Street work: route to revolution
I happened to see your stall at Hammersmith Broadway, where I got a copy of your paper. Hammersmith Broadway is such an anonymous, hostile place. But your stall was calling for the opposite of all the prevailing teeming greed of the area, as you demanded revolution against callous complacency.
The revolution won’t start except on the streets. We won’t get it through polite speeches in Parliament, or through grovelling petitions to Buckingham Palace. Your stall on the streets would appear to be the real route to revolution.
Zekria Ibrahimi
West London
The importance of FRFI
I admire your courage and conviction against the overwhelming wave of media misinformation. I used to sell Troops Out magazine in Cleator Moor pubs and was the local contact for the Birmingham Six campaign, taking petitions and leaflets around the pubs. I was abused, punched, violently threatened, called a supporter of murderers and told that the Six should hang like all IRA scum. I used to try and argue back, but it took me quite a while to understand how so many people had been thoroughly regimented to accept the daily media lies, mistruth, manipulation and disinformation as the absolute truth. Keep on telling truth. Tiocfaidh ar la.
Sean
Cumbria
Covid runs rife in Scotland
Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire. In the week ending 18 March, one in 14 people in Scotland tested positive for it and hospital admissions of Covid-19 positive patients have more than doubled in a month to 2,050, levels not seen since January 2021. Another 117 deaths involving Covid were recorded in the week to 13 March, taking Scotland’s Covid death toll to 13,563 according to the National Records of Scotland. By 2 January, the ONS estimated there were already 100,000 people suffering Long Covid in Scotland.
The government and its ‘experts’ practise an Orwellian form of doublespeak telling us ‘the pandemic is not over’ whilst they scrap all public health measures to fight it. Free lateral flow tests for the general population in Scotland will end on 18 April and from 30 April PCR testing will no longer be available to people with symptoms but you will still be expected to ‘stay at home until’ you ‘feel better, to reduce the risk of infecting other people’.
Those with health conditions and disabilities, and their carers, will be further isolated from society as they seek to shield against this social murder. It is clear our government and ruling class views our lives as expendable in the maintenance of the capitalist system.
Dominic Mulgrew
Glasgow
Joint Enterprise murder
I have been charged with Joint Enterprise murder. My case, and what was done to me by my legal team, is on JENGbA’s website (jointenterprise.co).
I have now served over 14 years of a life sentence for a murder in Blackpool that I didn’t commit. I wasn’t in the room where it took place. I wasn’t party to it. I was told by my defense team that if I pleaded guilty to murder the mother of my son would be freed, and go home with my six week old baby. I stupidly pleaded guilty.
Four days later I sacked my legal team, and applied to vacate my plea. This was refused, and I received a 16 and a half year life sentence. I’ve maintained innocence ever since and fought my conviction like a lion. My case has been with the Criminal Cases Review Commission since 2010. They, and the Court of Appeal, refuse to allow my case to be quashed due to the plea precedent it would ultimately set. Our court system denies plea bargains occur but they happen across the UK all the time. I’m now 50 and fear I’m going to be allowed to die in here to keep this from justice.
Steve Kidd
HMP Berwyn
You can write to Steve at: A9166AZ, HMP Berwyn, Bridge Road, Wrexham, LL13 9QE.
Child labour in India
Child labour remains one of India’s worst-kept secrets. In 2017 the Government of India amended the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act (CLPRA) of 1986. The new amendments allow children below the age of 14 to work after school and a literate child to work full time in family businesses (even if it is not their own family’s) and enterprises. The official justification for the change is that it allows children to learn traditional skills that run for generations in the families. This bill is misleading and blurs the line between forced labour and artistic skill using ‘family values’ to justify economic exploitation of children.
The original Act of 1986 strictly prohibits children 14 years or younger from being employed in hazardous occupations. The 2017 amendment brings the list of dangerous occupations down from the earlier 83 to just three: mining, inflammable substances, and hazardous processes. So, have these other 80 industries, hitherto considered unsafe and banned from employing children, suddenly become safe?
Five years on, the effects of the amendment are obvious: a 17% increase in lung and respiratory disorder in children below 12 years and a 27% increase in school dropouts.
Noor Zaheer
West London
Haiti and Cuba
Haiti – a country that once led the revolutions in the Caribbean against slavery and imperialist interventions – again finds itself destroyed by US machinations, political assassinations and chronic underinvestment. Once a revolutionary beacon it has again been dominated and destroyed by the imperialist colonial aspirations of consecutive US administrations. If only the people were left in peace to sort out their economic problems, Haiti could once again bloom as a democracy of the people, by the people, for the people.
Cuba is celebrating its 63rd year of freedom from the US backed military dictator Batista. Coming out of the pandemic it has developed several effective Covid-19 vaccines and has a people still imbued with the ideals of their socialist revolution and immune to the various efforts by the US to destabilise the country.
Fra Hughes
Ireland
Bring all workers in house
Security guards at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH), predominantly people of colour, migrants, working class people, went on strike on 2 February for six weeks, demanding sick pay, maternity pay, overtime pay, parental leave, pension contributions, all the rights that NHS staff receive. They are now the only workers at GOSH without NHS sick pay and have been on the frontline throughout the pandemic. GOSH domestics got full NHS contracts in October 2021, following staff in the Works and Catering departments.
The strikers, their union United Voices of the World (UVW) and supporters held demonstrations and pickets. On 10 February, the High Court served UVW with an injunction banning the security guards and their supporters from dancing, singing or waving banners, within 200 meters of the hospital, subsequently reduced to within 50 metres. Under the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, employers will be able to restrict the ability of unions to picket, with threats of fines or imprisonment. But it is clearly already at the discretion of a judge.
In a divisive letter to the striking security guards, GOSH Staff Partnership Forum, a body of trade unions at GOSH including UNISON, Unite and other clinical unions, accused the strikers of intimidating and distressing patients and parents, of having supporters who were not connected to GOSH, and of organising actions not held with the support of any of the trade unions recognised at GOSH. Here the trade unions are acting as a tool of management.
Bring all NHS staff in house! Defend the right to organise!
Hannah Caller
East London
Fire Habib! Fees must fall!
From 23 February to 4 March SOAS University of London students occupied the floor of executive offices in their university building, both in solidarity with UCU strikers and with their own demands such as the demarketisation of education. SOAS director Adam Habib led the executive team’s over-the-top response to the occupation. The SOAS main building, containing the library, teaching rooms and academic offices, was ordered shut by Habib on 24 February. Students remained barred until after SOAS – illegally, without obtaining a court order – sent private bailiffs to evict students off their own campus.
Habib imported his play-book from South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand (Wits), where he was vice-chancellor (2013-2020) and defended economic apartheid in higher education. Habib refused to engage with unfairly dismissed workers and students protesting against rising fees and de facto exclusion of black and poor people from education. Wits students, later joined by a mass #FeesMustFall movement across southern Africa, blockaded and shut down the university themselves from October 2015 to January 2016. University and government authorities responded violently, sending private security and state police to attack students with batons and rubber bullets. The fee rise, though, was stopped and these students’ continuing struggle spurred on a movement politicising education worldwide. SOAS cannot be allowed to return to business-as-usual: not just fees, but Britain’s oppressive education system must fall!
Nathan
East London
NATO pushes war
While reading FRFI, I heard the news about the mad run of our ‘Western’ NATO countries, led by the US, against the Russian people, the Chinese nation and other countries and peoples! Without shame, and using every kind of ‘fake news’ there is a very dangerous run to unite the imperialist states of the ‘West’ to rebuild US primacy in the world. It is a jump towards a real war. We know what class, what forces, can carry the world out of it.
Stefano
San Michele prison, Italy
