The Preston Model
The review in FRFI 286 about Community Land Trusts refers to a book by Labour Party politicians Matthew Brown and Rhian. Jones, Paint your town red: how Preston took back control and your town can too.
The Preston model involved persuading six public bodies, including Lancashire County Council, the police and the NHS, to shift their procurement strategies to local businesses. This is community wealth building. By shuffling budgets in this way the councillors – too respectable and collaborative to challenge central government or defy Labour Party orders – accumulated money to help local capitalists invest in their communities. This culminated in the refurbishment of Preston bus station, saving it from demolition. A worthy cause.
But capital has an innate tendency to expand beyond its boundaries. Mondragon in the Basque country, which was the inspiration for the Preston model, is now a multinational company.
This pretentious book is a manual of municipal socialism. Ludicrously, the authors place themselves in the tradition of the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1854 Marx thought there might be a revolution in Preston. The State needn’t worry. Not a drop of blood will stain Preston red by these methods.
Peadar O’ Loinsigh
PRESTON
GMB and Deliveroo fail workers
‘GMB and Deliveroo sign historic recognition deal’. This so-called voluntary agreement is a Pyrrhic victory – a backroom deal by GMB Union, which capitulates entirely to Deliveroo’s exploitation of the precarious workforce. In its statement, the union failed to mention years of struggle by smaller, more radical unions such as the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU), which have organised strikes and pickets and pitched legal battles to defend gig workers’ rights. Instead, GMB sides with the bourgeois courts in calling Deliveroo drivers self-employed, despite ongoing legal action by the IWGB against this position. IWGB described the deal as ‘signing away workers’ basic rights’.
Last May, GMB pulled a similar move with Uber. That agreement tacitly accepted Uber’s concessions to a Supreme Court ruling brought by ADCU (see FRFI 281), but still fell well short of full employment rights.
GMB’s statement also chose to quote a Labour MP (GMB is affiliated to Labour) who described Deliveroo as a ‘successful business’ which understands ‘the value of trade unions in a modern economy’. But there is nothing modern about the hand-in-glove cooperation between the ruling class and this type of trade union, which Engels famously called ‘rich and cowardly’ – consistently selling the working class down the river and frustrating revolutionary struggle.
Adam Grey
BIRMINGHAM
Trans rights left behind
The British government has announced a ban on conversion therapy, but refuses to cover trans and non-binary people in it. It comes as no surprise that the UK dropped from 10th to 14th in the official list of Europe’s most LGBTQ+ friendly countries – apparently the most dramatic drop of any country in the list.
As the LGBTQ+ advocacy group IGLA said, ‘this was primarily caused by the UK’s widespread political and media anti-trans sentiment, and refusal to extend its conversion therapy ban to all LGBTQ+ people’. Current plans are a blatant betrayal to people who do not identify as cisgender. True change for the LGBTQ+ people cannot be achieved under capitalism. For LGBT liberation, we must fight for socialism.
Ashley Green
BIRMINGHAM
Inge Viett, socialist fighter
Anti-imperialist, communist fighter and author Inge Viett died on 9 May in Berlin at the age of 78. Born on 12 January 1944, she joined urban guerrilla movements in Germany and organised in solidarity with the oppressed nations fighting for national liberation. She was arrested twice, in 1972 and in 1975, but broke out of prison on both occasions. In 1982 she obtained a new identity and was able to live and work in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). After the break-up of the GDR, she was captured and in 1992 was sentenced to 13 years in prison for attempted murder. She was released in 1997 and remained a communist activist until the very end.
In her fascinating autobiography, Nie War Ich Furchtloser (I have Never Been More Fearless) which she wrote in prison and first published in 1997, she remarks that ‘the left in the West have no idea how serious their lack of experience of socialist reality is … In their arrogance they even think that they can afford not to have to recognise this as a defect. The real socialism of their time, on their doorstep in the GDR … But they preferred to withdraw from this historical process, they preferred to nag it, to criticise it, to laugh at it from afar. They preferred, with their socialist theories, to cultivate imperialist reality. They always fight with their existential umbilical cord connected to capitalism and know nothing else … You have missed the chance to understand this great historical attempt to turn the history of capital into human history again, in a sensuous and political way.’
Replace GDR with socialist Cuba above and read it as a critique against the opportunist left in Britain today, hysterically attacking the Cuban revolution – at times more than they criticise their own ruling class – and Inge Viett is still spot on.
Ali Demir
LONDON
Environmental justice
My country Mali, as in all the countries of the Sahelian strip, is being hit hard by the consequences of climate change. We are suffering the consequences of the rich countries. I have seen climate change disproportionately affect people in my community, my country and the African continent. It should be known that the deforestation caused by multinationals is leading to an alternation of drought and flooding, which increases famine, diseases and of course, conflicts that are the breeding ground for terrorism.
The dependence of rich countries on fossil fuels is killing our people, but global leaders are indifferent to the crisis. They have consciously decided not to keep their innumerable promises made at Global Summits, including refusing to pay the annual $100bn planned from 2009 to 2020 to finance responses to climate and environmental change.
We are the last generation to be able to do something about it before there is irreversible change. As long as I have a breath of life, I will fight on this earth for social, climate, environmental justice.
Fousseny Traoré
MALI
Workers’ rights under attack in South Africa
The South African state used the coronavirus pandemic to change the labour laws and limit the right to strike. Some employers have refused to enforce bargaining agreements; others used the courts to have these agreements declared void. The government failed to deliver the 2018 wage agreement, which was upheld by a constitutional court. These attacks are likely to become more common in the coming months and years as the capitalist crisis intensifies.
The cost of goods, particularly petrol, has risen dramatically in recent months. Employers have offered minimal salary increases considerably below inflation and pushed for benefit reduction. The inflation was close to 5.2% last year, but most wage increases were around only 3%. The municipal sector offered 3.5%, while the public sector offered 1.5%. With these low wage increases, workers are struggling to keep up with increased living expenditures.
These attacks occur mostly as a result of trade union weakness, and many members lack the confidence to fight back during this time. The Covid-induced lockdowns and other restrictions limited workers’ ability to fight back. We need to fight against a capitalist system that attacks the working class.
Dumisane Magagula
SA MUNICIPAL WORKERS UNION
FRFI prison censorship
Here at Buckley Hall there are three subscribers to left-wing papers – two to FRFI and one to Socialist Standard. All of us were until recently unknown to each other. We who receive FRFI have had it stopped and started. It has been banned under Tact and Prevent legislation, then the next month it comes under the door for one of us but not the other.
It has been mentioned in security reports on both our paroles… At HMP Wymott the Morning Star was stopped while I was there, despite the Prison Officer Association (POA) taking out ‘solidarity’ adverts in this paper. I question the POA’s solidarity with the working class – and Morning Star morality in taking POA money.
Anonymous
HMP BUCKLEY HALL
BIRMINGHAM
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 288, June/July 2022
