criminal companies which provided building materials they knew to be lethal for the Grenfell Tower refurbishment, it is business as usual. Flammable cladding provider Kingspan, for example – recently found to have been allowed to provide its products to another Kensington and Chelsea high-rise after the Grenfell fire – stands to rake in record profits for the first half of 2023.
CAT WIENER
South London
Response to Turkey elections article
I read the article you published on the Turkish elections in May 2023. I congratulate you for the accuracy and mastery of the process in your description of the struggles of various bourgeois cliques in the form of two sovereign blocs to take over the rudder of the capitalist power in Turkey and the formation and development of the capitalist power.
The current reality is one in which revolutionaries around the world are increasingly stuck in national narrow-mindedness and indifference to the struggles outside of their countries. So, although this is how it should be, I am astonished not only to see your interest in issues taking place in Turkey, but also that these issues are being evaluated with the right references.
If we call ourselves revolutionaries and if we claim to fight for revolution and socialism, what needs to be done is always clear. The fight for the working class, the Kurdish people, women, LGBT+, all oppressed and exploited masses to increase their struggles, to organise a revolutionary mobilisation to establish the power of the oppressed must be created. This must be done without spreading any illusions about various sections of the bourgeoisie and without surrendering to such illusions and tendencies in the masses and, on the contrary, by fighting against this tendency.
ŞAFAK CAN
Turkey
Repression in Swaziland
The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) has faced increasing persecution by the police of Africa’s last absolute monarchy, for their role in the democracy movement. The latest attack came against 22-year-old Sambulo Shongwe, CPS Central Committee member and National Political Educator of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS). Comrade Sambulo has faced numerous arrests and torture and has now been charged with assault: a political attack after communists were singled out from the 2021 mass, student-led protests against King Mswati III.
Political parties have been outlawed in the former British territory since 1973, and political or social organisation must be recognised through the royally-appointed parliament. This has left the people with no officially recognised representation. Student protests demanding scholarships and allowances, led by the now-banned SNUS, became a channel for a wider pro-democracy movement. Within such conditions, the clandestine Communist Party’s crucial role has been to grow the revolutionary political consciousness of the people, alongside building unity in their communities’ struggles.
The attack on Sambulo followed the abduction and vicious torture of four CPS members by Mswati’s soldiers on 29 June 2023, after they attended the trial of Mxolisi Ngcamphalala, Deputy General Secretary of the CPS and Deputy Secretary of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers, in another politically motivated arrest for jaywalking.
In this year of hard and persistent struggle and state repression, the CPS has resolved to maintain its fight for Swaziland’s liberation from all remaining vestiges of British colonial rule, including its ruling dynasty. CPS International Secretary Simphiwe Dlamini made the stakes clear: ‘None of us are safe as long as this regime exists.’
Victory to the Communist Party and democracy movement!
NATHAN WILLIAMS
East London
Abortion criminalised in Britain
The courts’ recent sentencing of Carla Foster to over two years (then reduced to 14 months suspended following an appeal) for obtaining an abortion has revealed the British state’s abject misogyny in its criminalisation of women’s reproductive health.
Abortion is illegal in Britain unless a pregnant woman can gain the permission of two doctors. Foster was forced to have a dangerous self-managed abortion and following this trauma she then had police called to her hospital bedside. She is not alone in this regard. Recorded crimes for abortions increased from eight to 28 between 2012 and 2022.
Despite NHS guidance that abortions should take place within two weeks, women are routinely having to wait up to six weeks to access an abortion, or being forced to travel hundreds of miles away to receive one. Women should not be penalised for needing an abortion. We must demand that Foster’s conviction is overturned and demand free, safe, and accessible abortion on demand.
ANNIE O’CONNER
Newcastle
Israel: what democracy?
The far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu passed a judicial reform in the Knesset on 24 July which limits the power of the Supreme Court to block government appointments or unconstitutional legislation. The reform is a naked attempt by the Prime Minister, who is on trial for corruption and fraud, to give the government greater control over the judiciary. It is the latest stage in a process of judicial reforms which has sparked some of the largest protests ever seen in the Zionist state. Doctors went on strike in protest the day after the reform passed; a general strike and refusal of 10,000 military reservists is threatened.
Yet these forces have never mobilised against the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state, revealing the limits of their ‘democratic’ concerns. The American Jewish Committee, the premier Zionist organisation in the US, expressed ‘profound disappointment’ over the reforms to what it calls ‘institutions core to Israeli democracy’. What liberal Zionists truly fear to lose is not democracy, but the political, military and economic aid from imperialism which sustains Israel’s occupation of Palestine – the profoundly undemocratic source of their own privileges.
LIAM HARRISON
West London
Solidarity with the Kononovich brothers
Two members of the Leninist Communist League of Youth of Ukraine, Alexander and Mikhail Kononovich, have issued an international appeal for rescue after a police officer publicly threatened their lives and shared their address on social media.
After being initially detained in 2022 and later put under house arrest, the Kononovich brothers are now under death threat by a regime that since the 2014 coup has murdered and imprisoned leftists and critics. In spite of any ideological differences with the Kononovich’s organisation, we must call for solidarity against anti-communist terror in Ukraine and demand the immediate release of the Kononovich brothers and all political prisoners, as well as an end to the repression of communists and regime opponents.
