Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 237 February/March 2014
Tony Blair and the spoils of imperialism
Imperialism pays its own well. At the beginning of January accounts filed by two businesses owned by Tony Blair – Windrush Ventures and Firerush Ventures – reveal combined cash assets of £13.4m, the product of a bumper year which saw Windrush Ventures draw in post-tax profits of almost £2m, a £650,000 rise on 2012. This income augments the former Labour Prime Minister’s growing personal wealth, which is estimated at £70m and includes a multimillion-pound London townhouse and a seven-bedroom stately home in Buckinghamshire.
Since leaving office in 2007 Blair has established a growing network of global consultancies, with clients including JP Morgan, Zurich International and the governments of Colombia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Peru and Vietnam. On 15 December 2013 The Telegraph revealed that he made at least seven advisory visits to Guinea between 2011 and 2013, coinciding with a £3bn bauxite mining deal between the Guinean government and the Abu Dhabi investment fund Mubadala; Blair advises both. More recent meetings in August 2013 took him to the luxury resort of St Tropez, where he held discussions aboard a private superyacht with Egypt’s second richest man, Naguid Sawiris. They discussed the restoration of order in Egypt, where the tycoon has pledged to invest $1bn in spring 2014 alone. Sawiris has his own proposal to ‘restore’ order – banning protests for two years.
FRFI readers may be interested in their own personal meeting with Blair. Price tags reach up to £250,000 a session.
JACK EDWARDS
Birmingham
Disability cuts – a fight to be won
I am an autistic adult facing cutbacks to my support. Last year Manchester’s Learning Disability Partnership, run by the Labour council, reduced my support hours (individual budget) from 10 hours to six hours. After I appealed, they offered me an ‘increase’ to eight hours’ support, meaning I’d still lost two hours. After months of complaining and putting pressure on the council and Partnership, I went to an investigator, the ombudsman. Finally, my funding was reinstated and I was compensated for the lost hours and support payments. But only because I did something about it. My experience shows that there’s a fight that can be won against the ‘redefined social care offer’ and against Labour’s cuts.
I have a friend in a wheelchair and they’re trying to cut her 24-hour support, saying she doesn’t need it. She is paralysed and lives in a house without support – if there’s a fire she can’t do anything about it. There are cuts at every single level. I’ve been fighting over my hours for a year and now they’re talking about reassessing me again. We need to organise a campaign of people and get outside the Social Services offices on the panel days when they’re cutting funds and stop them – get on the megaphone so they can’t talk about cuts! I want to thank Manchester RCG for helping me in my struggle.
ZACH JACKSON
Old Trafford
Full-tilt towards fascism
On 30 January Parliament voted to amend the latest, already draconian, Immigration Bill so that British citizens who were not born here can be stripped of their citizenship if suspected of terrorism. Another racist amendment, preventing foreign national prisoners from opposing deportation on the basis that human rights law protects their right to family life, was defeated.
Both the parliamentary debate and the media coverage surrounding it showed the ingrained racism of the British ruling class, with MPs of all parties arguing over the relative merits of attacking foreign national prisoners, eastern European migrants or terrorism suspects. Among those MPs putting themselves to the right of Conservative Home Secretary Teresa May by supporting the latter amendment, which the government did not endorse, were Labour former ministers Hazel Blears and Keith Vaz, as well as one-time leader of Manchester council Graham Stringer.
The original Bill, introduced by Teresa May in October 2013, a contains a raft of restrictive measures, including a requirement for landlords and GPs to check the immigration status of tenants and patients. Anti-racism campaigners sometimes say that we are ‘sleep walking towards fascism’. With May in charge at the Home Office, and an ‘opposition’ filled with racists like Blears, it would be more accurate to say we are rushing full tilt towards it.
NICKI JAMESON
London
Spanish squat fights for survival
La Casika is a social centre in Madrid, which has been squatted for 16 years. It is now under threat of closure by the local authorities. It is a space for community self-organisation, through an assembly of the unemployed, a ‘Stop evictions’ campaign and a centre for all activists in the municipality. For 16 years, musicians, film-makers and poets have had this platform to express their art, and the working class has had cultural opportunities for free. La Casika defends direct action and free culture, so last Christmas we sneaked into the official parade to give away 2,000 children’s books.
Now we face closure. The authoritarian mayor and fascist police do not want this popular, anti-capitalist project to continue, as it is coordinating the efforts of many groups and that poses a threat to them. On 18 January around 4,000 people came out in our town to defend us. We will continue to fight in the courts and the streets against this corrupt capitalist system. As we say ‘support, defend and love’.
LA CASIKA
Mostoles, Madrid
Booker Prize author backs GDC
On 28 January, the trial of one of the ‘Glasgow against Atos 2’ was adjourned. It is now a year since two of us were arrested for using a megaphone on a protest against cuts in February 2013. On the eve of the postponed trial, we received this statement of solidarity from the award-winning Scottish writer and activist James Kelman:
‘People have a right to question. The police and legal system should do all in their power to support that right. Even when the subject under scrutiny is the authoritarian behaviour of the permanent state and its political apparatus. Instead of defending the people, the police and legal system protect the tyrant and attack, condemn and criminalise those who offer resistance. It is beneath contempt. People in Scotland are watching the actions of the police and the legal system here today. My best wishes to the Glasgow Defence Campaign.’
We urge others to follow Kelman’s principled stand.
GLASGOW DEFENCE CAMPAIGN
